In prior pages I have discussed three areas fundamental to conservative American thought, or at least fundamental to my understanding of it. First establishes a logical basis for morals and values. Second explains the important difference between America's two sides is more about having or not having values than what those values might be. Third exhorts us not only to follow our values but to defend them against encroachment from liberal-Democrat policies and programs. Having discussed these in these earlier essays I'm writing this essay to explore execution of these ideas, to create a code of conduct in dealing with our political adversaries. While our main political principle is leaving people alone ("Don't hurt people and don't take their stuff."), those on the other side are the opposite with racist and socialist and so-called "progressive" platforms that are fundamentally invasive. This asymmetry goes down to the most basic principles of our two political sides, not only to which basic, human values we embrace and treasure, but whether we live by values at all.
This essay has one purpose, establishing the basis of a code of conduct and a prescription for political action that will preserve these values, hopefully better than we have done in the past. Maybe we can learn something from the year 2020.
Urgency
For two hundred years the Democrats have been advocates of slavery, racism, socialism, censorship, and self-righteous rage. We know socialist regimes that Democrats supported have killed more than 150 million people and followers of their values and followers of those following their values have killed 262 million of their own citizens in horrible ways. (That's more than twice the number who have died in all wars during that same period of the past century.) Their other causes have also been expensive in loss of human lives, quality of life, and basic decency in many aspects our lives. In 2019 racism was ebbing, employment and prosperity were waxing, poverty was waning, pride in America was rising, and the people responsible for those changes have been removed from power and vilified.
More than ever the United States is the remaining beacon of liberty. Africa has been the Dark Continent for thousands of years, South America's record on socialism and human rights sucks, Russia and China are corrupt centralized economies, the subcontinent of India is just working its way out of state-induced poverty, Australia and New Zealand have shown ugly colors about COVID-19, eastern Europe and western Asia aren't friendly places, and western Europe has growing hate of Jewish people and others. Once American freedom's flame flickers and its dying embers go out the game is over, maybe not forever, but for a long time.
We've spent two hundred years trying to educate the Democrats in the error of their ways with little success, future attempts are not going to succeed either, so it's up to us to keep them from doing harm. Campaigns of education and persuasion appealing to their sense of duty or decency haven't maintained or restored liberty.
The Jews are like the canaries in the mine, when the birds die we know the atmosphere isn't good enough and humans are going to die soon if they don't get fresh air. Similarly, the tyrannical, genocidal despots seem to go after the Jews first. The rising tide of anti-semitism in western Europe and our Democratic Party are signals that bad shit is in the air. If those weren't enough, look at the politicization of COVID-19, two impeachments for things the impeachers did, race riots from a staged video, and a stolen election, all in one year. "Hold up, Wait a minute, Something ain't right."
Parent vs. Child
We're the parents here.
When ten or more progressive-liberal Democrats gather outside
stores are looted, buildings are burned, cars are blown up,
and people are hurt and killed.
When tens of thousands of conservative Republicans gather
for political action there has been no violence,
no destruction of property, not even a littering problem.
The apparent exception of 2021 January 6
at the United States Capitol
was resolved when we found the violence was done
by ANTIFA infiltrators,
presumably there to incite insurrection.
Parents have two main responsibilities,
to socialize the children they're raising and,
until that education is complete,
to keep their children from doing damage.
It's time to stop blaming the children
and accept that it's our fault when they misbehave.
Whatever we're doing to keep the dirty hands and feet
of bad economics, racism, tyranny, anti-semitism, pseudo-science,
and corruption
out of the clean living room of our American values of
human life, liberty, livelihood, property, and contract
with liberty and justice and opportunity for all,
it isn't working.
Narrow Path
From "Law & Order SVU,
"Those who fight monsters should make damn sure they don't become
one."
Drawing a line between the behavior necessary to fight tyranny
and becoming yet another tyrant isn't easy
and the revolutions that aren't already evil plots for tyranny
usually fail at that distinction and become despotic dictatorships.
Let's look at Russia after the Tsars,
Cuba's attempt at Communism,
Libya after Qadafi,
and South Africa after apartheid.
Germany's promising attempt at National Socialism
also didn't turn out so good.
The one success story I feel good about
is the Constitution of the United States of America,
penned mostly by Thomas Jefferson,
which lasted 124 years
before it collapsed into the kind of tyranny
it was written to prevent.
(I'm marking the move from Constitutional values
to Progressivism at 1913,
Woodrow Wilson's inauguration.)
We conservatives saw most of that coming
while progressive liberals championed most of those bad efforts
and now we're gun shy about pressing hard
to push our political positions.
We don't want to piss off our progressive pals.
Think of the horrors that might have been abated
if we had spoken up against
the Klan, eugenics and Planned Parenthood,
the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, the New Deal,
the Black Panthers, the Great Society,
Affirmative Action, ANTIFA, BDS, and BLM,
if we had resisted the progressive-liberal support
of these causes.
We knew who these people were and what they were doing
and we kept quiet for fear of imposing our own tyranny
and because we didn't want to offend anybody.
Those who do evil should get evil treatment, that's easy.
It's okay to beat up rioters and
to take stuff from looters.
It's okay to be sneaky to take back stolen elections.
It's okay to use force to regain open social-medium
fora.
What about those who only speak evil,
those who promote centralized health care,
government control of education,
public support of the arts, and economic redistribution?
Aren't they shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater,
to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes?
Well, that's where the line gets narrow.
Chatting in our living rooms or even in polite, public debate is fine
while raising an angry mob on these same issues is not.
So here we are,
we conservatives clearly did too little
and other revolutionaries did too much.
It's like the Goldilocks story
where Castro's people were too nasty,
Trump's people were too nice,
and we want a solution that is "just right."
We have to stop the real nasties without becoming nasty ourselves.
Torture Analogy
There was a "Law & Order" episode
where Detective Fontana pointed his gun in the eye
of a suspect and repeated held his head in the toilet
to find out where a kidnaped little girl was being held.
He got his information at the cost
of violating a suspect's rights.
At the end attorneys on both sides agree that,
in this case, the ends did justify the means
and the suspect deserved the physical punishment.
At the end they ask what if Fontana had tortured
the suspect's dog or his mother to get information?
Where is the line?
Another episode has an Arab woman
lure and kill an American
veteran
in a ritualisticly-gruesome way.
The soldier had participated in torturing her husband
and the offended woman chose not to go through legal channels
but rather to exact revenge on her own.
At the time both killer and victim were civilians
living their lives on U.S. soil
(or U.S. pavement
in the case of New York City),
not in any theater of war.
The torture inflicted in the war zone on the woman's husband
was mostly stripping the subjects naked
and having western women make fun of their genitals.
It offended them deeply but I figure
most American-college fraternities subject their pledges
to worse forms of humiliation.
The issues were many and interesting,
is torture justified as part of war,
is personal revenge part of the war, and
is being a resident of civilian life
supposed to protect a soldier from war-style retribution?
In a state of war where it is okay
for soldiers to kill other soldiers on a battlefield
and we need to get information from people
who have that information and don't want to share it,
should we get that information by inflicting pain?
We can also use pain as negative incentive for bad behavior.
Somewhere between slapping a child's wrist
and disemboweling a bad-behaving prisoner
there ought to be a line we don't cross.
Creating the perception of danger of death goes a long way
to enforcing cooperation from otherwise-uncooperative subjects,
waterboarding to create the impression of drowning for example.
There is a whole discipline of Psychological Operations
(PsyOps in short-speak)
to create unbearable fear without bodily damage.
Sometimes the psychological damage to the victim
of being in that state of fear can be life damaging as well.
I would like to think the people who make the decisions
of what to do with civilian and military prisoners
in the area of pain and torture
have thought these issues through very carefully.
In fact, I suspect they haven't thought through
much more than what they need to do to get what they need,
but that doesn't mean we can't think about these things
both in the immediate, close-range issue of torturing prisoners
and in the far-reaching, long-range issue
of figuring out a code of conduct in the
ideological and political war we're fighting
in the 203rd decade here in the United States.
(As one of relatively-advancing years,
as one who considered the year 2001 to be "the future"
I find it astonishing that I'm here in the third decade
of the third millennium.
Well, we're here, we have problems,
and we have to deal with them.)
So why have I brought up mostly-military torture
in a section on political-civilian code of conduct?
Because we were raised on the mandate of proportional response.
For example,
so-called-civilized people don't cut off a hand
for shoplifting when a teenager takes a candy bar in a store.
Proportional response turned our city centers into riot zones,
turned a two-week response to a normal pandemic
into two years of paranoid panic,
cost us an election,
and reversed a four year trend away from
racial and anti-semitic hate.
Maybe some of the perpetrators ought to feel
more-than-proportionate pain for their transgressions.
Ends Justify the Means
One of the mantras justifying good people doing bad things is
the ends justifying the means.
My problem with this is that the bad means being justified
are often evil ends in themselves
and are ignored in the so-called equation of ends vs. means.
My other problem is that those estimating the ends and means
in the justification often lack analytical skills
to do that calculation.
Put less nicely, it is an excuse for rationalization.
We have to do a little of that
because any application of force
to protect America and American values
is going to have "collateral damage,"
people getting hurt who would not have been hurt
without our action.
We have to be careful and mindful,
but, more importantly,
we have to recognize the damage done
and be prepared to pay for it when possible.
In Democrat riots the damage is deliberate,
not a negative consequence of their action,
but instead the point.
They burn, pillage, steal, and harm people and property
as means to some end, or maybe as an end in itself.
(Alternatively, all those big-crowds, noisy Trump rallies
occurred without any property damage or people hurt.)
For these reasons,
and a few others I'm less able to articulate,
the argument trading bad means for good ends
is fraught with peril.
If the good ends are immediate and imminent
and clearly better than the bad means,
then we have more-compelling arguments for a course of action
or a code of conduct than the ends justifying the means.
Consistency
We must sail a steady course in our beliefs and our actions.
We can spout all the blather we like about
our superior values and our moral compass,
but it's critical in our dealings with the Other Side
that we be consistent in our application
of those values and morals.
Part of this is the parent-child role.
Once we're going to assume the parent role,
then we have to hold a steady helm
lest the Democrats we supervise become spoiled brats.
As we'll see below,
the rules don't have to be simple,
but any rules we impose on them
should apply to us as well.
I may not give much credence to the arguments
that Congress would be a wonderful place
if the same taxes and laws
that apply to us applied to members of Congress,
but it certainly would help.
Hypocrisy is a bad thing for several reasons.
It gives license to those who do bad things.
One fellow I knew in 1997 bragged
about getting credit-card numbers
from the Internet and buying stuff with them.
When I challenged him about the legality of his new hobby
he replied, "Well, it's against the law to run a STOP sign."
He didn't see the difference between breaking one law
and breaking another.
Setting an example is important.
The reasons against hypocrisy go far deeper than I can explain
in a few examples,
but a consistent, non-hypocritical moral compass of behavior
is very important at many levels,
some of those reasons are hard to explain,
but they're still important.
While we want our rules to be simple and easy to follow,
consistency and integrity are far more important.
This is where I differ from the strict libertarians
and their non-initiation-of-force principle
or catch-all mantras like
"Don't hurt people and don't take their stuff."
These are good guidelines as a basis of behavior,
but the rules we follow are going to be more complex.
Let's not make them any more complicated than we need,
but let's make them cover all the interesting cases
so we can present to ourselves and to our political opponents
a consistent code of conduct.
I have examples below.
Consistency over Time
It isn't enough to have a rule for here and now,
it has to be strong enough to withstand the flow of time.
While the bough sometimes has to bend a little
to withstand the winds of change,
I prefer strength to flexibility.
The liberal excuse
"Well, that may have been fine then, but things are different now"
doesn't sit well with me.
Sure, there are new technologies that require new codes of conduct,
but if it wasn't okay to do something bad then
it should be clear from the same principles
that it's not okay to do the same something bad now.
Our moral foundations haven't changed,
our core values haven't changed,
so we should see little change in our code.
There are good changes.
The reduction in racism over the past century and half is good
and the reduction in racism and anti-semitism
during the Trump years was absolutely terrific.
Embracing a wider view of
sexuality
is a good thing.
These increases in acceptance of differences
are steps towards less control and more freedom.
Technological change means change in culture
which means change in how we act.
Cell phones have been a culture shock in a lot of ways.
Now we call a person rather than a place.
These changes are about social decorum,
not politics, not our issue here.
Some technology changes drive both infrastructure and politics.
The recent practical reality of electric cars
means a network of gasoline delivery
will have to change to increased electric-power capacity.
It was easy to
tax
motor fuel to pay for roads
and now we're going to need a different mechanism for funding.
Since much of our politics revolve around energy in general
and oil in particular, a massive shift from oil to electricity
is going to bring about serious change.
If half the cars go electric,
then it's a 20% drop in oil and a 20% increase in electricity.
Both of those changes have serious political implications.
Those examples are exceptions, however.
For the most part, things that were good then are good now
and things that were bad then are bad now.
Big government was bad then,
that's why we founded the United States of America,
it was bad in 1776, it was bad in 1789, it was bad in 1850,
it was bad in 1912, it was bad in 1933, it was bad in 1965,
and it's still bad now.
Often the enemy of our enemy is not our friend.
Progressivism is sugar-coated socialism.
We must be vigilant against tyranny and
we must stay vigilant against tyranny.
Showing respect for people,
even our opponents, was good then
and disrespect is still bad now.
Never mind the legalities,
never mind whether you like the current office holder,
whoever thought for a second it was okay
for a social medium to piss on the President of the United States?
What kind of animals "unfriends" people
because they don't like their former friend's political view?
Consistency over Media Exposure
The sudden popular realization of a problem bothers me.
Democrats I know were upset by the Rodney King video
where a traffic stop on 1991 March 3
in Los Angeles turned into a beating recorded on video.
Historically, for several decades,
traffic stops for "DWB" (Driving While Black)
have been routine in the City of Angels
(or, less charitably, the Mental Desert)
and quite a few of those have turned into police brutality.
This isn't new, this isn't a surprise to anybody with open eyes,
it isn't nice, and somebody should have done something long ago.
Long before the Rodney-King video
I had heated discussions taking a position
against this sort of behavior and similar police
abuse
in the Golden State of California,
mostly the Los-Angeles area
so I was especially irritated by
outrage about Rodney King.
"You all were silent for decades about it,
one example appeared on a video on television,
and now you're all excited about it.
Where was your outrage for all the decades
when it wasn't on TV?"
My liberal friends maintained their outrage
about the Rodney-King incident with complete complacency
about their silence for all the prior history.
I'll point out that Rodney King was not a routine DWB stop,
but rather a drunk driver engaging in a car chase,
so the police would already have been pissed off
when they finally stopped him.
The comparison of Rodney King and George Floyd is obvious,
Both were nasty people who did horrible things,
far from innocent victims of police brutality.
(Unless you believe George Floyd had time to see a
barber
while he was getting his beat-down,
both King and Floyd lived to tell their tales
after their media-popularized events.)
But here's the thing that bothers me.
Whatever one may think of these popular black victims,
where were all the sympathizers for all the times
violent racism occurred and wasn't on the news?
Where were all you folks when we were out there
pointing out that this behavior was evil?
We must stay vigilant for human rights and decency
even when they're not media events.
Consistency Across People
This one is a little different,
but it's still important in a code of conduct.
We must have rules that apply to everybody.
The rules may get complicated, but they must be universal.
The notion that rules should only apply to other people is scary.
My STOP-sign example above point out that
rules for some people and not others
creates disregard for all rules, not a good thing.
One friend who usually drove 75 miles per hour (MPH)
on the New Jersey Turnpike was in favor of a 55 MPH limit.
He said he didn't want all of
those idiots going 75.
He didn't suggest that some class of certified competent drivers
be allowed to drive faster,
just that the rules for others should not apply to him.
Another example is a friend taking a drug for diabetes
that was not certified for use in the United States,
only in Europe.
She supported the role of the
FDA
restricting untested drugs,
just that she should be able to get those drugs for herself.
This attitude that rules only apply to others is horrifying.
It should scare all of us
and we should be prepared to defend against it
in both our rhetoric and our behavior.
Perspective
Perspective in promoted political causes
is another narrow path.
On the one side it's important
to have perspective about specific causes
but always picking the maximum-benefit cause
lets things happen with long-term awful results.
If we have a cause, like feeding the hungry for example,
then whatever we do should leave
the world population better fed
and especially poor people with fuller tummies.
My economic argument against government-assistance programs
for the poor and hungry is they leave poor people
poorer and hungrier than they were without the programs.
Somebody who is against prejudice and discrimination
should be held accountable for supporting groups and organizations
that promote prejudice and discrimination.
Those against pollution should only support changes
that create less pollution overall,
not just one particular pollutant in one particular place.
It's okay not always to see the Big Picture.
The global-warming, climate-change, Green-New-Deal programs
will cut off the food supply for 2000 million people,
about one-quarter of the people in the world,
who get fed because of plentiful and cheap coal.
Being against anti-semitism to save fifteen million Jews or
being against violent racism to save 42 million American blacks
seems insignificant in the face of one hundred times as many lives
in peril from bad environmental decisions,
but some of us should support these smaller causes.
Closer to home, we specifically mourn
The Six Million Jews who died in Hitler's rampage.
The Jewish population has just
recovered
from this horror this decade, eighty years later.
Yet Hitler's total genocidal carnage was
21 million
and the total socialist slaughter of their own citizens
in the past century is
262 million.
Does that make our own six million less significant?
I don't think so because the anti-semitism hate
is a separate evil disease of the face of human history
and deserves to be exposed to the light of scrutiny.
(That does not mean a frightening book
about the physical horrors in the death camps
should necessarily be part of an eighth-grade corriculum.
I recall how my first exposure to that historical nightmare
scared and sickened me and I would be comfortable having
these young students learn about the Holocaust,
but I don't think it should be a national cause
if a Tennessee school board thinks otherwise.)
It seems a bit ambidextrous
on the one hand to believe in local perspective
in making wise decisions about how to support an important cause
and not to believe in global perspective
in not always choosing the biggest, "baddest" cause to fight for.
However, it's the right thing to do.
Support for political causes
is one area where divide-and-conquer does more good
than a unified effort in only the most-important cause.
Courage
I just watched Randy Otto's show
"Winston Churchill: Man of the Century"
where he plays Winston Churchill telling us his story,
mostly of the terror of Adolf Hitler
and what he had to do to deal with his fellow Englishman
to win the war.
Check out the movie "Darkest Hour"
to get a sense of the same story.
Many of the people I admire politically
venerate Winston Churchill
for his political views, for his actions,
and for his courage.
It's almost easy to overlook the virtue of courage.
Many of us have gone nose to nose with adversaries in our lives
but none of those adversaries threatened to wipe out
everything I love about my country.
Herr Hitler threatened both,
not only the present but also the future.
Not only should we remember the courage it took to fight him
but also we should summon the courage to face
those who supported him then and support his values today.
What We're Allowed To Do
Up until now there's nothing terribly controversial
in this values-code-of-conduct essay.
The world may be going to pot,
we know it's going to pot,
yes we care more than they do,
but they still seem to win.
Here's the part where I deviate
from most of the values-based positions.
Against the tried, true, and failed
conservative-libertarian positions,
I really am recommending initiation of force,
hurting people and taking their stuff,
and doing many of the bad things we accuse liberals of doing.
The difference, the important difference,
the fundamental and vital difference,
is that we have to use these violations wisely and carefully,
we have to use them as deviations from a chosen path
and not as a general pattern of behavior.
It's the difference between a driver
weaving drunkenly and stupidly in and out of a lane
and a driver carefully crossing a lane boundary
to avoid a specific obstacle.
We rightfully criticize the first and accept the second,
but even the careful driver swerving for a good reason
must take responsibility for the consequences of his deviation.
I'll start with an analogy from my own work.
One of my groundbreaking projects
(I'm not known for my humility)
was to write a mathematical computer program
that could assign fleets to airline flights.
It was a "warm start" solution in that it started
with a fleet assignment already claimed to be a valid solution
and proceeded to make it better
according to economic and operational criteria
subject to rules including
ground time, maintenance schedules, and aircraft range.
The problem is the starting solutions that came
from our airline clients,
the schedules they actually flew,
didn't completely follow their own rules.
They would give us a rule that a certain fleet of airplanes
required a "turn time"
of 35 minutes between its arrival and its departure,
but their own schedule had just 27 minutes.
What did we do?
We figured that any place and time they could
shave eight minutes off the schedule was okay
for our answers to shave the same eight minutes.
We could change to a smaller fleet with a shorter turn time
in the same connection or use another fleet with
the same 35-minutes requirement.
We couldn't forge any new violations in our fleet assignments,
but we could cheat as much as they cheated where they cheated.
If they could run their airline with a shaved-time turn,
then it was okay for us to give them a similar solution.
Let's apply that same logic to our own code of conduct
in the face of our political opponents
not following basic rules of decency.
Unacceptable behavior must have unbearable consequences.
Those left-wing, liberal Democrats
who riot, loot, pillage, steal, and hurt people
shouldn't be afforded the same moral protections
we give more-reasonable people.
Once we know people who were rioters,
we could find conservative volunteers
to hunt these people down,
to hang around those people, and
to beat the shit out of them if they make moves to riot again.
It's not nice, it may not be technically moral,
but it's the right thing to do.
How did that turn out?
262 million
died at the hands of their own socialist governments,
lashings and lynchings in the 1800s
and gas chambers and gulags in the 1900s
became a continuing river of racial violence
and anti-Jewish hate in the 2000s.
Economic programs of redistribution
have not only thwarted the growth that
threatened to end poverty forever,
it created a community of communistic control
over cowering crowds of comrades.
(Okay, I like alliteration.)
The Fourteenth Amendment of our Constitution
gives us a clever way to take our election back
with the same two Electoral votes for every state.
(See insert on the left side of the page.)
At the very least,
we should mount an effort to find anybody and everybody
who cheated in the 2020 election
and press all kinds of charges, one after another without end.
We conservatives have the resources to make their lives miserable,
maybe not the level of misery Biden has produced compared to Trump,
but miserable enough to make the point.
Their behavior was intolerable
and their consequences should be unbearable.
Sometimes we pick the wrong causes.
Clive Bundy was a conservative
who became a hero when he fought for his cattle-grazing rights.
It was stupid because the right he was fighting for
was to graze on government land for twenty years
without paying the fees he agreed to pay.
Some of our heroes aren't always heroic.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was a womanizer and a socialist
and was a crucial crusader for civil rights.
President John F. Kennedy was also a womanizer and
stole an election and got us track to walk on the moon.
President Harry Truman was
KKK and
he made the critical choice to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Even Winston Churchill had his less-than-heroic
moments while he was saving our civilization
from Herr Hitler.
We can still admire these heroic figures and
their history-changing successes
in spite of their failings in other areas.
When the political party of
the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK),
the Black Panthers, and
Black Lives Matter
preaches about racism,
then they need to be slapped.
They need to be mocked early and often
in conservative media and any other places available.
Their support of hate should be aired in public
every which way but loose.
When a political party endorses the most egregious pseudo-science
from eugenics to climate change
to most of the nonsense about the latest corona virus,
it's time to slap them hard.
Not only do we need a steady stream of social-media memes
mocking government-funded lab rats
masquerading as independent, informative scientists,
we need real scientists to speak out.
"The global warming that happened mostly from 1920 to 1940
was not caused by fossil fuels from 1960 to 2000."
"A cloth mask for a dry corona virus works
as well as a chain-link mosquito net or a fishnet condom."
Edmund Burke is supposed to have said,
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil
is for good men to do nothing."
While I don't always agree with this sentiment,
it applies here.
(This one is for my friend Scott.)
Until
now
I felt the McCarthy trials were utterly wrong.
From 1950 to 1954 Senator Joe McCarthy led
a serious of trials against otherwise law-abiding Americans
for being members of the Communist Party.
The technique used was ruthless and insidious.
Suspected Communists would be put on trial
and they would be be blacklisted and lose their jobs
unless they named somebody else
who was a Communist.
It was a sad outcome that most of the victims
of McCarthyism were not members of the Communist Party.
It was a Witch Hunt not unlike what went on
in Salem, Massachusetts a few centuries ago.
The Communist movement was itself
ruthless and insidious, but I rejected
the McCarthy technique for being
mean and nasty and ugly.
I still believe they were mean and nasty and ugly
and I regret having to use that sort of tactic.
I seriously regret that innocent, non-Communist people
were seriously hurt,
I believe there was a responsibility
to choose the right people to hurt in this process,
and I believe that responsibility was shirked.
The Communists (big C) and socialists killed
262 million
of their own citizens,
so there really was a need for slapping them and
slapping those who supported them.
If left-wing progressive college protesters
threaten a conservative speaker,
then it is up to conservatives to threaten those protesters.
If a publicly-funded college is only allowing
liberal-Democrat speakers,
then it's time to be threatening protesters
until conservative voices can also be heard.
No, it's not nice, it's not good manners,
it's not protecting their free speech,
but threatening those who threaten free speech
is the right thing to do.
Civil disobedience went a long way
and it's a great tool for raising awareness
and correcting wrongs.
When we have adversaries who are not embarrassed
by their support, through lies and violence, of evil,
whether it be racism or socialism,
then we have to slap harder.
We have to employ uncivil disobedience.
When we slap our miscreant liberal friends,
we have to slap hard but we have to slap in the right place.
When a child wrongfully takes a cookie we slap his hand.
When a cat or dog bites me I don't slap his paw,
I slap his face.
When a liberal says stupid things about race,
then we must rub his nose in racist causes he supported
like KKK, Black Panthers, and BLM.
When he promotes the so-called Palastinian state
we rub his nose in ANTIFA and BDS and PLO and ISIS and
progressive-Democrat support of eugenics
back in Hitler's time.
When he promotes socialism
we rub his nose in left-wing-Communist support
of Stalin, Hitler, Castro, and Mao.
When he promotes Islamic law
we rub his nose in the state of human rights in Islamic states.
When he suggests Israel is somehow despotic
we ask him if he would rather be
an Arab in Israel or a Jew in Saudi Arabia.
Did you ever see the movie
Mississippi Burning?
FBI agent Alan Ward (William Dafoe)
is a young, naive fellow trying to follow his moral code and the rules
while older Rupert Anderson (Gene Hackman)
realizes they have to do some bad things
while being careful not to become monsters themselves
and eventually convinces Agent Ward to use
the FBI's teeth and claws to battle the beast
of small-town
Klan
racism in Mississippi in 1964.
The thing that's especially cool in the counter-attack
where the good guys do bad things to bad people
is the bad things they do are precisely the bad things
the bad people have done.
Actually, they create total terror in the bad people
that they are going to be victims of the same bad things
without actually doing the bad things.
This isn't about defying authority.
I believe in police, maybe public, maybe private,
and I believe in a structure of rules.
Those rules may not be absolute,
but those who break them should do so at their own peril.
Breaking the law for the sake of breaking the law isn't right,
but sometimes breaking laws is the right thing to do.
If there is a secret to this values violation
for preserving our values,
then it is the notion of being
"positively perverse" in our actions.
We should push back in a way that follows
the negative elements of our opponents actions.
When we can find a way,
we should push back
in such a way that only a person
violating our values gets hurt.
It's like putting bear traps under the windows
to prevent burglery as only a burgler comes in
through the window.
(While that example is good for illustration,
in real life there are non-burglers who would
have a reason to come in through the
bathroom
window or, perhaps, to step near a window.)
If we can get away with creating fear in
our liberal-Democrat bad people without actually
hurting them or causing them economic or political strife,
then that's wonderful.
If not, then we should do the best we can.
Robert Heinlein had a line
in The Puppet Masters,
"You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
(My Internet search attributes the quote
to François de Charette.)
We can shoot the leg or the shoulder rather than the heart
and we can kill bad people's livelihoods
instead of their bodies.
As they act like children, let's explain it like children.
"You liberals started it, you acted terrible,
you supported racism, thought-control,
pseudo-science, and socialism,
and hundreds of millions died needlessly.
That was your choice
and we conservatives
have no sympathy if retribution and restitution
are painful."
What We Must Do
We have to hit hard,
especially in the embarrassment factor.
When liberals are stupid we have to make sure
everybody knows they're stupid.
Like a cat yelled at for being bad,
they may not understand the language,
but they can understand the tone.
"Yes, you've been stupid again,
what you did hurt people,
and shame on you all!"
We must enforce consistency.
Once Donald Trump is subjected to scrutiny
we must subject Democrats to the same scrutiny.
For Hillary Clinton's campaign
every donation to the so-called Clinton Foundation
should be examined and exposed.
If colluding with Russia is an impeachable offense,
then let's go after all the Democrats in office
who actually did collude with Russia in some way
and castigate them in all the conservative media.
If racial quotas are wrong in college admissions and hiring practice,
then we must castigate the choice of a Supreme-Court Justice by race.
Imagine having each Obama, Clinton, and Biden lie and scandal
splashed across every right-wing news forum.
If you're worried about losing respect from liberals,
then please don't worry.
You already don't have their respect
as they have far less regard than we do
for people of another point of view.
We must also be quick.
When we train a child or a pet
we can't wait an hour or two
and then punish bad behavior.
It just doesn't work because the child or pet doesn't learn.
Not only will Democrats not change their behavior,
waiting gives them time to regroup and to reinforce
their trangressions.
When COVID-19 became a political network of lies
it was time to expose the fraud.
How could more people die of a new disease
than the entire excess deaths in 2020?
If snot-covered cloth masks with fabric-weave holes
hundreds of times the size of a virus
are hailed as a good idea,
if lockdowns puttings tens of millions out of work
are promoted as right,
then we must loudly and immediately demand explanations
and empirical studies showing they're right.
They did all this with the promise that
COVID-19 would be gone in two weeks,
and we should have been embarrassing the hell out of
the so-called experts making the claims after a month.
Rodney King and George Floyd
were nasty, horrible people,
hardly the right choice for a campaign
against racial discrimination.
If we had immediately called a spade a spade
(ooh, nasty!),
then much of the hypocritical controversy
and ensuing violent riots could instead
have been constructive change.
When Congress impeached a President they don't like
for "Abuse of Power" without specifying any power that was abused,
then hold them to task right away.
When those colluding with Russia are impeaching
the other-party President for colluding with Russia,
then punishment with immediate media exposure is critical.
Get the Supreme Court involved if we have to,
but nail the charlatans who thought it appropriate
to use something serious like impeachment for petty squabbles.
When an election with almost two-thirds voting for Trump
came up the next morning with a Biden victory,
there was a clear eleven-week time window to fix it.
Once there's a Biden inauguration it's a lot
harder to fix.
With non-citizens voting,
all news media under Democrat-government control,
all three houses stolen
(Representatives, Senate, and White),
and a soon-to-be-packed Supreme Court,
how were we planning to fix it?
More historically,
think how much easier it would have been to marginalize
the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1870 than in 1913?
How much easier would the whole pseudo-science politics thing
if eugenics and Magaret Sanger had been dealt with early.
Better planning and a commitment to world freedom from tyranny
could have been used to stop two world wars right away.
In all of these cases and many more,
unimaginable and unspeakable tragedy
would have been averted
just by acting quickly.
Please don't take this as a mandate for always being vocal.
I've seen postings and memes about silence being consent
for the most horrible things in history and the present day.
That's not true.
If we yell and scream and post nasty shit for every deserving cause,
then we dilute our impact to the point where we're just
"crying wolf" instead of being a voice for positive change.
(Instead of responding directly
to every stupid Facebook meme I see,
my own strategy is hunker down
(with a good record or tape on my hifi
and my cats purring at my side)
and write another essay on my web page.
The result of this is a
lot
of essays on my web page.
I hope this has been more effective
than pissing into the wind responding to those
who never seem to understand no matter how obvious
their logical flaws may be.)
War
We're surrounded by media-created wars going back to my childhood.
We had the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs,
neither of which did very well.
I worked for a company whose first corporate-mission priority
wasn't being profitable or keeping clients happy.
It was "War" on their fiercest competitor.
(That it was a German company only
added to the irony in the wake of two world wars.)
War has become a catch-all phrase for any Great Big Mission.
I'm loathe to call anything
"war"
that isn't really
a contest for existence with real mortal threat
and real lives on the line.
That being said, this really is a war
this really is a contest for existence with real mortal threat,
and we have to think and to react that way.
Look at the Democrats reacting to the threat
of ending slavery, integrating neighborhoods,
getting black people the right to vote,
reducing political corruption of labor unions,
and having the police do the job we all want them to do.
Look at the Democrats rounding up
Chinese and Japanese citizens, the yellow people,
without being concerned about Italians and Germans
during the World War II.
Look at the progressive-liberal support
for Comrade Stalin's and Herr Hitler's genocides abroad
and for Margarat Sanger's kinder, gentler genocide here at home.
How bad does liberal disfunction have to get
to be a conservative call to battle?
More recently,
look at the actual deaths from liberal politics in this century.
The crime rates have soared in Democrat-controlled cities.
The pandemic-panic lockdowns cost
at least as many lives as the disease in 2020.
Look at all the riots over media-created racial issues
when racism was at an all-time low in the United States.
Those concerned about mass shootings should note
that the shooters have all been left-wing Democrats.
The riots and fires and destruction are far short
of what happened in London eighty years ago,
but they're not pretty, they're not right,
and we should consider them a war
on our country and its principles.
I'm certainly not suggesting the American conservatives
start digging foxholes and shooting Democrats,
but when liberalism turns to violence,
we should strike back as we would for any other act of war.
We should be vigilant,
we should judge left-wing violence harshly, and
we should be willing and able to react with harsh violence
for both retribution and restitution.
This essay isn't a call to arms.
During earlier wars regular people led regular lives.
They went to work, they came home,
they raised their families, spent time with their friends,
and took their vacations.
We can and should do that now.
If the liberal Democrats keep us from our
home, work, families, friends, and recreation,
then they win and we lose.
I recall liberal conversations where
liberals were discussing what they were
"going to do with the Trump supporters"
once they regained control.
Reeducation camps and restrictions of freedom were on their lists.
I'm not suggesting any such thing for my liberal friends,
only using force as needed to keep them out of politics
when their actions are poisoning the last hope of freedom
in the entire world.
Here's one for the books (pun intended).
A friend with a Kindle told me the
the book 1984 disappeared
from his Amazon-Kindle library.
Just like that, it was gone!
Who knows how many other titles were removed?
This wasn't a school board deciding not to use
a particular book in their eighth-grade class,
this was a nearly-universal source of books in America
eliminating a title they didn't like.
Apparently it came back, but we should be scared shitless by this.
If Amazon can do that, it's not a huge leap
for the "Kindle edition" of your favorite book
to have its content edited with a political agenda,
no more extreme than social media filtering political content.
While we're still allowed to read books without Amazon,
let me ask this question:
What are you willing to do,
what are you planning to do,
if and when Amazon-Kindle books are edited
to be politically correct?
(Thank you, Jim, for pointing this one out to me.)
So what should we do?
While we're living our lives,
we should be prepared to defend
our lives, our liberty, our livelihoods, our property,
and the integrity of our contracts.
We should be prepared to defend
our rights and our values and our country.
Summary
We're starting with the presumption in this paper
that we believe in the freedom-and-liberty heritage
from the Magna Carta down through
John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson
and that we believe it is imperative that it be preserved
for those who want to live by its principles.
This paper proposes a stronger, firmer guideline
for a code of conduct
that preserves these values as
our current behavior has not done.
•
For two hundred years those who have pursued American values
of human life, liberty, livelihood, property, and contract
have failed utterly at preserving those values.
Just in the year 2020 we had
two baseless impeachments,
a routine pandemic turned into a political panic,
a whirlwind of violence and hate from a non-racial police event,
a social-media blackout of conservative values,
and a stolen election.
•
Things went from good to bad quickly enough
that any hesitation on our part
in making a change of direction in enforcing
our principles
is likely to send things irreversably
from bad to horribly worse.
•
Our political opponents are acting like children
and should be treated like children.
Whatever foibles conservatives like Trump may have,
compared to liberal, progressive, left-wing Democrats,
we are the adults and must act like parents.
•
The path between under-reacting and over-reacting
is narrow enough that we really have to understand
what we're trying to do,
why we're doing it,
and the consequences of not action appropriately.
•
Consistency is crucial in our execution of political force.
We must have clear rules governing how we behave,
consistent in time,
consistent in the face of media exposure, and
consistent across inviduals and groups of people.
•
We must keep our positions and postures in perspective.
Actions must clearly point towards goals and accomplishment
rather than appeasing emotional pressure.
Doing good must take priority over feeling good.
It's okay to put effort into smaller issues over bigger issues
so long as that effort furthers good morals, values, and goals.
•
Courage is critical.
We face difficult choices,
sometimes life-or-death choices.
There will be pain and even loss of life.
After the history
of lashings and lynchings (1800s),
gulags and gas chambers (1900s),
and violent hate (this century),
I feel it's worth such a price to keep it from happening again.
We should work hard to keep it minimal,
but we have to face the music and to pay the piper.
•
We must act firmly and quickly
and specifically in the area
of liberal transgressions,
If it makes sense to beat the shit out of rioters,
to shame those guilty of media censorship,
to use Constitutional loopholes to reclaim a stolen election,
or to take back stolen property by force,
then we should do it without hesitation.
•
We can't sit on our hands waiting for somebody else
to rescue us from liberals.
They're not ashamed of their actions,
they don't feel bad about the consequences of what they do.
•
This is not about how anybody feels,
it's not about anybody's opinion, and
it's not about how much anybody cares.
We are not trying to become the Thought Police
like our liberal friends have.
Nobody has to love America,
only to act respectful.
Our actions must be targeted reactions
to what people have actually done,
not what we think they want to do.
Rational, contained, thoughtful discussion
about sensitive and incendiary issues
should get rational, contained, thoughtful discussion in return.
Promoting tyranny in the form of racism, economic redistribution,
anti-semitism, environmentalism, or any other brand
of force and hate
should be dealt with quickly and harshly.
It's about actions, not words or feelings,
and now we must act.
•
We're living an a war and must be prepared like it.
•
There is imperative in my exhortation to action.
Hundreds of millions have died
and at least that many have lived in oppression and poverty
because we didn't act against socialism circa 1913.
I don't blame this on the people who perpretrated all this pain
any more than I blame a child for burning down a house
when his parents should have kept him from playing with matches.
All this pointless pain is our own fault.
It's incumbent upon us conservatives to act
smartly, strongly, and safely
to preserve what we have in
human life, liberty, livelihood, property, and contract.
The alternative consequences have been made clear
in more times and places than any of us
should want to think about.
23:59:03 Mountain Standard Time
(MST).
1694 visits to this web page.
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