Commentaries on the Book of Elvis, Chapters 11204 and 11209
I've been working on the Book of Tiny, which will be part of the scripture of the Free Markets Church of Tiny. The Book of Tiny preaches a message of love and redemption. But it has come to my attention that the Book of Tiny must be accompanied by fire and brimstone. That's the only way this will work. There's the New Testament and the Old Testament. The good cop and the bad cop. And now, there will be the Book of Tiny and the Book of Elvis.
I have decided to take some of the writings of Elvis and provide commentary. This is a lot like what you might have done in Sunday School, when you take a verse and then talk about it for an hour, to extract a deep and profound understanding of the words. And so I shall begin.
[QUOTE=Elvis2008;2772026]Isn't the whole point of racism not looking at people as a group and to get to know them as individuals when determining their worth? A[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Elvis2008;2772561]When you call a president the devil, you are calling him evil and all his 75 million supporters at worst evil and at best stupid.[/QUOTE]Barton Swaim, writing in the Wall Street Journal, has provided an excellent guide to understanding the words of Elvis I've quoted above. Some excerpts appear below.
The most obvious change in American politics this century is the sorting of voters along educational lines. The Democrats are increasingly the party of educated urban elites; the GOP belongs to the white working class. The dispute is over suburban and minority voters. The latter still plump mostly for Democrats, although the party's social radicalism is pushing them toward the GOP. Voters with impressive educational credentials tend to be Democrats, and those without them lean strongly Republican.
That one party is the educated partythat its members see themselves, in some respects accurately, as more cultured and informed than their opponentshas generated an intellectual pathology that is obvious to everyone but themselves. Adherents of the smart-people party have lost the capacity for self-criticism. Which on its face makes sense. If your views are by definition intelligent, those of your critics must be dumb. Who needs self-reflection?
We can start to understand the Democrats' predicament by ridding ourselves of a set of metaphors. For a decade or more, we've been told that left and right live in "silos" or "bubbles" or "echo chambers" or "information cocoons. " The left watch MSNBC and read the New York Times, and the right watch Fox News and listen to talk radio.
In any case, the silo / bubble metaphor doesn't describe American politics in the 2020's for the simple reason that there is no silo or bubble. Or if there is, it's very large and almost exclusively populated by adherents of the smart-people party.
If you're on the right, you simply can't isolate yourself from the habits and attitudes of left-liberal progressivism. They are everywhere. The most determined imbiber of right-wing opinion still watches television and movies and reads the mainstream press. The left-liberal outlook is expressed everywhere in these media, and generally it isn't expressed as viewpoint but as established fact.
The left-liberal outlook has triumphed across American culturein corporate boardrooms, in government agencies, in sports and entertainment institutions, in K-12 education bureaucracies, in universities and in media organizations. [B]But that is precisely what has robbed progressives, especially those in the political class and in the media, of any ability to criticize themselves or doubt their own righteousness. They dont engage with serious arguments advanced by the other side. They live in a world in which it is possible to pass through a month without encountering much in the way of serious conservative opinion. When they do encounter a conservative view, it is precategorized as fringe or extreme by the calm, omniscient NPR voice that relates its content.
And so progressives have become, if I could put it bluntly, incurious and lazy. Every conservative journalist born in the last 70 or 80 years has, early in his career, come to the sad realization that liberal writers and intellectuals, the people conservatives are so careful to read and react to, dont actually read conservatives or know much about the right. Their attitude recalls that wonderful line in Casablanca when Ugarte (Peter Lorre) asks Rick (Humphrey Bogart), You despise me, dont you? Rick’s answer: “If I gave you any thought, I probably would.”
....Something about Mr. Trump gave Democrats and liberal journalists all the emotional license they needed to discount, once and for all, any possibility that a Republican might have a point. No party that could nominate Mr. Trump deserved further thought; the GOP had, in their eyes, defenestrated what was left of its legitimacy.[/B].
Consider the past two years of Democratic governance. A slender majority in the USA House and a 50-50 tie in the Senate somehow led Democrats to believe they had no opposition to speak of. At times they seemed literally to believe this, as when Sen. Bernie Sanders and others fulminated against his Democratic colleagues Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for resisting President Biden's so-called Build Back Better billas if the bill had two opponents and not 52.
On economics, Republicans warned the administration in early 2021 about the danger that trillions in spending would inflate the currency. Their warnings were ignored. Inflation exploded, and the administration denied it. In August 2022 President Biden asserted that inflation was "zero percent. " he was, absurdly, comparing that month's prices to the previous month's, ignoring everything that happened before July.
A global energy shortage has sent gas and electricity prices skyward. Congressional Democrats and the administration might easily have backed off their green commitments, promoted fracking and increased domestic oil production, at least on a temporary basis. That would have brought prices down, which was the only outcome Mr. Biden and other elected Democrats appeared to care about. I am not aware that such a policy change was ever considered.
Rarely in politics does anyone admit fault. You don't expect high-ranking members of either party to acknowledge straightforwardly that they were wrong about anything. But people sometimes adjust, even if they don't admit they're adjusting. [B] After the 2022 midterm elections, in which Democrats outperformed expectations but still lost the U.S. House, the president was asked what, in light of the fact that three quarters of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction, he plans to do differently in the future. His reply: Nothing. You can discount Mr. Bidens words for senescence, but that answer expressed perfectly the solipsistic self-confidence of his party.
Even if the Democrats had been crushed in the 2022 midterm elections, they would have been unable to adjust. Their cultural dominance discourages them from changing course, which is why they can be counted on to invent exogenous reasons for electoral defeats: an allegedly racist TV ad in 1988, shenanigans in Florida in 2000, faulty voting machines in Ohio in 2004, collusion with Russia in 2016. Mr. Trump adopted this custom with abandon in 2020, but Republicans, who arent encouraged by elite culture to think themselves infallible, usually blame each other for electoral losses. Hence the 2013 autopsy, as wrongheaded as it was. There is no Democratic correlative to such a document.[/B].
[URL]https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-smart-party-never-learns-democrats-self-reflection-elite-culture-media-universities-covid-inflation-election-excuses-11670592902[/URL]
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"Some" vaccines
[QUOTE=JustTK;2773437]Typical BS. Put everyone in the same basket so they can paint them the same colour. In shlt.
I am not a vax denier. I am a COVID disdent. Some vaxes are great for some ppll. But the global covid policy was a disaster and morallly criminal. These are different things. But, hey, whatever you say.[/QUOTE]Not sure why you're upset. You ARE a Covid vaccine denier. Putting you in this basket is a right thing because this is the basket where you belong.
PVMonger didn't call you a vaccine denier, he called you a "COVID vaccine denier. " Your response only confirms that this is what you are.
But please feel free to tell me I misunderstand what you've been saying. What's a difference between a Covid denier and "Covid dissident"?
And of course, no such thing as a "global covid policy" has ever existed. But I'll try not to hold this against you.
And by the way. . .
Vaxes are great for some people? Wrong!
All major vaccines are great for all people save some incredibly rare instances of catastrophical side effects. This is why schools require ALL children to be vaxxed for a number of diseases.
Not SOME children.
And when moron "activist" parents are trying to play god we know what happens.
Fucking polio.
Early Polio vaccine & Lee Harvey Oswald
A book, Dr. Mary's Monkey, by Ed Haslam traces the early history of the polio vaccine that was cultured on monkey kidneys and an unsolved bizarre murder of a researcher in New Orleans. The book is backed up with many documents. Including one memo by FBI director and alleged gay queen J. Edgar Hoover forbidding the FBI from investigating the murder. Oswald's girlfriend was threatened into silence at the time, but 40: years later felt safe enough to publish a book.
