Posts Tagged ‘culture’

Haditha, Gaza and the Up Against the Wall Conundrum.

Posted: March 7, 2024 by datechguy in culture, Israel, Israel vs Hamas, middle east
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as: “A bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.”

Curiously, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica which fell through a rift in the time-space continuum from 1000 years in the future describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as: “A bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.”

The attacks on Israel in the press, on campus, in large marches and in the arab have one thing in common: The complete lack of reliance on the actual facts on the ground.

No matter what Israel does, no matter how they respond they are accused of genocide and no amount of reality or the pointing out that all of this comes from Hamas not only launching the attacks of Oct 7th but their claim that they intend to repeat said attacks if and when possible.

This brought back to mind a letter I wrote to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit about the Haditha “massacre” before the facts came out and the lawsuit against rep Murtha began and the question: “When will Biden apologize to the Haditha marines?” was asked. The email said:

There is one aspect about Haditha that seems to be ignored by everybody.

Our press and the anti-American left both in this country and outside of it has been reporting “Hadithas” over and over again over the last three years.

Time and time again our friends have accused us of every possible atrocity that there is to the point that internationally people are already able to believe this or the 9/11 stuff or all the rest.

Because of this, internationally it is totally irrelevant if the Marines actually violated the rules of war. Our foes are going to say that we’ve done things if we do them or not, so the only people that it really matters to will be; the people killed (and family) and the people in our own country who support the military.

The real danger is that we who support the war will reach the point that we say “we might as well be taken as wolves then as sheep”. At that point the left can celebrate that they have made our military and those who support it the people they claim we are. Once that happens however any compunction about respecting them will be gone, and remember one side is armed and one is not.

That is a fate that I don’t wish on any of us.

You could take out the word “haditha” and replace it with “Genocide” and take out the word “Marines” and replace it with “IDF” and take out the words “anti-American” and replace it with “anti-Semitic” and that paragraph would pretty much hold up.

This leads to the logical question. Since no matter what they do they will be accused of “genocide” why not simply flatten Raffa, slaughter Hamas without mercy or concern for civilian causalities and end the issue once and for all? You would lose the hostages assuming any are actually alive but would likely save the lives of hundreds of Israeli soldiers who would die by trying to protect a population that wants them and their families dead anyways.

That’s important to remember. The Palestinians of Gaza aren’t upset at the slaughter of Jews, they celebrated it, they’re upset that said slaughter had consequences for them.

That’s the real question: Will Israel eventually decide to treat Hamas & Gazans they same way every other Arab & Muslim leader treats them if they get in the way. The way any other nation would treat a land that attacked them as they did. When will Israel say: ENOUGH! and give notice to the arabs who want to kill them in Gaza, West Bank, Yemen or even Qatar that if they try to kill Jews or finance those who do so, neither they nor their buildings nor their treasure is safe?

I suspect they will not and the reason is the against the wall conundrum and it works like this:

At any given time there are a lot of people who deserve to be put up against the wall, the problem is as soon as you decide to start putting such people up against the wall you invariably turn into the type of person who deserves to be put up against the wall.

Speaking for myself I’d say that cost is too high.

Israel has decided to set a standard that the world is unlikely to follow, but having made that choice there is no point in changing direction now that the war is almost over.

But the temptation to do so never leaves.

A Primer on Real Life Pt Two: “I was poor when Poor was POOR”

Posted: November 22, 2023 by datechguy in culture
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One of the great truisms of life is that people tend to believe that the world begin with their birth.

This is of course quite normal in the sense that our experience of the outside world begins in that moment. This is of course why having two good parents makes all the difference because those early experiences are going to shape you heavily.

It’s also the reason why the left is so anxious and so intent on getting to the school kids from the sexual grooming to the rewriting and abolishing of history because without knowledge of history people do not understand how the world works.

To illustrate this let me turn back to Stacy McCain’s piece that I referenced yesterday. Let’s hear about his ambition as a young man:

When I was a young man, I was full of wild and reckless ambition. My dream was to become a multimillionaire rock star, to record a string of platinum-selling albums, tour the world, marry Brooke Shields and retire by age 30 to enjoy my wealth in a mansion on my own private island.

Readers may laugh at this, but I was very serious about it — driving a forklift in an industrial warehouse, saving up to buy a P.A. system for my band — and my idea was, “Why bother with small dreams?”

The advantage of small dreams is they are easier to achieve. My dreams were much smaller, degree, wife, family and my own business and by age 28 I met them. While the business eventually failed and reverses took me out of the job that of my degree both Stacy & I ended up very much in the same place:

Things didn’t work out the way I’d planned, of course, and becoming a mere journalist would have once seemed to me a great disappointment, but certainly I’ve succeeded in many ways that others might envy. My lovely wife and I have raised six children and now have five grandchildren, and in my maturity, I’ve come to appreciate the value of something I once viewed with disdain, i.e., middle-class respectability.

If you asked me what I want for my children and grandchildren, that’s it in a nutshell.

This is where a knowledge of history becomes huge. How could someone like Stacy, who has been all over the country, rubbed elbows with people of wealth and consequence, someone who has seen so much have such a small ambitions for his children and grandchildren?

The answer is simple, because he understands that for almost the entire history of humanity that middle class respectability was a pipe dream. That’s 97% chance to avoid poverty was a wild dream that people strived for.

Consider. For most of human history life was about:

  • Finding food for the day
  • Finding shelter for the night
  • Finding safety from attack

And you’ll note that this list doesn’t even touch on avoiding disease or preserving food because those things are luxuries when you don’t have those first three things covered.

For most of human history this was what it was all about. It took generations upon generations to get to the point where a solid chunk of the population.

Even when the basics of farming were developed it was a question of storing food in a way that meant you would have something to eat the next day, if another person or an animal didn’t take it first that is.

Consider for a moment why so many people came to America after it’s founding and in the 19th century. They came because they believed that by hard work they would be able to achieve those basic goals. Such people were even willing to waive the 3rd goal for a time, heading west figuring that if they worked hard enough they would eventually have a safe place for themselves and their children.

And remember these were the days before electricity. Survival required toil, unrelenting toil, the type the the young people of today objecting to the idea of having to work for a living couldn’t imagine and likely wouldn’t survive.

And even if you managed to reach a point where your food supply and shelter both from the elements and from attack were secure, you weren’t affluent, you were breaking even.

John McCormick the former speaker of the house knew this when in 1968 the Reverend Ralph Abernathy & a group of fifty marchers from the “poor people’s march on washington” who he had invited to his office were talking down to him and he answered:

You’re talking down at me, Let me tell you, I was poor when poor was POOR.

Tip O’Neill Man of the House 1987 page 123

McCormick knew not only his own history but the history of the Irish people and understood the difference between being poor in a country that provided assistance and a safety net to those in need and those who did not. Furthermore he understood the great efforts it had taken to get the country into a position where it could provide the assistance it did.

Alas in a way the country is a victim of its own success. One of the reasons why so many people who are the children, grandchildren and great grand children of the World War 2 generation sneer at the idea of having to earn their way is that the world war 2 generation and those who came before it were so successful in creating a rich and safe country where the sky was the limit that they assume all of this is the norm.

The efforts my grandparents had to make when they came to this country in 1906 were drilled into me along the sacrifices involved in getting through the great depression and the 2nd world war and are a large part of my world view. Likewise Stacy McCain by understanding the poverty of his ancestors like from Winston Wood Bolt captured on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, and those who came before is able to appreciate what he has today:

 Our father’s mother, Ma McCain, was more stoic in temperament, as she still resided on the family farm near the Little Tallapoosa River, where she drew her water from the well, cooked on a wood-burning stove and didn’t have indoor plumbing until about 1969. To use the bathroom at Ma McCain’s you went out behind the barn.

Having some sense of the hardship of my pioneer ancestors’ life on the frontier — Ma McCain hoed her vegetable garden well into her 80s — conveyed to me the idea that I was the descendant of survivors. Whatever difficulties and challenges I’ve faced in life are as nothing compared to what my ancestors lived through 150 or 200 years ago. Considering that my own father came within an inch of death in World War II, I think of my existence as somewhat miraculous, and therefore I should be grateful to God even to be alive. How many young Americans today grow up with this sense of themselves as a descendant of heroic survivors?

Stacy can trace his ancestry much further back than I can but in the end our ancestors, my Sicilian Catholics and his English & Scottish protestants had something in common.

While both were by any measurable standard of today would have been considered poor, they did not consider themselves poor but where instead grateful for the chance to be in a country where they could live their lives with those basic things needed in relative security and have a chance to improve their lot and the lot of their children so perhaps their lives could be just a bit easier.

This is why it is so vital for the left do destroy and erase the history of western civilization in general and America in particular and destroy the young’s connection with their ancestors.. A people who understand that their comforts that are their norm rest on the foundation of a culture build by their forebears who suffered hardships so their descendants would not have to is not likely to dismiss either said ancestors or the culture that they built.

Thus they have no appreciation for when poor was poor and because of this they are at a much better chance to find out firsthand.

A Primer on Real Life Pt One: I’m Old Enough to Remember When This Was Real Life 101

Posted: November 21, 2023 by datechguy in culture
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I was looking at Stacy McCain’s site and he quoted a stat from Douglas Murray that I recall Rick Santorum advancing during his quest for the 2012 GOP nomination which unfortunately he lost to Mitt Romney who lost to Barack Obama whose 2nd term is the primary source of a lot of the ills we are facing today.

The stat is as follows:

However, one of the key insights Murray found from studying poverty statistics was that any young American had a 97% chance of avoiding long-term poverty if they accomplished just four simple things:

1. Get at least a high school diploma.
2. Get a job and keep working.
3. Get married and stay married.
4. Don’t have children before you’re married.

Is this too much to expect? Is this an impossible obstacle to overcome?

For dozens of generations these basis steps (with the exception of the high school diploma which only became common in the late 19th century) were considered so natural and so normal that they didn’t even have to be said. Then again during that same time nobody needed to be a biologist to define “woman” or “marriage” either.

The sad thing is the days when these facts were known by all are in fact still in living memory but my generation of baby boomers, unable to cope with the safe and secure world that their parents had given their blood sweat and tears to bequeath them ran away from these values and thus now their children and grandchildren are at a point where you have them idolizing a terrorist whose primary ambition was to kill them.

But the idolization of Bin Laden and even the Hamas Terrorists have a more basic source, the forgetting of just how lucky they are to be in the position they are in. All of this is achieved in erasing history and forgetting the collective acquired wisdom of millennia that were the building blocks on which their lives were made.

A Point Concerning Christianity, Truth and Culture (with an assist by Chesterton)

Posted: November 14, 2023 by datechguy in culture
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Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and those who enter through it are many. How narrow the gate and constricted the road that leads to life. And those who find it are few.

Matthew 7:13-14

One of the things we have noticed from the left in general and from both the Biden administration and the pro-terror folks in media, academia and among the mob is that they are not on speaking terms with the truth.

Part of this, at least for the Arab mobs is understandable as they would have been indoctrinated their entire lives and you might even suggest that this would be the case for those in academic setting except for the fact that this would be a tiny part of their lives.

For a Christian this should not be a surprise, because as we are taught the devil, the father of lives is in fact the prince of this world and once people move away from the Judeo-Christian standard of false witness being sinful and wrong then words simply become another means to an end.

One of the things about living in Western Civilization particularly during the golden age of American power at it’s height as a Christian Nation a lot of people were convinced that Judeo-Christian values were the norm. If however you look at both history and the current age and of course scripture the church’s warnings about “the world” one must conclude that the values of Judeo-Christianity are completely contrary to human nature and that while in the long run these values used as a standard to live by, even if people fail lead to the kind of culture worth living in.

The irony of course is that that so many in the west reject these values not realizing that they are the bedrock on which their free and prosperous society is built while in the world who rush to migrate to the west in order live reject the values that make that society they are fleeing to possible.

Chesterton absolutely nailed it:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

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