Posted on 11/24/2012 4:41:35 PM PST by Eric Blair 2084
The gap is growing between liberals and conservatives, the rich and the not rich, intergenerational privilege and new-immigrant power, patriarchy and gender equality, the expanders of liberty and the withholders of it. And that gap, which has geographic contours — the densely populated coastal states versus the less densely populated states of the Rocky Mountains, Mississippi Delta and Great Plains — threatens the very concept of a United States and is pushing conservatives, left quaking after this month’s election, to extremes.
Some have even moved to make our divisions absolute. The Daily Caller reported last week “more than 675,000 digital signatures appeared on 69 separate secession petitions covering all 50 states,” according to its analysis of requests made through the White House’s “We the People” online petition system.
According to The Daily Caller, “Petitions from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas residents have accrued at least 25,000 signatures, the number the Obama administration says it will reward with a staff review of online proposals.” President Obama lost all those states, except Florida, in November.
Snip nonsense and vomit
But even putting secession aside, it is ever more clear that red states are becoming more ideologically strident and creating a regional quasi country within the greater one. They are rushing to enact restrictive laws on everything from voting to women’s health issues.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
But did you notice that Charles the Blowboy is very subtly putting forward the concept of a "conservative problem" that may need to be "solved" by strong-handed methods?
Sort of like John Quincy Adams's solution for the "Southern problem", that he came up with after the tariff and nullification crisis of 1832-3.
I also like his arrogance in defining Megalopolis as "the greater country" -- anywhere you can't get good knishes at 2 a.m. is now "Indian country" and a Problem.
The reality is that the country he despises is America and has always been America -- not his Europeanized, secular-humanized, parlor-pink chunket of it.
Stop thinking of MSM propaganda as statements or propositions which are arguable and falsifiable, or provable truth. They are only operational statements, political button-pushing intended to produce an opinion effect. They are, in Orwell's NewSpeak, prolefeed offered by duckspeakers for the brain-dead 'Rat masses to bellyfeel, to increase their bellyfeeling love for Big Brother.
As truth, they are nullities, in a vast sea of propagandistic nullities.
I just wished we would stop spending money on education, why does a cow need to go to school?
Yes, but maybe it’s time to make these people define their terms. Otherwise, we let them get away with it & the brain dead don’t get any other message.
I read years ago that the pattern of brainwaves of someone watching the television are identical to those of a person asleep. It’s time to wake people up! For instance, Fox always has an R & a D debate each other in little segments. If every time a D said so & so is ‘extreme’, the R said ‘define extreme’ & then counter it with “How can we be extreme if we are essentially status quo?”, then we might begin to take back the conversation on our own terms. And show who really is extreme.
I do agree with you. The Left is only a few small steps in the rationalization process from the outright use of force against conservatives. Race baiting, PC, and hate speech codes are disturbing rationalizations designed to eliminate free speech and dissent. 0bama has the power to detain via NDAA, and he has the authority to impose martial law under non-emergency situations. If the Left does decide to use force, they will probably use a ‘crisis’ as their rationalization. Then they will have to come down on the public quickly; they will shut off the Internet, completely take over the media, restrict travel, and institute martial law wherever needed. The idea is to prevent organized resistance.
Agreed, although the guy is a lefty, at least he understands we cannot live in the same house anymore, we have nothing in common. There will be a time that we somehow need to separate peacefully or we rumble to put it simply.
Charles Blow is too busy deceiving you. He mentions in passing that Mountain West States are included in this secession wavelet -- and it's only that, a wavelet -- but when it comes to saying which States specifically had seen secession petitions, Charles turns to The Daily Caller, holding them at arm's length to mumble a little Big Lie:
According to The Daily Caller, “Petitions from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas residents have accrued at least 25,000 signatures, the number the Obama administration says it will reward with a staff review of online proposals.” President Obama lost all those states, except Florida, in November.
Thus he leaves the false impression that "it's the Confederacy again" -- those people -- Simon Legree and his lash, ogrish Klansmen in robes and hoods, riding by night to oppress the Righteous Poor of the Earth.
In fact, this is another typical-liberal use of a hate-puppet caricature of the people he is talking about, in order to demonize a much broader and very different population of American conservatives.
It's hate literature, when The Daily Caller and Blow tell it like that.
I always point out that, if I were using my bedroom to print up near-perfect copies of twenty-dollar bills, liberals wouldn't think my bedroom so sacrosanct.
Crime is crime, and wickedness is wickedness, and spreading disease is spreading disease.
Public health officials in old New York seized Typhoid Mary without much consideration of, much less respect for, her rights as a person. So how is Blow's favorite Disease Center and antpile now part of the "land of (real) liberty"? The truth is, he's inverted the geographical regions' attention to the liberty interest.
Yes, that's exactly what Orwell warned about the Communists' misuse of language. Totalitarian speech is always necessarily dishonest and relies heavily on loose or imprecise meanings of things to accomplish their deception. And physical violence, or the threat of it, is always the closer.
Some people believe in the forum of ideas, and that bad speech will always be driven out by better speech. Our own history demonstrates otherwise, as when the liberty interest was defeated by the business interest in the ratification of the Constitution with its Hamiltonian trapdoors and weasel-phrases, a situation that was only partly retrieved by Federalist James Madison's gracious accession (Hamilton continued to fight it, in Federalist 81) to the Antifederalists' demand for a Bill of Rights, which was possibly an even greater document than the Constitution itself, and, with Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence, one of the greatest writings in all of human history.
It behooves us always to remember, the Bill of Rights was made necessary by the Federalists' new Constitution. So much for the Constitution's strength, by itself, as a liberty document, and for the Federalist party as champions of our liberties. (In office, they soon wrote the hateful Alien and Sedition Acts, and it was one of their party who first floated the idea, 20 years before the event, of "reorganizing" the South by force into a more cooperative posture.)
So the "marketplace of ideas" will not by itself protect us from bad, even evil, ideas -- and Charles Blow is here the embodiment of that evil, and The Old Grey Whore is the institutionalization of it.
The only thing more sacred in business than "a deal is a deal" is breaking that deal.
The aptly named Mr. Blow.
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