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Translating Democrats
Powerline’s Scott Johnson quoted Barack Obama from his speech at the DNC last night. See if you notice the same thing I did:
Well, we have a broader idea of freedom. We believe in the freedom to provide for your family if you’re willing to work hard. The freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and send your kids to school without worrying if they’ll come home. We believe that true freedom gives each of us the right to make decisions about our own life, how we worship, what our family looks like, how many kids we have, who we marry. And we believe that freedom requires us to recognize that other people have the freedom to make choices that are different than ours. That’s okay.
When I read that, I had two thoughts:
1) That’s a good political speech. Very inspiring.
2) What on earth is he talking about?
I have a lot of friends in Sweden, so I have my Google Translate set on “Swedish to English,” to help me understand Facebook posts etc. So I switched it over to “Democrat to Reality,” to help me understand Mr. Obama. I fed his speech in, phrase by phrase, and this is what it came up with (remember, Google Translate is not perfect, but I think it got pretty close):
Well, we have a broader idea of freedom.
We’re communists.
We believe in the freedom to provide for your family if you’re willing to work hard.
We believe in forcefully confiscating the property of those who are willing to work hard, so that people who don’t work can get everything for free.
The freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water.
We believe in somehow convincing people that they don’t have clean air and clean water, and the only way to get them is to vote Democrat.
The freedom to send your kids to school without worrying if they’ll come home.
We believe in using teachers’ unions and other Democrat operatives to destroy our schools, and then convincing people that it’s the Republicans’ fault.
We believe that true freedom gives each of us the right to make decisions about our own life, how we worship, what our family looks like, how many kids we have, who we marry.
** Google Translate crashes – I have to do a hard reboot on my PC – I shut down all other applications, and try again: **
We believe that Communism allows us to marry black Muslim trans-sexual furries and kill our children.
And we believe that freedom requires us to recognize that other people have the freedom to make choices that are different than ours.
And we believe that Communism requires everyone to pretend to believe absolutely everything that we pretend to believe.
That’s okay.
If you disagree with Democrats, you’re evil.
Again, Google Translate sometimes misses shades of meaning or subtleties of language. And translating ideas from Democrat to Reality is inherently difficult, of course.
But there are very few people who are fluent in Democrat who are also aware of Reality. So this is the best we can do.
I wonder what would have happened if Mr. Obama had goofed up and said what he actually meant? Would Democrat voters across America have applauded, like they did for his intentionally deceptive steaming pile of catchphrases?
There is a mobile abortion trailer parked outside the Democrat Convention Hall in Chicago. It is booked solid. Mothers are getting abortions on site, apparently to emphasize how important abortions are to Democrats.
Suppose they decided that even that was too subtle. Suppose, during prime-time coverage, they brought a pregnant mother on stage and an abortionist killed her baby on live TV. They could pipe the Doppler over the sound system, so everyone could hear the heartbeat stop.
Would they applaud?
Some would, I suppose. But I suspect that most Democrat voters would turn their heads and cover their ears, unable to come to terms with what they are supporting. They take similar approaches to immigration, Democrat urban leadership, drug legalization, educational policies, defunding the police, homeless initiatives, and many other elements of Democrat dogma. They turn their heads and cover their ears.
Mr. Obama used extremely vague language for the same reason they didn’t perform an abortion on stage. What he’s proposing is horrifying. And he knows it. So do his supporters. And they will continue to support it only as long as they don’t have to look directly at it. They don’t want to kill their own children. They don’t want to live on the South Side of Chicago. They don’t want homeless heroin addicts camping out on their driveway. They don’t want their kids in Democrat-controlled schools.
The purpose of the Republican Convention is to tell American citizens what they believe in.
The purpose of the Democrat Convention is to conceal what they believe in, giving their supporters plausible deniability so they can vote Democrat without being haunted in their dreams by images of dead babies and dystopian cities.
I’m trying to imagine being a Democrat in that Convention hall. I’m trying to imagine applauding somebody for lying to me – being thankful that they didn’t come right out and say just how horrifying my beliefs really are. Imagine smiling for the camera after actively participating in your own willful deceit.
I just can’t imagine.
Around half of American voters are going to vote Democrat in November.
Absolutely amazing. I just can’t imagine.
Published in General
That’s kinda my point.
Their catch phrases are but a thin veneer of deception. You don’t have to dig far to get to some very dark stuff.
Back in the early 90s I was predicting that nobody would be able to get confirmed for a federal appointment without expressing loyal adherence to the holy sacrament of abortion, and that it might even be necessary to demonstrate an abortion for the committee, making one’s appearance carrying a a scalpel in one’s teeth and wearing a bandolier full of abortifacients.
No, I get it.
It’s surreal. The left (I’m reluctant to paint all Democrats with this brush) has long waged a war against women. In order for women to have equality, so they were told, they had to essentially become men: they had to work like men, have sex like men, and demand to be treated like men.
The tragic irony is that the one thing that women unquestionably, irrefutably, absolutely do better than men, the only thing that one can without reservation say represents a unique capability possessed by one sex and completely absent in the other, is childbirth.
And so the nullification of that one unique and defining feature of womanhood is literally the only thing the left holds as sacred.
Better than men? That’s a necessary result of only women being ABLE to give birth. From the evidence we’ve seen, if men could do it, they would probably do it better.
Absolutely not, KE. Because only girlie men would have babies, if men could have babies. Because having babies just isn’t a manly thing to do.
I often wonder what happened after the Civil Rights generation left the stage.
Ha ha.
Of course, if men gave birth, it would have been that way all along, and the attitudes would be different.
Jesse Lee Peterson is still around, but the left doesn’t seem interested in hearing from him.
This is very interesting.
I haven’t fully thought about it, but I think it points to my theory of sticking to public policy when you talk to leftists and Democrats.
We don’t need inflation.
We don’t need anything but actual public goods from the government. It has a definition. 80% of the government is non-public goods.
The problem is the Fed and the financial system regulation gets in the way. Nobody can afford a house or anything else right now.
It’s interesting you can get them down to this.
We don’t need inflation. All it does is force more central planning, which also doesn’t work.
You can’t beat nuclear and fossil fuels for energy. Energy is life.
There isn’t one leftist or Democrat that has anything intelligent to say about gun policy.
Same-sex marriage isn’t marriage. The state never should have said they were the same. Transing kids is insane. I’m sorry, but the government needs to force the procreation of W-2 slaves at gunpoint.
Homosexuals and cross-dressers shouldn’t make a great big public deal out of it if they can help it.
Not a lot, but I have had personal experience with Democrats talking like this.
When you look at schools, for example, if you just cut a check to the parents, the aggregate value would go straight up. Everybody’s freaked out about it, but that is just a fact. Everybody acts like education is a public good. It obviously isn’t.
Education is not a public good. Cut a check to the parents.
Do you have any ideas for accountability?
Socialism requires the procreation of FICA slaves.
Human advancement requires the procreation of tax slaves, even if you’re smart enough to have just public goods.
Somebody is doing something wrong and it started at least at 1965 if not, when they started, Social Security.
You know, we could actually let government policy reflect this.
Gee, how do you have lots of households producing lots of FICA slaves? You largely do the opposite of what we are doing right now.
We are idiots.
It would go up by 80% immediately. The whole thing would be all but perfectly corrected in five years. Black kids get totally mowed down in Minneapolis.
Government schools are simply a vehicle for teacher unions to capture. Then everything goes downhill. It’s insane.
Education is not a public good. Look up the definition of public good.
They’re dishonest, but they understand something that it seems a lot of people on the center-right don’t. Everything is contagious. We live in a society and it absolutely matters what everyone else does. Nothing illustrated that to me more starkly than mask-wearing during Covid. If everyone is doing something, especially with government backing, it’s pretty hard to do your own thing. Life becomes confrontational or possibly criminal very quickly.
We all take cues from each other about what normal behavior and choices look like. As for marriage being whatever you want for yourself, research has shown that a couple’s risk of divorce increases if they know another couple who divorces. Divorce is contagious. Exercising, or being fat, or drinking a lot, or going to church – it’s all contagious. The left wants to redefine normal as weird and weird as normal. And they know everyone has to agree, or else.
That is one hell of a quote. They started Medicare right when it became fashionable to not have FICA slaves.
Masks didn’t do a damn thing except irritate people and waste money.
We really are exceptionally stupid.
I mean, today’s black parents were yesterday’s black children ruined by public schools. If you just “cut them a check” as you say, for schools for their children, what assures that they don’t just spend the money on themselves, or even technically “pay” a school that gives them kickbacks?
You’re still going to need “departments of education” on some level, perhaps more than one level. But once you’ve ruined multiple generations, can those people even usefully serve on School Boards for their own children?
OK OK OK
That isn’t what I mean, but we aren’t even close to doing that, so I’m not talking about it, yet. You would get a special credit card and you could only spend it on approved institutions. It would be a mess at first, but I don’t think that many people would be hurt. The value proposition would go straight up. We can’t keep doing what we are doing.
I forget the exact grades, but you have to be reading right by third grade and get your math down by seventh grade or something like that. If you blow that, you need a decent alternative like a paying trade. You could have systems that compensate to a degree having terrible parents.
Here they were talking about homeschooling four kids at a time. You take a high school teacher that hates the system. She homeschools four kids. They get a math tutor. This literally only takes 2 1/2 hours to four hours a day. Then you go do bourgeoisie sports or learn a trade or something. Learn to cook.
If we keep doing what we are doing, it’s just paying union thugs and worthless academics to keep making the world worse.
We have government schools, but it isn’t a public good. It’s just a system that they commandeer.
Great post, doc. Barry delivers, again, with the vague platitudes that are easily applauded, with no specific substance underneath – that they’re going to elaborate on.
To elicit some hope, remember that only 50% of eligible voters vote. If you split that between the two major parties, it’s about 25% that are going to vote D in November.
If the other half of them showed up, though, it’s pretty clear they’re buying what Barry is selling.
“Half of all people have an IQ of 100 or less, by definition.”
No, he wants to take guns away from law-abiding Christian conservatives and forbid teachers with concealed carry licenses from carrying in school even though it is the godless heathens who are doing the school shootings. He wants to do so because that is the “common sense” solution.
Wish a could bookmark a comment.
According to Dr. John Lott, the big gun policy expert, this literally works perfectly. You put some teachers in there with guns and you put a sign out front, nothing happens to your school.
Has worked well, so far, where tried. It also has reality on its side:
-Concealed carry permit holders don’t suddenly become incompetent when they cross the school threshold, unless you think overall, teachers are more stupid than the average concealed carry permit holder. But then that calls for an additional fix.
-A concealed carry permit holder isn’t less likely to defend himself inside the school than outside.
-School shooters pick easy targets. A school with a lot of guns isn’t one. However, this doesn’t eliminate the fact that a godless mental patient doesn’t still want to harm people for the notoriety. They will just strike elsewhere until helped or locked up.
-Concealed offers better defense than a uniformed guard. The shooter would know where the only gun is in the school if that is the only defense the school chooses. The shooter would not know which classrooms have armed teachers, and neither would the students.
This makes me insane out of my mind. We don’t need guards. You just need a few teachers that are willing to conceal carry and go through some training.
The cop in Florida was useless. Furthermore, and to be clear, I’m not some big expert, but I don’t think anybody should be a permanent school resource officer. You just get into that groove that you don’t think you have to ever do anything and then you get to retire.
A decent school would get the parents to donate for a bunch of AR-15s and body armor.