Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Are You a Target?…or Maybe Just Collateral Damage?
There are multiple categories of Americans toward whose interests the Democrats…quite clearly… intend harm. Are you a member of any of the following (overlapping) groups of people?
Do you value free speech?…the ability for yourself (and other people) to be able to express your/their views without fear of censorship, mob violence, job loss, cancellation of financial services, threats of government prosecution?
Do you think you and others should be able to seek financial success without necessarily being highly academically credentialed and/or having connections to government and political players?
Would you like to be able to pursue happiness without being constrained by your ethnic background? More generally, do you believe that human beings are defined by more than their race/ethnicity and that ‘community’ means something more than racial grouping?
Are you an ethnic minority individual who believes that your opinions do not necessarily have to be defined by those that are expected for your race?
Do you believe that educational excellence is important for individual futures and for our national future? Are you in an area where public schools are poor but would like to see improved educational options for your own kids, if any, and your neighbors’ kids?
Do you believe that the artistic and literary heritage of the West’s last few thousand years has any ongoing value?
Do you think education should appeal to intellectual curiosity and aesthetic sense, rather than reducing everything to power relationships?
Are you from a rural background, or identifiably Southern?
Do you think the United States should maintain its independence and avoid falling under the excessive influence of China, or any other country?
Would you like the option to engage in artisan child-raising, ie, bringing up your young kids at home? Even if you don’t want to do this yourself, do you think other people should have that option?
Are you in an industry whose competitiveness is closely linked to the cost of energy?
Are you in the mining industry?…even the US-based mining of those minerals which are critical for ‘renewable energy’?
Do you prefer a suburban or rural living environment to residing in an urban core?
Are you in an area where crime is a constant concern…or heading in that direction?
Especially, are you running a small business in an area where crime now is or is likely to become an issue that threatens the survival of your business?
Do you believe that US citizenship should be an asset, rather than just a tax-owing liability?
Especially, do you live in an area near the southern border?
The Democrats…by which I mean not just the Dem party and politicians per se, but the whole aggregate of media, academics, ‘nonprofits’, and bureaucrats orbiting around it….have either a clear malign intent toward everyone in the above categories, or at a minimum view them and their values and interests as utterly unimportant.
It strikes me that the present-day Democrats, as defined above, manage to be simultaneously hostile both toward communities (in any sense other than politically-useful demographic groupings) and to any level of individual autonomy. Tocqueville’s warning about the danger of a power which “covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd,” apparently seems to them to represent not something bad, but rather a condition to be desired and sought.
The next few years will be critical in determining the survival of the United States as anything like a free and prosperous society. Republican and other anti-Dem political campaigns need to do a much better job in explaining the harms of Dem policies and ideas, not only in general terms but in terms of harm to specific groups of people, including grouping that may be non-obvious to the typical political writer or marketing consultant. This is true not only of campaigns, but of political writing and other communication in general.
Published in General
Totalitarians want neither communities nor autonomous individuals. Both are threats to their rule. They want isolated individuals who have limited information and thus can be kept in fear. Communities (including families) share information and ideas, and thus build networks of power separate from the ruling regime. Autonomous individuals also gather information and ideas, and create with other autonomous individuals networks of power separate from the ruling regime.
Ruling regimes depend on a population of isolated and fearful individuals.
Do you prefer having the government enforce the right to practice your religion and refrain from inhibiting your right to religious expression?
Do you prefer having a choice about what to put into your body and those of your children?
Do you prefer not paying for abortions?
Do you prefer not funding illegal aliens?
Do you prefer keeping private how you spend your money private?
And finally, are you hoping never again to hear the following phrases or words: Moral Construct, Identify As, Random Controlled Trial, The Science, January 6 Insurrection, Road Diet, Green New Deal, Critical Race Theory, Gender Rights, etc, etc, and so forth?
Road Diet?
Ah, yes, “road diet”. It means public thoroughfares that are purposely supplied with various barriers to make traffic slow down. In Seattle, that includes standard “speed bumps”, as well as islands at the sides and in the middle of streets so cars have to navigate around them. These are mostly found in the various single-family neighborhoods in the northeast part of town. I wonder, though, what will happen when Seattle eliminates single-family zoning, and apartment-dwellers have to navigate those streets. Well, the city wants everyone to take public transportation, and you can bet the buses don’t travel those streets.
Oh, by the way, I have several targets on my back, including my incendiary personal blog. However, my blog gets so little traffic, it’s no threat to anyone.
Sorry, Jim. I threw that it in because it is a major annoyance in my life. As RushBabe has so well described, this is a current, annoying Leftist thing that is part of their larger plan to control everything we do. It is led by the righteous cyclists who have been rightly called the “shock troops” of the movement and it is a world-wide thing. If you don’t mind being worried about yet another aspect of the Left’s takeover of everything, check out UN Agenda 21.
In Eugene, we don’t need those artificial restrictions; the street layouts are non-nonsensical enough to disrupt efficient traffic flow.
Rush Babe: “Ah, yes, “road diet”. It means public thoroughfares that are purposely supplied with various barriers to make traffic slow down. In Seattle, that includes standard “speed bumps”, as well as islands at the sides and in the middle of streets so cars have to navigate around them. “
I object RushBabe! I think my great Socialist paradise of Los Angeles beat your Socialist Seattle to it. In the face of near frozen gridlocked traffic, our great and wondrous City Council proposed severe “traffic calming” measures to slow traffic down even further., like among many measures taking away half the lanes for cars on busy thoroughfares for bikes, joggers and skate boarders. It was “for the children” you see, you know the ones they want to maim for life with these dangerous vaccines, because slowing traffic to an absolute crawl allegedly would not allow speeding cars to hit errant children running out in the middle of the street, but of course that doesn’t quite account for the severe “road rage” factor which may in many cases drive LA drivers to very reckless and dangerous driving habits to get to where they are going.
But I must admit in terms of dealing with hostile riots and such, your great Socialist Paradise has mine beat, even though we are really trying to make amends in that direction.
Be on the lookout for Mayor Pete’s plans for your communities. Just anticipate all the Federal grants to cities, counties, and states he has in mind. The money will be too good for local governments to pass up, but the conditions to receive the grants will aim at radically transforming communities.
This should be in the list of Scariest Halloween Events! Not the worst, but very close.
Money first, conditions later.
Nice, but unlikely.
It was the way the U.S. treated the Dakota Indians in the 1840s-1850s. It had agreed to give annual payments of money in exchange for land, then started to attach conditions to the handing out of the money. It wanted the Dakota to adopt a more individualistic culture, but it treated them collectively when looking for reasons not to hand out treaty payments.
The instinct to not pass out agreed-upon benefits to those whose behavior it doesn’t like surfaced again in connection with covid.
All they need is 40% or 45%of actual voters to go along. If they can make it difficult for some Republicans to vote and cheat a good bit in key states they’ll still win. We have to be prepared to pull out, so Democrat governors in key states must be defeated so the option is credible. It won’t be easy and it will be dangerous, but the danger really depends on how involved the Chinese already are in calling key shots for Biden. They will get more powerful and we will get weaker and our military will be degraded, so we can’t wait around and pretend we’re dealing with old Democrats.. Everything this administration is doing weakens the country, economically, militarily, and everything moves toward top down and away from bottom up, but ineptly, corruptly and and Republic endingly.
This $450,000 payment is perhaps the most gratuitous example of the way Democrats target their opponents. What possible justification for it could they make? Does it serve the public interest? No. Does it serve the interests of justice? No. You never even hear Democrats arguing that they do, because they can’t.
Does it even serve the naked political interests of Democrats in a traditional way? No. We know they want illegals coming in so that they will vote for Democrats. But what purpose does such a payment serve? If they just wanted to make absolutely sure they would get their vote, they could make a much smaller payment which would have the same effect. Do you really have to give illegal families a million dollars? Wouldn’t $10,000 have the same ingratiating effect on extremely poor immigrants? Don’t you need them to just vote for you? Why does it matter if they do so with extreme, unprecedented enthusiasm? A vote is a vote.
The only explanation is that Democrats are making these payments to attack those who are not loyal to them. To demoralize and humiliate them. To make them stand by and watch as people who aren’t even Americans are made millionaires with their hard earned money.
So add this policy to all the rest. The Republican messiah is the one who will, among other things, make this point in a presidential debate, and who will then tell his opponent that he’s done debating. He will never again debate him or any other Democrat. He should then call on all his supporters to to follow his lead. Democrats should not be argued with or debated with. Democrats should be defeated. Their arguments are not made in good faith, and they should not be treated as if they are. Everything they do is an attack on their opponents. Of course both parties attack the other, but only Democrats incorporate those attacks into their actual policy goals, which means that the attack is not primarily on politicians, but on average American citizens.
WSJ op-ed this morning about the effect of Biden’s proposed child-care provisions. The author’s analysis says that it would provide a strong disincentive to single mothers getting married. It also means, of course, that those who do choose to raise their children themselves would be paying for those who make other choices. The Dems really, really hate artisan child-raising.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/spending-build-back-better-marriage-single-mother-unemployment-welfare-childcare-11635706221?mod=opinion_lead_pos7
Good.