I’ve found my next gifts to my younger brothers – once the series is published in hardcopy, that is! I received the first novel as a gift for Christmas, and upon finishing, immediately bought the second. Then when I had finished the second, I immediately bought the third!
I’m glad I waited to start reading until the whole trilogy was completed, because having to wait for the next to be published would have been a trial of patience indeed.
I’ll be shelving this in my personal library as well – next to Narnia, the Hobbit, and the Dark is Rising. Kindle’s all well and good but some things deserve to be backed up on dead tree once it’s available. 😉
So I heard about the Tulsa shooting through social media, and I’m afraid that at this point every time I see a black person sharing a news story headlining some innocent black person getting shot, my reaction is “Let’s wait and see how many lies the media is telling you about that ‘innocent’ black person. If this was a real innocent they wouldn’t be telling you about it.”
Because the media are Satan’s whores, and their agenda is to get cops and blacks to kill each other by maliciously spewing deliberate falsehoods. That’s the only conclusion I can reasonably reach, given their behavior over the last few years.
Not that I disagree with those who say that police behave badly toward black people. I’m perfectly willing to accept testimony from blacks that holds that institutions in Democrat-controlled areas are cesspits of racism, corruption, and rampant abuse of power. And I’m perfectly willing to believe black people suffer a lot of power-tripping abuse from cops. Getting upset over abuse of power is entirely reasonable.
On the other hand, cops have a tough job, caught between the idealism of “serve and protect,” facing the dregs of criminal evil every day, and being conscripted to be the jackbooted tax collectors of the administrative state, local edition.
And on each side you’ve got the bad apples – the blacks who are bigoted against cops, and the cops who are actually racist (or just total thugs to everybody).
You know, both the cop community and the black community have the same problem here. Failure to police their own.
Sure, sure, Not All X Are Like That. Trouble is, while there are probably some fairly non-corrupt police departments and there are plenty of noncriminal blacks, the people speaking out and trying to hold their own accountable don’t have enough power or influence to stamp out the widespread and rampant malfeasance. So the entire community suffers. Particularly black communities that face double victimization – from their own criminals and from their corrupt local government. (The solution to your problems is NEVER “vote Democrat.” It observably doesn’t work.)
There’s a lot of things police need to do to clean up their act, and more sensitivity training courses about diversity are not going to help. Not with the media and various other leftwing organizations attempting to start a low-grade civil war between black people and cops. But I don’t see a solution while both sides are closing ranks around their own bad actors and insisting the blame lies entirely with the Other.
Currently my life is divided between baby’s naptime and Boob O’Clock. This routine cycles roughly every two hours, and since my natural sleep cycle is three hours long, has rather predictably resulted in my Not Caring about much outside the walls of the house. I have barely enough functional brainpower to play Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes on my cellphone, commentary on current events is pretty much out completely.
Other than the whole Islamic terror thing, I will say this, if Obama really were the second coming of FDR, every Muslim in this country would be in an internment camp. Seriously, this is how you get camps. Do people want camps? Because deportation is far more humane than that, and “living together in peace” is observably not an option on the table.
The leftist narrative is that of course this latest terror attack is due to insufficient gun control – facts, reason, and American rights be damned.
A few thoughts, based on the information that’s been promulgated so far.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way” applies just as much to evil goals as it does to virtuous ones. Focusing on the tool used to do evil is ignoring the evil. There are many ways to commit mass murder, and making it more difficult to obtain one tool will simply cause terrorists to use another tool instead. It’s far harder for people to defend themselves from explosives or a vehicle driven with intent to kill. And the Orlando terrorist was a fan of the Boston Marathon bombers, so it’s not like he would have given up if he couldn’t obtain guns.
Laws don’t help if they’re not used. Testimony from the Orlando terrorist’s ex-wife indicates that he was a violent person who’d already committed assault. Why was he never brought up on charges for domestic abuse so extreme that his wife’s parents felt the need to essentially kidnap her to save her life? The authorities cannot deal with violent criminals if their victims don’t come forward.
A coworker testified that the terrorist was homophobic, racist, and harassed him, and yet when he reported this to their employer, nothing was done. Because the terrorist was a Muslim “POC” his atrocious behavior was ignored. This is exactly how political correctness enables violent crime, by covering up and making excuses for the inexcusable. Fort Hood and San Bernardino were enabled the same way – people refused to confront evil because they were afraid of being called “racist” or “Islamophobic”, and so evil got to operate with impunity.
The terrorist should never have been able to keep his job as a security guard – after abusing his wife and harassing a coworker, he definitely shouldn’t have been licensed to legally obtain or carry any kind of firearm. If there had been an official record of his previous violent behavior, would the FBI investigators have kept a closer watch on him as a high risk individual, as hindsight shows he was?
Side note – a nightclub is an extremely poor environment for self-defense. Witnesses testified that at first they couldn’t distinguish gunfire from the music! And a large crowd of people who can’t legally arm themselves in that environment was defended by only a single armed guard. In the wake of many other terrorist attacks around the world – many of which involved multiple attackers – a single armed guard is not enough. Probable jihadi targets need to take terrorist claims seriously and increase their security. How many lives could have been saved if there’d been more than one armed defender on the scene as soon as the terrorist arrived? How many injured people bled out as they waited those long hours for the hostage situation to be resolved by the police?
I guess people don’t want to take responsibility for their own safety in part because contemplating how vulnerable you are to someone who means to do you harm is, quite frankly, terrifying. You have to be on guard always, but the predators only have to get lucky once. People want to ignore the reality of evil and their own vulnerability, instead clinging to talismans like the police or gun control (or even owning a gun but having no training) to give them the illusion of security. And for the majority of Americans, this actually works out fine most of the time. However, the terrorists also know this and take advantage of it. There should never be a place in America where 300 people depend on one armed guard to protect them. Especially not 300 people who are high-value targets for Islamic terror.
Self-defense provides herd immunity against violence, and America is in desperate need of a booster shot.
It occurred to me today that one reason intersectional feminists never shut up about rape culture is that they do, in fact, live in a rape culture. Is there any group more politically correct than intersectional activism? And political correctness serves one purpose, and one purpose only – to cloak wolves in sheepskins so that they may prey freely on their victims. Wherever you find political correctness, you will inevitably find a vile cesspit of corruption and hideous criminality that no one is willing to confront.
This is why those who claim that enacting policies ending sex segregation in bathrooms and locker rooms for the “transgendered” (in actuality, anyone who says the magic incantation “I identify as something I’m obviously not,” since competent trans individuals aren’t distinguishable from regular people.) will not result in any uptick in crime are naive, ignorant fools. They say, “Assault is already illegal, a criminal won’t be deterred by a sign on door!” Well, if assault is illegal, no transvestites need a special law to “protect” them while using the facility designated for their physical plumbing. But the fact of the matter is that individuals who can claim membership in a PC-protected class can and have taken advantage of that protection to victimize those lacking “protected class” privileges. Over and over again. With the collusion of the authorities.
People died in the Fort Hood terrorist shooting because political correctness made the authorities look the other way. People died in the San Bernardino terrorist attack because political correctness made the neighbors look the other way. (And the media is careful to push stories of how people who “saw something” and “said something” are ignorant racists, using social pressure to ensure that the next time someone notices something, they’ll prefer to keep quiet.)
Rotherham made a pretty big splash in the conservative media – authorities looking the other way while gangs groomed and raped over a thousand children. That was illegal, but if the authorities are too cowed by political correctness to enforce the law, then the law only matters when the cops aren’t afraid of being called out by the commissars of political correctness.
We’ve had quite a few events over the last year or so in which the nation’s police forces have been schooled very thoroughly in the negative consequences of crossing political correctness when it comes to race. They’ve been responding as desired, by decreasing their enforcement of the rule of law. And the naifs think the LAW will protect children from perverts, in a community held hostage by political correctness?
Sure. Like the law protects feminists from the predators masquerading as “feminist men” in order to gain greater access to victims. Like the law protected the girls of Rotherham. A decade or two late, and who knows how many dead later, oh sure, everyone will be deeply saddened and horrified… but every day the same things will keep happening, because those who see something won’t say anything. Because saying something in a culture ruled by PC doesn’t stop the perpetrators, but it does get you targeted as a bigot – by the criminals, the useful idiots, AND the authorities. And thus the predators are emboldened to take ever more blatant action, while resentment and anger are bottled up in the pressure cooker of “You can’t say that!”
If you’d like to destroy civil society and the rule of law, there’s nothing better than metastasizing political correctness.
Oh wait, no, they don’t actually care about rape at all, because when nearly 2,000 women are sexually assaulted and young children are raped, they crack jokes about it.
What’s the difference? Well, notice that the fake rapes trumpeted from rooftops by feminists tend to involve white males, and the real rapes that feminists won’t talk about are committed by non-white males. (If they do dare to mention those rapes, they will invariably blame society – or the victims – and excuse the rapists.)
Which leads to the only possible conclusion: intersectional feminism only cares about rape when it’s committed by white males. Which is racist. And remarkably unhelpful when it comes to protecting women and children from the majority of rapists on the planet, who don’t come from Western cultures and who definitely don’t attend prestigious institutions of higher education in America.
Remember Rotherham. Every authority in town looked the other way while Pakistani gangs assaulted and raped 1400 white girls for YEARS, because they were afraid of being called racist. Feminists DO NOT CARE about rape. If they cared about rape, they would be willing to be called “racist” if it meant tackling the actual systemic sexism and rape culture found in some nonwestern cultures and being imported into the First World through mass immigration.
Just another reason to despise feminism. There are two kinds of feminist in 2016: idiot feminists who are ignorant of the true face of feminism, and evil feminists, who deliberately identify themselves with a racist, sexist ideology that promotes hate while using real, vulnerable women as tools to advance their political agenda.
Fair warning, this post may get… rambly, since I’m running a bit of a sleep deficit. I blame new daughter C. Making new humans is hard, and she hasn’t even gotten big enough to start really kicking yet!
However, I want to talk a bit about family, and upbringing, and relate that to a blog squabble that’s happened recently between two authors I admire – and who, I think, are both right, because I think both have ID’d a different piece of an elephant. I’ll be writing my own perspective on things, which may or may not be correct, but because I’ve been a reader of bothblogs for… um, a few years now at least (cannot for the life of me remember how many) I’m not going to link to any particular posts. There’s not really a good “summary” one; both authors have a huge “back catalog” of blog posts that people who aren’t regular readers haven’t encountered, and so I’ve seen some big mistakes in interpretation from people who are readers of one or the other who’ve read only a couple posts and then misinterpreted the other author out of ignorance of that author’s wider philosophical views. So if you want to join the popcorn crowd, please be aware of that issue.
Thoughts on Orlando