Recent Posts
Was thinking how they never mention "Sleepy Joe" any more
Hypocrites!
Since that day in the ’90s, the shield of victimhood has stopped being merely personal. It has become public moral currency. Claim membership in a targeted group — black, female, gay, transsexual, immigrant, illegal alien, Muslim, and so on — and you can claim high status. Intersectionality even supplies a kind of mathematics, a ranking system among the victim classes. The whole arrangement has been institutionalized in DEI, and it delivers concrete rewards: preferences in jobs, scholarships, awards, publication, and more.
...
When you take on a victim identity, it feels empowering at first. You are naming a painful thing, or something society insists should be painful. It brings moral clarity, community, and a simple explanation for the frustration or hurt you feel day to day. “They treated me this way because I’m a black woman.” It can even feel like strength — finally speaking the injury instead of carrying it in silence.
Over time, the same identity turns hollow. You are seen, yes, but only as the victim you have declared yourself to be. I was seen as a woman who had been profoundly harmed as a child — not as a complex thinker, a science-fiction reader, a storytelling fanatic, a Christian, a girl in love with a beautiful world. Just a victim.
That shield becomes an anchor. It burdens you. You begin to identify with the shield more than with the person underneath it. The weight slowly drains your energy and your strength. It stunts emotional development and personal growth. It keeps you from the full capacity that should have been yours.
We have all seen the results. Girls who ruin their beauty with tattoos, strange hair, piercings, and body modifications, trying to look like the figure in the shield. People of color who darken their own souls by blaming every failure on white people. And the politicians who encourage it all, turning living people into social widgets instead of complete human beings with deep inner lives.
...
The victim shield is the same mechanism that has damaged certain minority communities for decades. Tell people repeatedly that they are permanent victims, that the system is rigged against them in every particular, and that only an external force — government, party, ideology, some designated savior — can lift them, and many will eventually believe it. Agency atrophies. Excellence starts to look like collaboration with the enemy. The result is not the justice promised by activists and politicians. It is a population trained to wait for rescue rather than build its own strength and resilience. Thomas Sowell predicted this outcome repeatedly and documented the devastation it causes.
Byron York’s current Examiner column is “Voters reject Resistance stars.” He takes up the cases of George Conway and Alexander Vindman. Vindman’s case really rings my chimes. This is how Byron tells it in the column after he disposes of Conway (whose primary also involved the defeat of Jack Schlossberg)(I have added the links to the books Byron cites):QuoteThe other Resistance star to face-plant was Alexander Vindman, who in 2019, as an active-duty Army lieutenant colonel on the staff of the National Security Council, set in motion the first impeachment of Trump. Vindman, who was privy to some of the president’s calls with world leaders, felt that Trump had committed some sort of unspecified violation in a conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Vindman relayed secret information to a friend in the CIA, who came up with a “whistleblower” complaint against the president.
...
The impeachment failed, of course. Under pressure from the Trump administration, Vindman retired from the military and began trading on his notoriety. He wrote a memoir called Here, Right Matters, with the title based on his congressional testimony. ...
The next step would be politics. Vindman moved to Florida and ran for the Senate as a Democrat. When he jumped into the race in January, his announcement video began with news clips from his role in the Trump impeachment. A moment later, Vindman said, as pictures of his congressional testimony played: “The last time you saw me was here, swearing an oath to tell the truth about a president who broke his. ... And I sure as hell was not going to bow down to some wannabe tyrant. This president unleashed a reign of terror and retribution, not just against me and my family, but against all of us.”
No subtlety there; the Hero of the Resistance had arrived to take on Donald Trump! Vindman raised $16 million for his campaign, while his socialist opponent, Angie Nixon, raised a little less than $1 million. Vindman immediately became a heavy favorite to win the Democratic nomination. He remained the favorite until Election Day, when Nixon shocked the political world by trouncing Vindman, 56% to 44%.
Aviation Pro (15,994 posts)
Let's get one thing clear
When MAGAT representatives say, “Support the troops,” they really mean, “Support the contractors.”
They give **** all about the troops.
https://democraticunderground.com/100221454644
Not many people in journalism would resign from a plum job for any reason.
...
And it's particularly true when your job is to be a columnist, which is about as plum a job as one can get. Like me, people pay you to share your opinions. ...
Yet Matt Calkins chose to do so, and for all the right reasons: his newspaper censored him for writing about topics from a perspective that was considered unapproved by the fanatics in the newsroom.
Matt was a sports columnist for the Seattle Times, which gave him entrée onto the fields and into the locker rooms and access to the people who make all the big decisions in any industry that he loves, and he shares that love with about a third of the country, according to market research. Twenty percent of Americans check scores and read stories and columns about sports several times a day, which means Calkins was likely the most-read person at the paper.
Yet when we decided to write about fans who showed up to support Sophie Cunningham after she took a stand defending women and girls in sports set aside for them, his paper spiked the column after holding it back for days and having multiple layers of editors review it.
...
Calkins' column was not a screed in any way. Instead, it was intended to share with his readers that good people could oppose trans athletes being women's sports without being "transphobic." It didn't even argue that transgenderism is a mental illness that should be treated as such, or that trans people are at all a threat to non-trans women.
All he did was share that the young girls (who would be shouted at by the owner of the Seattle Storm in the most unladylike way that night) were not preaching hate, but speaking out for girls who felt threatened by having to compete against boys who are stronger than they are.
George Bernard Shaw stood in Stalin’s USSR in 1931, watching millions starve to death, and declared there was no famine at all. The Nobel Prize-winning playwright didn’t just stay silent about the horror unfolding around him. He actively promoted the lie that would help Stalin cover up one of history’s greatest atrocities.
Shaw toured Ukraine during the height of the Holodomor, when Soviet grain requisitions had stripped peasants of every scrap of food. Conservative estimates put the death toll at 3.5 million Ukrainians. Shaw saw the empty villages, the skeletal survivors, the mass graves. Then he signed a public letter praising Stalin’s “remarkable progress” and told Western journalists that reports of famine were capitalist propaganda.
Why would an intelligent man become Stalin’s useful idiot? Shaw believed in central planning with religious fervor. He thought brilliant intellectuals like himself could design society better than millions of individuals making their own choices. When confronted with central planning’s inevitable result (mass death), he chose to lie rather than admit his ideology killed people. Shaw preferred beautiful theory to ugly facts.
Howzabout when LIEden claimed he tripped and fell over a sand bag that was actually over three feet away from where he was walking?
Do you morons say the same when Biden was crapping his pants and wandering off?
