RSSThanks! I sold my oil at $37.50 or thereabouts.
Great! Now you can afford to buy
Mostly laid-back FlyOverStan is pretty good right now. So far, anyway.
I wrote too soon. Last night there was a half-baked try at a demonstration/ disturbance downtown in Flyoverstan, there wasn’t much to it. However I have a confirmed report of a pallet of bricks dropped off by unknown persons. There’s no construction going on, no renovation that would require pavers or cinderblocks, and nobody seems to know where they came from.
This is not a big city. Yet a person or persons unknown pre-positioned a pallet of bricks that nobody ordered or wanted, in nowheresville, for pretty obvious reasons.
If the US had a functioning intel agency that worked for US it would not be difficult to find out who’s been dropping off pallets of bricks around the country, because there’s always some sort of trail, paper and otherwise.
Stuff like this has been all over Bubblevision all week. The business elites are visibly committed to the cause of the month, the unspecified whatevers that simply must be done. Because reasons. Today’s highlight was Carly Fiorina taking Drumpf to task for — “lack of leadership” — lol.
This reminds me, what exactly are the demands of “Only Black Lives Matter” beyond “Pay attention to us and GIBS US DAT!”?
Liberals are good, kind-hearted people.
Liberals are parasitic free riders who are generous with other people’s money and property and even their lives, but careful to protect their own. They are giant-sized hypocrites.
Now, imagine being a street cop with Chicago PD sent to take care of something like a traffic accident. Like one car T-bones another in an intersection and the wreckers are going to have to come to clear it up. She’s one of the drivers, and you have to get her information & testimony. Or maybe she’s a witness who ‘saw it all” and you have to get her testimony.
Really big fun, eh?
Now for the bonus round, imagine answering a domestic disturbance call and meeting both her and her male counterpart on the front stoop. Don’t screw up or the feminist organizations will be on your agency with a vengeance!
Anyone ready to be a city cop on a beat, yet?
Those COPS shows aren’t made up…
Which was taken from the great cultural historian Morse Peciham's masterpiece
I will refer to them as the Tragic Vision (a term he uses in a later book)
Completed in September 1961. Published in 1962.
Beyond The Tragic Vision: The Quest for Identity in the Nineteenth Century
and, of course, Beyond The Tragic Vision.
Explanation and Power: The Control of Human Behavior
Not surprisingly, Peckham’s book, which is the single greatest book of cultural history ever written*, was permitted to go out of print.
This the book? A used copy costs $5.98 or so.
More! More! More!
What about the cost of all the free ponies?
i posit the following as an outline of a solution.
You should do more reading of history and see if it has already been tried.
HINT: It has.
Sorry, I don’t quite get the gist of what you are trying to write. Could you explain
Most of those white Evangelicals who voted for Trump have hearts that bleed endlessly for Jews and blacks.
Evidence?
And all Protestantism is heresy.
Boring troll.
Democratic progressives have now attacked a statue in Golden Gate park, San Francisco, that remembers Cervantes.
One of you progtards explain why the eminent Spanish author of Don Quixote is now evil and must be cancelled. Let us all know when you’ll move on to burning books. Should be soon.
Well?
Don’t you know what
There is no need to deface an entire mural as was apparently attempted. Just paint out the letter “V”. Leave everything else in place.
Lol. Obvious much?
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur.
Who died in 1813. His observations of a very different country are not relevant anymore.
Read Robert Putnam, learn what dieversity really does.
Replies: @Robert Dolan, @petit bourgeois
“I do need to step back a minute and say I think that the – it’s not merely a fact that America’s becoming more diverse. It’s a benefit. America will – all of us will, over the long run, benefit from being a more diverse, more heterogeneous place. Places that are more diverse have higher rates of growth on average and they have better cuisine. And it’s just a more interesting place to live.”
“So in the long run, waves of immigration like we’re going through now and that we’ve gone through in the past and increasing diversity is good for a society. But what we discovered in this research, somewhat to our surprise, was that in the short run the more ethnically diverse the neighborhood you live in, the more you – every – all of us tend to hunker down, to pull in. The more diverse – and when I say all of us, I mean all of us. I mean blacks and whites and Asians and Latinos, all of us. The more diverse the group around us, ethnically, in our neighborhood, the less we trust anybody, including people who look like us. Whites trust whites less. Blacks trust blacks less, in more diverse settings.”
THE SAR UNDERCLASS IS ON THE MARCH!The Sons of the American Revolution Underclass has got its marching orders from the high command and they are ready to grab the electronics of the American Empire and dislodge the ruling class of the American Empire from power. They'll eat chili and beef stew cold from a can with a plastic spoon and they'll swill some cheap beer and they'll be ready to go! They Are Sure To Be Ready!Remember, the money grubbers after the American Revolution or the American Colonial Secessionary War from the British Empire started up with their fancy and nasty Mammonite games almost immediately upon the ratification of the US Constitution. Alexander Hamilton and his type of money-grubber bankers and financial swindlers got word that the paper money paid out to soldiers in the American Secessionary War from the British Empire would be paid for in whole instead of at a much lesser amount and they bought up as much as they could from soldiers and others holding the paper currency. Hamilton and money-grubbing skanks screwed over guys who got shot at by lobsterbacks and smelt the gunpowder from pepper shot or grape shot or maybe grape nuts and bolts -- hard to say really. These soldiers thought there was no chance to get their loot in full and they sold those sonofabitches on the cheap and the damn swindling bankers and scam artists knew damn well they would be redeemed in full by the new United States government.If you are a bit Scotch-Irish like I am by way of Givens you should also know that Hamilton screwed over the Scotch-Irish in Pennsylvania by taxing whiskey as a test case to prove that the new government could tax the hinterlands and make it stick.OUTRAGE!Now the Sons of the American Revolution Underclass is hopping mad about monetary extremism and monetary swindles run by those crooked crooks who control the corrupt and crooked Federal Reserve Bank. I have made myself the leader of the SAR Underclass and I say we attack at dawn like a full force gale -- LEGALLY and RHETORICALLY attack folks, don't get too excited.DebtDemographyMonetary ExtremismMass Legal Immigration and Mass Illegal ImmigrationNone but SAR Underclass on watch tonight! -- George Washington never said that, but he might if he were alive today and saw the bankers and the debt games being played. Remember, Washington had debts too running his plantation and Washington was hopping mad at his financial factor in London who lived like a king while structuring Washington's debts.The SAR Underclass will mount up their boots and walk to the sounds of the guns!Maybe they could borrow some new cars from the 600 hundred dollar unemployment scam swindle aristocracy and roll to the sounds of the guns!Victory Awaits the SAR Underclass!Replies: @Too Long Didn't Read
So we have the ability to enrich impoverished Americans right now, without consequence, and we’re not doing it. If this is the case, and the MMTers are correct, then the current level of civil unrest is quite understandable and a lot more should come.
Do I need to write a short encyclopedia here ?
No, you need to use
Simply don't buy this line of argument. After all, why is so much hatred coming from Jews, a people with a long illustrious history of their own? Meanwhile, the brown folks of Latin America have been pretty much passive before white power. They are not going around smashing colleges and churches. And neither are American Indians. It's not the American Indians who are knocking down Columbus statues. In fact, many of the worst vandals are whites.
The unforgivable fact of 2020 is that white men have done most of the great things of the last 600 years. This deeply angers many nonwhite people today that their ancestors didn’t accomplish much.
Ok, Boomer!
This would be a great essay
When you were writing your PhD dissertation did you ever use the “paragraph’?
¶ 1/2. Sorry, bloke, I got as far as “When you were…” and dozed off.
Totally understandable.
I will see if I cannot check my White verbosity,
Try this, maybe it can hlep.
Portland mama, lolz. She should walk home and throw out all the cheap carbs for a start.
Politenessman? Lol.
I didn’t read much of Tom Wolfe, so I may be mistaken
There’s your logical stopping point.
they committed fuck-all troops and matériel to PNG or the Solomons).
Lol @ your trolling. Is Guadalcanal in the Solomons?
Really ? Three years ago ?
Yes, check the date on the killing.
You fuck wit , some people worship a f**king Jew that rumor has it died 2000 years ago .
Non sequitur. By the way, do you ever wonder why it can take a very long time for your comments to be approved? Read your sentence and see if you can tease out a hint of a clue.
Is the crime of the death an innocent man diminished by time ?
No, that’s why in Anglo Saxon law there is no statute of limitations on the crime of murder.
However the surprise factor does diminish.
No , the spilt blood of the innocent cries out for justice till the end of time .
But it is not news until the end of time.
It’s good you are getting up to speed. Keep at it!
No one seems to have questioned my comment that the American presidents who ended slavery were Lincoln and Kennedy.
There could be a reason for that.
If refugees can go back to the countries they refugeed from, why can’t they just stay there?
Even paying them to stay there would be better than letting them back into here.
Because they're much more valued by the powers that be being here (as a profitable weapon against you) than their being over there in their home country.
If refugees can go back to the countries #refugeed from, why can’t they just stay there?
1. why are you always complaining?
Irony.
Why can’t you learn to use
Dude, learn to use this gift of Unz:
Let’s hope the one good outcome of this descent into stupidity is that universities lose their stranglehold on being the ticket to a decent life.
Higher education is in a bubble kinda like the housing bubble of 14 years ago. There are too many uni’s chasing a dwindling demo of students, and too many faculty chasing tenure; overproduction of elites is a thing.
The SARS-2 Coof Plague has brought this to a sharp focus because online / virtual courses are clearly not the same as face to face, and the declining enrollment this fall is one result. But if not the Coof Plague then just demographics and economics would do the same. There are just too many “colleges” and “uni’s”, not only privates but also public institutions.
Part of the problem is Griggs vs. Duke Power
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
a USSC decision that pretty much outlawed a lot of testing because the results were uneven.
So a 4 year Bachelors became the de facto “diligence + intelligence” test back in the 70’s. We don’t have a full substitute available yet, so people keep sending their offspring to “college” so they can “get a good job” in the gig economy. A BA in English can get some traction in a bookstore clerking job I guess…online work is ok for some things like Khan and Leetcode but it does not readily translate to other areas of knowledge.
tl;dr
College is overrated, most people don’t need it, and the social elites are busy pulling up the ladder.
Now substitute the word COVID for the word Cancer—given time, can medical science decode the genome for a disease like cancer?
Search terms: “cancer” “dna” “test”
3rd result:
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/precision-medicine/tumor-dna-sequencing
Cancer is a genetic disease—that is, it is caused by changes in DNA that control the way cells function, especially how they grow and divide. These changes can be inherited, but most arise randomly during a person’s lifetime, either as a result of errors that occur as cells divide or from exposure to DNA-damaging carcinogens.
Each person’s cancer has a unique combination of genetic changes, and tumor DNA sequencing—sometimes called genetic profiling or genetic testing—is a test to identify these unique DNA changes.
You’re welcome. Please learn to use duckduckgo. Thanks.
One of the things I find fascinating about Steve Sailer is why isn’t he pointing out that *absolute* collapse of American’s big Blue Cities into Third World squalor and utter anarchy?
One of the things I find boring about unz.com is how many midwits do not bother to actually read any of the essays before commenting.
If you’re in college and not on the lookout for someone to build a life with, you’re doing it wrong.
Ok, Boomer!
The average age of a US girl on the day of her first marriage is 27. That’s several years out of college.
Try to keep up.
Well maybe boomers have it right this time. Waiting until your 27 to marry is silly. College is absolutely the best time to find a partner. If you aren’t actively looking for a mate by the time you’re a senior in college you’re just wasting time.Replies: @anon
The average age of a US girl on the day of her first marriage is 27. That’s several years out of college.
Watch out for the Woke, they’re out to pick your pocket.
No worries, we just send them to places like state capitols and Fortune 500 companies and DC. Safely out of the way where they cannot hurt the rest of us.
I don’t get it.
Thus summing up every comment you make.
The traditional mentality that offensive action is limited to military action is no longer adequate given the range of contemporary threats and the rising costs-both in dollars and lives lost-of traditional warfare. Instead, Liang and Xiangsui suggest the significance of alternatives to direct military confrontation, including international policy, economic warfare, attacks on digital infrastructure and networks, and terrorism. Even a relatively insignificant state can incapacitate a far more powerful enemy by applying pressure to their economic and political systems.
You carry around a great deal of anger, and pour it out into comments on a regular basis.
Where does this anger come from, and why do you choose to hose others down with it?
Please contemplate this in a quiet moment.
Paragraph breaks are good.
Why are you arguing that antifa isn’t heavily Jewish
Why are you arguing that it is?
Dude, there’s a lot of mug shots of Antifa online. A lot from Portland, Oregon look like these:
Portland isn’t a heavily Jewish city, yet there are scores if not hundreds of arrest pix. Because Rose City Antifa has been out in the streets for months, tearing stuff up and trying to damage the Federal courthouse.
You’re really not making a coherent argument, and the evidence is against you.
The message from Black Lives Matter is “Please Stop Killing Us”
Sure. That’s why peaceful protesting often involves burning down bookstores, looting Target, looting WalMart then burning it down, burning new public housing, burning small grocery stores, burning office supply stores, burning people’s cars, looting drug stores. Because nothing says “please stop killing us” like Burning and Looting, right?
Oh, and beatdowns. Gotta have the beatdowns!
The message from Only Black Lives Matter is “gibbsmeDAT! and DAT! and DAT!”
The main killer of young black men — other young, black men. Not cops. Other young, black men.
Lame troll.
Agree 100% Thanks.
Sure. That’s why peaceful protesting often involves burning down bookstores, looting Target, looting WalMart then burning it down, burning new public housing, burning small grocery stores, burning office supply stores, burning people’s cars, looting drug stores. Because nothing says “please stop killing us” like Burning and Looting, right?
Oh, and beatdowns. Gotta have the beatdowns!
The message from Only Black Lives Matter is “gibbsmeDAT! and DAT! and DAT!”
Why Did Mass Shootings Spike Upwards Spectacularly About the Time George Floyd Died?
White Privilege. No other force in the universe is powerful enough to do it!
Ending mass immigration, and thereby ending the unsustainable increase in our population, would be an important factor in making people’s lives here less miserable.
President-Elect Harris disagrees.
Item: medical schools in the US have been approximately 50% female since Bill Clinton ordered them to do so.
I butted in and said that their problems could easily be overcome simply by expanding the Medical School and admitting more freshers.
Without similarly expanding the clerkships and residency slots that would be a total waste of time and money. Medical school is not like “more college”, at least not in the US. The last two years of med school are when students are paired with active doctors in a junior position. This is an essential part. Once med school is completed, they are then resident typically in a hospital. This is also essential.
Medical school entails a lot of people outside of the formal schooling process, and those connections are not made in a matter of weeks, one doesn’t just turn on the machine casually.
A lot of people (especially from southern European cultures) never get disciplined by their parents,
It really disappoints me to see so many White men do exactly what politically correct progressives fear they would do: use differences to justify discrimination.
To acknowledge that the tradeoffs exist one would have to acknowledge that there are differences between the sexes.
It really disappoints me to see so many White men do exactly what politically correct progressives fear they would do: use differences to justify discrimination.
Hysterical hallucination…
Is anyone in this echo chamber serious about accomplishing anything or is this a big circle jerk?
…do you have any clue who Dr. Thompson is, or what he writes about?
Paperback Writer
You forget that most doctoring is grinding up aspirin pills and giving them to patients with phantom problems.
Ignorant nonsense.
Just two of the most recent in a long series of exhibits. Demonstrating yet again why we cannot have nice things such as a serious, science-based discussion of differences between the sexes. Because reasons.
I see you support women doctors, but many here do not. Before you accuse me of being "hysterical," I suggest you read the comments here more closely.
Hysterical hallucination…
This is more of the same old, same old.
Nice intro. Thanks for the warning!
[…]
I don’t have any answers
At last, some truth!
Vivaldi good too. And Gab's Dissenter browser.
1.) Browser: best choice is Brave.
Despite Snowden's endorsement, something's wrong with Tor lately. Sites on the far end can know your location. I don't know if it is anything to do with "browser settings" as Chrisnonymous suggests, but somehow it's gotten leaky in a way that even non-tech-lord sites have visibility through the tunnel.
2.) Learn to use tor
Other good search engines to keep market fragmented and honest: Yippy, StartPage. There are others.
3.) Web search: Duck Duck Go is the best in my opinion, but anything that isn’t Google is OK–fragmenting the market keeps the search engines honest.
There are others too, e.g., Tutanota. Note that most have significant limitations in the free versions.
5.) ... think about Protonmail ...
Agree. Apps are spyware. For some reason it is very hard to get people to understand this. Even if you are not using the app, once you have downloaded and installed it, many apps have invisible components that are running all the time in the background.
6.) Don't ever use an app to access something on your phone that you could just access through the phone's web browser.
Agree.
7.) ... monero is better design than bitcoin
Agree, but note that all machines nowadays have hidden operating systems running underneath the OS you think you're using.
9.) Run linux instead of Microsoft Windows or Apple iOS.
Agree.
10.) ... use open-source software unless it is just totally inadequate.
Agree, but note that no matter what phone you have, you still have to deal with a carrier (AT&T, Verizon, etc). Carriers have been notable among the corporate wokarchy as the dogs who haven't barked ... yet. They are all converged by the NSA, so if the Three Letter Guys want to listen in, they will, but so far, I know of no cases of woke employees doxxing customers, leaking private data, or blocking you based on your viewpoint. Why not? Maybe because they come from the Common Carrier era that predated the insane perversion of Section 230 that has led to the woke impunity culture. Or maybe because you really have to be able to do something to work there, so mouthing wokitude isn't enough. OTOH, these carriers are all pledging allegiance to BLM, diversity, etc., so it is probably just a matter of time before they become SiliValley-ized.
11.) You can also get linux smartphones such as the PinePhone if you are really hardcore, and this avoids dealing with Apple and Google.
Agree. Apps are spyware. For some reason it is very hard to get people to understand this. Even if you are not using the app, once you have downloaded and installed it, many apps have invisible components that are running all the time in the background.
Most people don’t actually read Terms of Service for anything.
Most people don’t actually pay attention to the permissions they allow for Apps.
Most people are idiots.
Absolutely. I downloaded an app from my bank and during the install it asked for permission to access, among other things, my contacts. Why the hell does a banking app need to access my contacts? I cancelled the install.
Apps are spyware.
I doubt Sailer has many young female readers
I’m sure that there are some 45 year old women reading here.
https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/keeping-backdoor-eugenics-ajar-disability-and-future-prenatal-screening/2016-04The same author of this article makes the same point as me that it's inaccurate to lump down's syndrome with fatal diseases and despite warning about prenatal screening for down syndrome he cautions "we argue that it is unhelpful and offensive to pregnant women and medical services or systems that they use to equate all prenatal screening and testing to eugenics".It appears though you are going to continue dishonestly lumping down syndrome with fatal diseases because you have no argument against the former being undesirable.Replies: @Oliver D. Smith, @Too Long Didn't Read
Related to this point, Skotko warns that promoting “choice” as medical progress in the context of prenatal screening may lead to the “disappearance” of people with Down syndrome [52]. Skotko’s argument is important to consider in light of termination statistics from around the world. A report from the National Down Syndrome Cytogenetic Register claims that in 2012 in England and Wales, 90 percent of 1,259 fetuses diagnosed prenatally with Down syndrome were terminated [53]. Moreover, in England and Wales, the annual rates for termination after a Down syndrome diagnosis between 1989 and 2012 have ranged from 88 percent to 94 percent [5]. In addition, 10 out of 18 European countries are reported to have an average termination rate of 88 percent after a diagnosis of Down syndrome [54]. Finally, termination rates of 95 percent in certain areas of Australia [55] and 74 percent in select US states are reported [5, 56]. Within this context, and drawing on our claims as outlined above, one may argue that prenatal screening represents a form of eugenics and that the “choice” promised by such techniques is not necessarily a (free) choice at all. Force is not involved in prenatal screening decision making (except in presumably rare but understudied familial circumstances) but, arguably, eugenics does not require force. One can claim that even making screening available for Down syndrome and other genetic conditions is already, by definition, suggesting that they are not valued reproductive outcomes [57-59].
It appears though you are going to continue dishonestly lumping down syndrome with fatal diseases because you have no argument against the former being undesirable.
The dishonesty is all yours, because you chose to move your goalposts around.
Obviously when I posted the definition of eugenics I didn’t include fatal genetic disorders
Your definition was obviously flawed. Then I pointed the obvious flaw in your reasoning out. Instead of clarification you chose ranting anger.
Perhaps you could try thinking instead of emoting?
Clickbait. Again.
That's a weird way for writing "they need to be drenched in much blood or we will never get out of there".
Enough with the moralism. Revival of public respect for institutions requires the institutions themselves to admit where they’ve failed and change first.
As far as I can tell, Godiva’s shops were clustered inside shopping malls, or sometimes as a sublease of a higher end retailer like Nordstrom or maybe Neiman Marcus. But…indoor malls have been declining in foot traffic for a few years, and the Coof plus Only Black Lives Matter looting hasn’t done them a bit of good. If Godiva’s is switching to online it’s mostly just a result of market plus social forces. Might as well blame Bezos, for all the good it will do for you.
Thanks a lot, dumbasses, for destroying our culture.
To whom is this little rant directed? At governors such as Cuomo – mostly D’s? At rioters peaceful protestors? At others who comment here? At the random passersby who carefully avoid eye contact with you at the bus stop? Whom?
Who you talkin’ at, Willis?
They all stare right at me because they're out to get me. They want to take my chocolates away.
At the random passersby who carefully avoid eye contact with you at the bus stop?
It's certainly an old man's movie. It was made at a time when the Western too had grown old and was on the way out, ironically not least due to its great success on the TV screen. When the Western became generic fare in every living room, it lost the silver screen luster, and in a way, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE seems to be addressing the issue of TV and its impact on the Western. The use of sound-stage over actual locations suggest at this. Not only has the West been tamed but the Western itself has been tamed as weekly TV shows on all three networks. (Hitchcock likely also had the impact of TV on mind when he made PSYCHO, especially as he lent his name to a TV series.) Likewise, Sam Peckinpah's THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND is partly a commentary on the rise of home video and its impact on culture, not least cinema. In a way, the West had a second life through the Western. Already by the time the first Western movie hit the screen, the Wild West was mostly thing of memory. The West had already become 'old'. But the Western genre made it 'young' again, and a very handsome John Wayne was there almost from the beginning, especially as the star of Raoul Walsh's magnificent THE BIG TRAIL. It was as if Manifest Destiny reborn, happening all over as American Saga in the form of the Western. The West was old but the Western was young, and in movies like STAGECOACH John Wayne conveyed that youthful spirit of the frontier. Indeed, John Wayne aged along with the Western. By the time he made THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, he'd aged along with the genre that was soon on its last legs. And John Ford was even older. So, LIBERTY VALANCE takes on different meanings depending on the context with which one watches the movie. Minus any context, one will notice many 'flaws' that may even seem ridiculous. Why didn't John Ford insist on using makeup to make Wayne and James Stewart look younger? Why do they look VISIBLY OLDER than the characters they're playing? And yet, this 'flaw' becomes a point and takes on meaning if seen as Ford's commentary on the Western and his place in it. As a story of recollection, it's taking place inside the soundstage of Ransom Stoddard's crusty old mind. It's sort of like a ghost-play. It's also as if Stoddard has forgotten how young they were and revisits those young days trapped in an old-man mentality. Thus, what seems slow-paced and even boring has to be seen as unfolding at an old-man's mental pace. It's a narrative with cobwebs. Stoddard has to rummage through the closets and attics of his mind to recall how things had been. Also, there's added tension because Stoddard's intention is to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, but personal memory is never a sure thing. The stage-like quality of the movie conveys this: the past has to be reconstructed to be deconstructed. Also, as the story is essentially subjective, drawn from Stoddard's memory, and shows the limitation of Stoddard's perspective. He's a man of words & ideas and never felt at home in the actual Wild West. He was too busy building order out of it, and the narrative and the setting are ordered and arranged like so many toy houses and train set. However, for a story that is largely subjective recollection, there are scenes without Stoddard. How could Stoddard know of them if he wasn't there? At best, he could have heard of what happened elsewhere or surmised with his own intuition(and limited imagination). Or, maybe John Ford just used the age-old convention where the flashback, though initiated as subjective memory, turns into a kind of omnipotent survey of the past. But then, LIBERTY VALANCE is less about actual facts of the West than about a certain myth. In the end, all the details of something, true or not, matter far less than the key issue of myth. And the element of myth was inseparable from the West and especially the Western. In a way, a Western trying to be real or truthful is a fool's game as its very essence is the myth. Pull on the loose thread of truth from the Western fabric and the whole thing comes apart. This was because the Western was constructed as a myth than as history, and John Ford played as big a role, maybe the biggest, as anyone else. Initially, in movies like THE BIG TRAIL, the Western had yet to be formulated into a genre or convention and could be lots of things. Indeed, CIMARRON, unjustly overlooked, features so many real-life aspects of the Old West. For the Western to live on as popular entertainment, it had to dispense with too-much-truth and too-many-details and be streamlined more into myth of movement and heroism. With STAGECOACH, John Ford contributed to the formulation of the Western into a tight genre, but he also remained true to the original vision of the Western as a sprawling and unruly genre with big cast of characters, which is why THE SEARCHERS is such a rich movie: it's about far more than Cowboys and Indians. Ford generally showed more of life and community than fixating on the 'lone hero'. One of the central myths of the West was the good guy winning at the end, but of course, it wasn't so. Often the bad guys won, and the West grew out of corruption, compromise, and tyranny as much by morality, community, and civilization. The Western Myth says there was this Wilderness full of savage Indians and unruly outlaws who made it difficult for good decent hardworking folks. But then, some redemptive hero or upright sheriff came to town and cleaned things up, and the good triumphed over the bad. But in truth, those with power generally kept the power, got to appoint the lawmen, and cut deals with politicians. In the West, the big ranchers won over the 'sodbusters', especially as the land there wasn't much good for farming.
John Ford’s last great film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) enjoys the status of a classic. I find it a deeply flawed, grating, and often ridiculous film... John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, both fine actors given the impossible job of playing men in their 20s, even though they were aged 54 and 53 at the time. It just doesn’t work... The film is poorly paced as well, burning through screen time... Shinbone was built on a soundstage. Ford was known for shooting on location because he loved authenticity. But Shinbone’s cleanliness and newness—its clear artificiality—were quite deliberate representations of progress and the end of the frontier.
Ford was not a man of taste, and even though he could make relatively high-toned dramas like MARY OF SCOTLAND, he felt most at home with folkish tales of rough men in vulgar worlds. THE QUIET MAN certainly isn't a work of 'taste'. This is the meat-and-potatoes of Fordism. You got to take it all or not take it at all. The folkish style especially fell out with the rise of the Cool where most Americans became embarrassed to be associated with hee-haw and anything old-fashioned. This even affected Westerns. PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID has the first 'California Teeanger' in Beaver. https://youtu.be/wSUTWGQ8n7M?t=103
Ford thought that drunkards and men with funny voices were hilarious... There is also a great deal of scene-chewing overacting and overbroad parody that often seem downright cartoonish. Beyond these lapses of taste...
This is reverse-PC and ideological bean-counting. I would have an issue about mixed-race marriage in a movie is out-of-place, unlikely, and/or pushed as a message. But Shinbone is set in the Southwest. It could very well be a Texas town, and there were lots of white-Mexican marriages there. The legendary Billy the Kid had many Mexican girlfriends, and Pat Garrett was married to a Mexican woman. So, the fact that a white man has a Mexican wife in Shinbone hardly seems out of place or unlikely. Could there be a message in there somewhere? But it's hardly 'left-liberal'. The white man mating with non-white woman goes back to Pocahontas in American lore. Possibly the greatest American song, "Shenandoah", is about some white guy in love with the daughter of an Indian chief. In a way, these could be construed as love-conquers-all stories, like in ROMEO-AND-JULIET, but they could also be taken as white sexual imperialism. After all, sex has never been neutral between men and women. It's a matter of who does what to whom. As men are the dominant sex, the race with the men humping the women of another race has the upperhand. When whites ruled over blacks, most interracial offspring were white-male-and-black-female. Today, with black men dominating sports and rap music and kicking white butts in schools all across America, most mulattos are products of ACOWW or Afro-Colonization of White Wombs. When the Mongols invaded Russia and parts of Eastern Europe, it was yellow men sexually conquering white women. When white Americans militarily took over South Vietnam, it was a case of white(and black) men sexually colonizing me-so-horny yellow women. In a way, one could argue that even white-male-and-non-white-female pairing is 'anti-racist' in its 'interracism', but it was also used as a form of imperialism. This was especially true in South America or Latin America, traditionally far less 'liberal' than North America. There, Spanish men took many brown wives and created the mestizo race. Doniphan-and-Pompey is a traditional relationship of that time. LIBERTY VALANCE takes place after slavery has been abolished, but if the South had won the Civil War, Doniphan could be Pompey's master. (Ironic that a former slave would be named 'Pompey' after the great Roman general. It either suggests Americans are ignorant of history or hints at black ascendancy in the future.) The thing is, apart from social distinctions, there is a personal bond between Doniphan and Pompey that go beyond the political. Doniphan is surely no racial egalitarian(and even Ransom is rather condescending to Pompey who is later given 'pork chop money'), but he's generally not a mean person(when he doesn't have to be) and much appreciates Pompey as his loyal sidekick, his Tonto.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance also contains Left-liberal messages on race. For instance, Devine’s Marshal Link Appleyard is married to a Mexican woman... This must have been Ford’s preference... Wayne’s character Tom Doniphan has a loyal negro sidekick named Pompey (Woody Strode). Pompey even endures the indignity of being refused service at the saloon, but Doniphan stands up for him, although he does refer to him as “my boy Pompey.” ...Ransom Stoddard (Stewart) teaches reading and civics to a class of white adults, plus Pompey and a brood of Mexican children. (All the children in Shinbone are nonwhite, a poignant sign that white civilization has not yet been established there. Now such classrooms are signs of white civilization in decline.) Lawyer Stoddard teaches that the fundamental law of the land is the Declaration of Independence, which holds that “All men are created equal.” The Declaration, of course, is not the fundamental law of the land. That would be the Constitution, which says nothing about all men being created equal.
Chances are that, during most of John Ford's life, most WASPS were more 'progressive' on race than your average Irishman, Ford included. As a matter of idealism, Wasps were the main pushers of 'liberalism' on race. Jews pushed it for reasons that were more tribal than idealistic(though there was some of that too as many leftist Jews back then sincerely believed race was skin-deep). Many Irish were Democratic but more for ethnic and economic interests than high-minded idealism. Generally, Irish Catholics followed the Wasp lead on racial politics. While most Irish were opposed to stuff like the KKK(who bashed Catholics as well as Negroes), even the Irish Democratic Machine operators were a bunch of Archie Bunkers at heart.
Ford did not, however, identify with outsiders against America’s WASP ethnic core because he was Jewish. Instead, he did so as an Irish Catholic.
They wouldn't be offensive today because PC only cares about Jews, blacks, and homos. Mocking or making fun of whites or white groups is not only okay but obligatory. John Ford was profoundly Irish but in attitude and swagger than identity politics. He wasn't into Irish victimology or separatist thinking, but one can't help sensing the distinction between the Anglo way and the Celtic way in some of his works. It's buried somewhere in LIBERTY VALANCE as well. Ransom is very much an Anglo-kind of character. Very Waspy, whereas Doniphan is Irish-like. And the movie hints at the troubled but symbiotic relationship between the Anglo and the Irish. Anglos led with their big vision and ideas, and yet, no civilization is merely the work of ideas and principles, not even the US founded on liberty and rights. A lot of dirty work had to be done, and as the Irish and Catholics were generally poorer, cruder, and disadvantaged than the Anglos and Protestants, they ended up taking up a lot of the 'dirty' jobs involving muscle and sweat. Often, it was ham-fisted Irish cops who kept the blacks in line. In battles, the officers were more likely to be Anglo, whereas the Irish took the lower positions as footsoldiers. Granted, the Irish gained real fast in America, but the Anglo-Irish thing was like an ethnic version of the class-divide in England between the gentleman 'caste' and cockney-speaking laborers. In the film RAGTIME, the privileged family that takes in the Negro orphan is very Waspish, whereas the firemen who harass the Negro driver are visibly Irish, right down to the red noses from too much drink. In some ways, the rowdier side of the Irish could be seen as more honest and real, but it could also be seen as brutish and bigoted. The Irish developed a dual mindset in regard to Anglos. In a way, they were the first victims of British Imperialism, and their resistance later inspired other rebellions against the empire. And yet, the Irish were also like the pitbulls of the empire. They went wherever the Anglos went, terrorized the darkies, and did the 'dirty work' as overseers and enforcers. Thus, to those on the ground, the Irish seemed even more bigoted, tyrannical, and exploitative than the genteel Anglo who gave orders on horseback. Irish were at once the hammer of the empire and under its heel, and it's no wonder that today's Irish are both filled with victimology but also share in the 'white guilt'. (But then, blacks have been no different. They were oppressed under white rule but also benefitted from white victories and took part in neo-imperialist aggressions around the world. Blacks in today's military don't ask why they are ordered to bomb Syria or to threaten/invade other nations. They just do it, just like the Irish under Anglo orders long ago.)
Judging from Ford’s cavalry trilogy—Fort Apache (1948), She Wore the Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950)—the West could not have been won without the help of golden-hearted, silver-tongued Irish drunkards. These stereotypes seem rather broad and offensive today, but Ford—a heavy drinker himself—obviously regarded them affectionately and thought their inclusion to be progressive.
It depends on what you want to see. One could pick out the 'anti-conservative' elements of LIBERTY VALANCE and include it in 'left-wing cinema'. This is a fool's game. While some works are clearly 'liberal' while others are 'conservative', LIBERTY VALANCE can't be ideologically pigeonholed one way or another.
The film’s message is deeply anti-liberal. Indeed, although Ford could not have known it, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance illustrates many of Carl Schmitt’s criticisms of liberalism.
Actually, Valance plays it both ways. He is a thief and killer but not at all times. He isn't merely a wolf or coyote but a weasel. When he robs a coach, he covers his mask. But in town, he act just lawful enough to pass as a member of the community. If he were a total outlaw(like the bandits in THE WILD BUNCH), he would be no use to the ranchers. In contrast, Valance wears many masks. He steals when he can, but at other times takes up regular jobs with the ranchers. In that sense, he's more like a proto-gangster, the creature of civilization, than a classic Western outlaw. Valance can easily adapt to the New Order. Indeed, the likes of Jimmy Hoffa operated as criminals as well as labor bosses. In the West, there were outlaws and then there were OUTLAWS. One bunch couldn't do anything but rob and steal. Another took up stealing as a hobby or side-job while doing other things as well. They had their feet on both sides of the fence, and Valance is quite an adaptive bastard. Thus, even as he intimidates the people of the town, his ilk can co-exist with change because the Power always needs muscle for hire. Today, the likes of him could work as a mercenary and blow things up in Syria.
Played to cartoonish excess by Lee Marvin, Liberty Valance is a cold-blooded murderer and thief. He’s also a drunkard and a petty bully. The entire town of Shinbone lives in terror of him. He’s the kind of man who needs killing, so decent people can plant crops, raise children, and sleep at night.
It's also odd that the good guy's name is 'Ransom', usually associated with kidnapping and extortion. Anyway, I don't think Valance represents only the Wild West. His name 'Liberty' doesn't represent the state-of-nature or savage-freedom. Rather, it's ironic, a suggestion that American Liberty has always been compromised, corrupted, and hypocritical. Also, the name of 'Ransom' suggest that American Progress was brought about by holding all of us hostage to some faulty narrative.
It seems odd that an American movie would have a villain named Liberty. Isn’t America the land of liberty? But Liberty Valance is not really an American. He’s a man of the Wild West. America is a Republic with laws. The West is the state of nature. Liberty Valance represents the liberty of savages in the state of nature, where one man’s liberty is exercised at the expense of another’s.
Doniphan doesn't see Ransom as a rival, understandably so as the latter is just barely alive after getting beaten up by Valance. He figures Hallie is ideal for taking care of Ransom as if he's a little child beaten up at school by bullies. He has more manly things to do than playing nurse. It's almost like finding an orphaned doe in the wild and handing it off to a woman to take care of. Incidentally, there's a scene with a woman nursing a man in SERGEANT RUTLEDGE as well, and it might have been Ford's way of, wink-wink saying, THE NEGRO IS GONNA ROB US OF OUR MANHOOD. Unlike scrawny James Stewart, Woody Strode was a well-built guy, so there could have been sexual tension when the white woman tends to him though the times discouraged that stuff when it was made. On the one hand, Ford as an Irishman with bitter national memories, sympathized with Negroes who faced discrimination. But he was also mindful of racial differences. On the set, he often mocked John Wayne's manhood as movie-fake and pointed to Woody Strode as the Real Athlete of the bunch.
For no sensible reason except that he likes her, Tom(John Wayne) awakens Hallie, who works as a waitress at a local eatery, to help tend to Stoddard’s wounds.
No, Ransom isn't against guns or use of violence. He's against vigilantism. For the law to work, it has to be properly enforced by legal authority. And Ransom wants the people of the town to create and uphold a system that can ensure peace and stability by rightful use of force.
Rance doesn’t see any difference between force used by criminals and force used by decent men against criminals. He’s an idealist who apparently thinks the laws can magically enforce themselves.
No, Obama is no zealot, no real progressive. He's a smooth version of Valance, a globo-gangster and weasel with many masks. He could play race-hustler, cultural-marxist, cosmo-elite, genteel buppie, machine crook, warmonger(for the Jews), Wall Street shill, deep state flunky, and etc. Whatever faults Ransom has, he is a true man of principles. Also, he's very courageous, in some ways more than Doniphan, who is naturally big and strong and grew up doing all the Western things. In contrast, Ransom is an outsider who sticks his neck out even at the risk to his life and for total strangers. When the coach is robbed, most people just stand around passively and afraid. In contrast, Ransom rebukes Valance to his face. Foolish perhaps but it took real courage. Obama is just a gangster who looked around, noticed Jews got the power, and played their waterboy to be president.
(Ransom) is spindly, priggish, progressive zealot. He reminds me of Barack Obama.
Ransom not only expects the law to settle disputes but pushes for changes that finally bring that about. Thus, he's a visionary, and he's keen on practicing what he preaches, something rare these days. While it's true that Ransom partially comes to appreciate Doniphan and his ways, reverse is also true. Grudgingly, Doniphan acknowledges that Ransom has his own kind of toughness, courage, and resilience, a real tenacity. They sort of merge into one another, like Lawrence and Ali in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, and Mendoza(Robert DeNiro) and Gabriel(Jeremy Irons) in THE MISSION. Mind envies the muscle, the muscle envies the mind.Plenty of men in the West wore aprons. Sure, Western movies focus on the gunslingers, but most men did regular work to build the West. Butchers wore aprons. Grocers wore aprons. So many men wore aprons. It was not a woman's thing. It's like what Nixon's pa says in the movie: Nixon's Ma - "Could thee at least remove that apron, Frank?"Nixon's Pa - "This blood pays the bills, Hannah. I'm not ashamed of how I earn my money."The problem of the Western Formula was it so over-emphasized the men-with-guns that it relegated to insignificance all the men who did the real work to make the West work. Naturally, we want to see men with guns than men with aprons & ladles, but the earlier Westerns did have a wider and more embracing vision of the West. The real West wasn't about men-with-guns and men-with-aprons but men-with-aprons-and-guns, and womenfolk learned how to use guns too, like the woman in RED RIVER. It's like the guys in GOODFELLAS both cook and kill. Paulie has a system of slicing garlic. And Clyde nearly got crushed by a man in an apron. In MIDNIGHT COWBOY, Joe Buck is someone who works with an apron but goes off to New York to play cowboy stud, a gunslinger with the ladies. He chases after the myth and runs from reality. In New York, he sees other men like himself working with aprons in restaurants. He is one of them, a regular Joe, but has been poisoned by the myth that dreams come true for the cowboy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQV6CijIzrc&ab_channel=ShakemodeProductionshttps://youtu.be/ajxXy1t7Fzc?t=168https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBR0Dug9sIo&ab_channel=MattFreemanOf course, a Western could deviate too far from the men-with-guns narrative. There was a recent one called FIRST COW(which should be called FA**OTY MOO) that was 'gayish' or 'homo-social'(as its writer calls it) as shit. It was about two fellas, one Jewish and one Asian, in the Wild West stealing milk from a cow to... get this, bake muffins. It is the fa**otiest thing I ever did see, though I turned it off after 30 min. I didn't see BROKEBACK MOUNTIN', but even two cowpokes poking each other's bung is less 'gayish' than the idea of two guys out in the rough frontier having nothing better to do than bake muffins with stolen milk. Can anyone imagine Gary Cooper and Richard Widmark forming a team to milk a cow in the middle of the night to go bake cupcakes? It's the sort of tooty idea only a comfy city-slicker can cook up in his own world of creature comforts. "Gee, what if a sensitive Jewish guy met a naked Asian guy pursued by Russians(!!) and formed a 'homosocial' bond where they pick flowers and bake muffins together?" Total pukeville, but a favorite among critics, but they're a pansyass bunch who probably went off to get a muffin at Starbucks after the screening. How is teaching someone how to read being a 'schoolmarm'? The hero of VIVA ZAPATA is ashamed he can't read. And the Viking leader in 13TH WARRIOR learns to scribble some lines from an Arab. Word is Power. Granted, teaching womenfolk(except for lesbians) to read beyond perusing personal letters(like Laurie in THE SEARCHERS) may not have been a good thing as most woman-minds aren't fit for real thinking and easily get confused. It's like what the girl says in KINGS OF SUMMER about her 'woman-brain'. Incidentally, if the tough guy loses the girl to the idea-guy in LIBERTY VALANCE, it's the opposite in KINGS OF SUMMER, more along the Arthurian Tale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhto3fS6itk&ab_channel=IvanCastro
Rance’s role in the community, however, is distinctly feminine. In a land where men wear guns and settle problems for themselves, he refuses to wear a gun and expects the law to settle disputes . . . somehow. Thus in the Ericsons’ restaurant, Rance wears an apron while washing dishes and occasionally waiting tables. (Obama also allowed himself to be photographed in an apron.) When Rance learns that Hallie can’t read, he takes on another stereotypically female role: schoolmarm.
No. Often in Ford movies, women love the fact that men fight for stuff like land, honor, and pride... and especially over women. In THE SEARCHERS, Laurie, trying to be a Good Girl, beseeches others to stop the fight between Marty and the guitar-guy but soon loves the fact that two men are fighting over her. In THE QUIET MAN, the Irish beauty played by Maureen O'Hara doesn't mind that John Wayne's character wins her heart by knocking out other men. Boys will be boys, and girls will be girls(though, in our globo-homo age, boys will be girls, and girls will be boys). Pro-Law stance of Ransom is essentially beta-male-ish as force is used by legal institutions to secure rights and protection for all men. Still, even though Ransom is physically beta-male, he has alpha-male ego when it comes to pushing others to follow his lead.
This too is an attitude more commonly associated with women. Ford clearly thinks that manliness is connected with a willingness to fight over matters of honor.
Ransom isn't opposed to guns per se. It's about who uses it and how. Ideally, he believes, lawmen with the backing of the community should have the power of guns to do away with the likes of Valance. But more importantly, he keeps his practicing with a gun secret because he doesn't want to lend the impression that he's a gunman and draw the wrong kind of attention from Valance and the like, especially as he has poor chance of winning any gunfight. He keeps a gun as a last resort. It's like, if a bully is messing with you, you might take up martial arts lessons and weight-lifting but secretly because it will take time for you to learn how to build up strength and learn how to fight. If you do it openly, it sends the message that you're cruisin' for a brusin'. (Indeed, weaker nations build up their military without fanfare. The last thing they want is attention.)
Rance furtively buys a gun and sneaks off to practice shooting. Why the deception? Because he can’t really reconcile it with his self-image and the image he has established with the public.
No, it's not due to a lack of nerve. Rather, he's so sure that Hallie will be his that he takes it for granted and goes about at his own chosen pace. It's like the hare that takes a nap in the race with the tortoise. He figures he will first build a nice place for them both and then ask her for marriage and then settle down. He's so sure of himself that he doesn't rush it with her.
There’s also a love triangle in the mix. Tom is in love with Hallie. Everybody sees it. But he hasn’t screwed up the courage to propose. It is his one failing of nerve as a man.
Dissident Right is full of brainy literary types who are more like Ransom than Doniphan, so I find it odd that Lynch would keep calling Ransom's manhood into question. Also, there are different kinds of power. There is brute power, but there is also the power of the mind and power of knowledge. In brute strength, Achilles and Ajax were far more manly than Odysseus, but Athena favored the latter for his intelligence. After all, what distinguishes man from beast is the mind. Most beasts are bigger and stronger than man, but man has dominion over horses and cows. Why? The power of the mind. In raw power, Uther was many times the man than his son Arthur, but Arthur is the one who creates the New Order based on righteous rule and theory of justice. With Uther, violence is the authority, i.e. whoever wins by might is right. With Arthur, might has to be backed by what's right.
Rance is pretty much zilch as a man, certainly nobody Tom would regard as a rival.
But Ransom was never a child. And everything he did took a good deal of courage, even before the showdown. In a way, it was all the more courageous because he stuck by his figurative guns and kept true to his ideals/principles. It would have been easier for him to just throw up his hands, accept the world as it is, get some guns, and shoot bad guys. Rather, despite all the obstacles and disappointments, he chose to do it right by his principles and conscience. Of course, it too is a kind of personal pride as he doesn't want to admit he's wrong, sort of like Albert Brooks character of BROADCAST NEWS who does care about journalistic ethics but is also driven by ego and pride.
But Rance is no longer a child. He has faced death in a duel over honor.
It's something far more than 'self-pity'. It is a genuine moment of personal tragedy.
When Tom sees them together, he knows that he has lost Hallie. He gets staggering drunk and burns his own house down in self-pity.
No, he wasn't so much troubled by personal conscience over what he did. Rather, it's the Narrative pushed by the other side: Cold-blooded thug Ransom killed upright citizen Valance. The Narrative totally reverses the roles. So, he's perturbed by being painted as the very creature that he struggled against with his vision of law and order.
...when he shot Liberty Valance, he became a man and a hero. It also launched his political career. But none of this sits well with Rance’s puritanical idealist streak. He feels that he bears the “mark of Cain” and is perhaps unworthy of public office.
What might be true is both Ransom and Doniphan shot Valance at the same time. But surely Doniphan was there on the spot with the rifle because Hallie asked him to, and he couldn't say NO to her. And, why would Doniphan care about Ransom's feelings if he did not shoot Valance? He feels responsible for how Ransom feels precisely because he, Doniphan, was there and took action. Given that Doniphan lost Hallie to Ransom, protecting the latter's feelings would be the last thing on his mind if indeed he did NOT kill Valance. In a way, by telling of his role in the killing, he is owning the narrative between himself and Ransom. Indeed, it serves him more than it serves Ransom. Ransom often derided Doniphan as hardly better than Valance, a tough guy beast and thug, but Doniphan, with the tale, reveals that he is a beast with a heart of gold and even violated the Western code to protect Ransom, even if it meant risking losing Hallie to him. And it is that account by Doniphan that makes Ransom and Hallie feel forever indebted to him and even attend his funeral long after the whole town forgot who he is. Doniphan takes on the role of the 'unsung hero'.
I wonder, though, if Tom’s story is even true. Did it really happen, or did he make it up to spare Rance’s feelings?
Though not stated by Ransom and Hallie, I think the biggest sense of guilt on Ransom's part(as well as Hallie) is not about the killing or the matter of justice but that he took Hallie from Doniphan. That part is shown to us in the movie but surely not told to the newspapermen as Ransom tells the tale. (What we are shown is much more than what Ransom tells the newspaper man.) But what really complicated the three of them was Doniphan gave up Hallie. Seeing her in Ransom's arms, she still belonged to Doniphan if he'd asked for her hand. Not only did he court her for a long time but even saved Ransom due to her pleading. They both know this. But Doniphan knew that if Hallie married him, the bigger part of her would regret it and truly be in love with Ransom. He would rob her of true happiness. So, he let her go. He knows it, she knows it, and Ransom knows it. So, even though Ransom told the truth to the newspaper, he didn't tell the deeper truth, which was personal than political. The real issue involving Doniphan isn't "who shot Liberty Valance?" but "Who took Doniphan's girl?" Doniphan killed Liberty, but in a way, Ransom killed Doniphan who spent the rest of his life rather like Noodles in ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA. Feeling sad, going to bed early.
(Ransom) no longer thinks his public esteem is based on killing, but shouldn’t he be bothered that it is based on a lie? Perhaps he can live with the lie by telling himself that he is doing good things for the people. But couldn’t he say the same thing about killing Liberty Valance?
Civilization would have come with or without Valance. Cities have always been full of crooks, thieves, and killers as any gangster movie makes clear. Valance is a bad guy but rather crafty and adaptive. Lyndon B. Johnson was equally a crook and politician; he may even have been a killer. What happened with Jeffrey Epstein is a clear indication that civilization is a gangster-operation at the top, and Japan and Italy have been known for fusion of organized crime and politics. Also, it does matter who kills whom. After all, outlaws, thugs, and criminals are always killing one another. But when a thug kills a thug, the thug is once again triumphant. Had Valance been killed by another Valance, thug would be replaced by thug. So, it matters who does the killing and why. Doniphan is half-Ransom and half-Valance. Like Ransom, he's a good guy and sides with the good people in town. Like Valance, he relishes the wild anarchy of the West where a tough guy is king-of-the-hill, a natural nobleman. He doesn't use his might for evil, but he rather likes might-is-right as it favors his kind of skills. Doniphan is someone who could have thrown his lot with the Valances of the world, but he chooses Ransom, even though he could have had more fun and better relations as a partner of Valance who respects other tough guys. So, that Doniphan kills Valance is significant as it symbolizes the struggle in the heart of power between the good and evil. In killing Valance, he kills a part of himself. It's like the circular opening scene of PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID that suggests Garrett's killing of Billy the Kid was essentially killing himself. But if killing the outlaw is a good thing in LIBERTY VALANCE, it is a bad thing in PAT GARRETT.
The deeper truth that Rance evades is that, for civilization to come to the West, somebody needed to shoot Liberty Valance. It doesn’t really matter who.
This makes no sense. The motives of Doniphan in telling his account to Ransom and of Ransom in telling the truth to the newspaper editor are totally different in kind from the motive of the editor in burying the fact. Doniphan really wanted to get it off his chest, mainly because he lost Hallie to Ransom. It was his way of saying, "I saved your ass and lost my girl to you, so you better go in there and fight." He gave up the world as she meant everything to him. And Ransom tells the tale partly out of idealism and partly as tribute to Ransom. There is still that idealistic part of him that believes in truth and etc., and he sees in the newsman his younger self starting out in the West. But he also feels that Doniphan, so long forgotten that few even showed up at his funeral, should be credited as the unsung hero who really killed Valance and saved Ransom's life. Both Doniphan's and Ransom's motivations are in favor of truth. In contrast, the newsman's decision to edit out those facts is political or social. Why overturn a beautiful myth when so many people have come to believe in it? He figures the truth can do more harm than good.
The possibility that the story is false is supported Ford’s frank exploration of noble and ignoble lies later in the movie. Although the newspaper editor has pried the story out of Rance by insisting on his “right to the truth,” once the tale is told, he burns his notes and tells Rance he will not print the truth. “This is the West, Sir,” he says, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
But that doesn't make any sense. If what really mattered was that, in order for civilization to take root in the West, SOMEONE-ANYONE had to shoot Valance, then what does it matter if it's revealed that Doniphan did the killing? The editor would have been perfectly happy with the new fact as SOMEONE killed Valance. If the main issue is 'Valance had to go' and therefore, 'someone, just about anyone, had to kill him', then the story of 'Doniphan as killer' would be just as acceptable as 'Ransom as killer'. It'd be a case of "What does it matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches the mice?"
But why replace the truth with legend? What’s wrong with the truth? The superficial truth deals with who shot Liberty Valance: Tom or Rance? If Tom shot Liberty, he can’t be punished now because he’s dead. Rance, of course, kept the secret. Perhaps there would be legal consequences for that. But the real need for deception has to do with the deeper truth: somebody needed to shoot Liberty Valance so that civilization could come to the West,
No, liberalism seeks to concentrate force in the state governed by laws. Also, liberalism accepts that fraud is a part of life and ineradicable, and therefore there must be laws and procedures to deal with fraud and violations that will always be with us. Liberalism isn't utopianism, a vision of future where all people will be free, equal, and just. Liberalism is based on tolerance than perfectionism. Liberalism says we will never have perfection, and so, we must learn to tolerate the flaws and failings, but there is still a workable solution by systems of laws and enforcement to ameliorate the worst abuses of society. Of course, 'liberalism' has many meanings. It could mean classical liberalism or libertarianism. It could mean the New Deal and Big-Governmentism. It could mean high taxes and social-democracy. It could mean the Welfare State and Great Society. It could mean the Nanny State where the state passes ever more rules and regulations(about guns and smoking) to make us do what's right. Or, nowadays, it could mean Neo-Liberalism where the globalists oligarchs, deep state elites, and ivory tower operatives all conspire to gain more control via monopolization, more wars, and hate propaganda against whomever they hate. Currently, what is called 'liberalism' is just Jewish Supremacist Gangsterism with globo-homo and magic-negro as gods.
Liberalism seeks to do away with force and fraud in human relations.
There is much truth in the above statement, but such hypocrisy isn't limited to liberalism. When barbarian lords became kings and fancy aristocrats, they begin to put on airs. Their power was based on violence and brutality, but the kings invoked some divine right. And aristocrats acted as if they were born of finer blood and that their authority was based on culture and sophistication than on exploitation of the masses who toiled in the fields. The Christian Churches pretended their authority was the blessing of God when it depended on an alliance with the military caste that rarely acted according to Christian ethos. Liberalism inherited than incubated such hypocrisy. This is why we need fascism that is most honest in exploring and explaining how power really works, but fascism was disgraced by the Ridiculous Fascism of Mussolini and Ludicrous Fascism of Hitler who turned fascism into mindless personality cults.Replies: @Too Long Didn't Read
Liberalism, in short, depends on illiberal men and extralegal violence for its very survival. But, instead of questioning their own ideological premises, liberals simply lie about this fact.
I’m not quite sure what it is that you are trying to say. Maybe because your comment was rather short and terse. Perhaps if you could explain in more detail and at greater length it would be clearer?
Thanks!
Taking bribes was not part of his official duties.
Wait, are you sure? Isn’t this a Philadelphia story?
* See Henry Seward’s historic March 3, 1858 speech to the US Senate, entitled ‘Freedom in Kansas’, where he outlines the history from the US founding to the then present of the North and South’s two clashing systems of labor, calling it a multi-generational ‘dynastical’ struggle, where all the the past compromises had broken down.Replies: @Too Long Didn't Read, @Audacious Epigone
'..the immigrants usually serve three main functions: cheap labor to replace native groups, settlement in the ‘frontier’ (periphery), and control over the natives and their land. These dynamics generally result in the maintenance of hegemony..’
The Wokels do not care. Anything before the current Year Zero is pure racist evil.
Endless, tiresome recitations are useless against people of pure emotion.
Wake up to what’s really happening.
I agree. However, what I wrote wasn't aimed at the so called 'woke', which I see as something like cultists.
The Wokels do not care. Anything before the current Year Zero is pure racist evil.
Endless, tiresome recitations are useless against people of pure emotion.
Well, in that specific sense I'm already quite 'awoke', thank you! [pun intended ;-)]Replies: @anon
Wake up to what’s really happening.
Yadda yaadda yadda.
Thanks!
Put that box of wine away, honey, and go sleep it off.
Yes, got it wrong. If every cocaine abusing hen pecked hubby turned trans, the shoe stores would be carrying a lot more size 12 high heeled shoes. I can't speak to Jenner's reasons, background, etc. I'm sure he has and will continue to do that. While disgust and even hatred here for The Other is strong in many commentators, it is best not to use manufactured stereotypes in place of evidence. Who would you prefer in the White House (or Cali gubernatorial manse), Caitlyn or Slo Joe/Newsom? Jenner herself (I always have to pause to use the right gender pronoun) has far better political philosophy than Nonsense Newsom. Also I have seen/read anecdotal evidence that many actual lesbian women tend to be more conservative than perhaps, the norm. Certainly more than male gays. I doubt that can be attributed to T levels or hormones. They may not be outspoken on this, but it is sometimes seen. Perhaps they realize that their psuedo "man's world" is best experienced in a law & order environment and viewing personal achievement before racial/gender leveling by Big Sister. Not sure if there is any hard research on this. Okay, maybe you don't want your son/daughter to marry a transgender person. But no one is asking you to do that. If Cait can find a somewhat macho smart Hispanic politician to run as Lt. Governor on her ticket, they might just upend the hopelessly inept Dem monopoly in Cali. Or would some here prefer to stew about the strange person who happens to agree with their ideas?Replies: @Too Long Didn't Read, @Mike Tre
So, Jenner abusing cocaine (and god knows what other chemicals) and being under the screws of a master manipulator for 30 years had no influence on his late life desire to go tranny? Got it.
What does Off Topic mean to you?
I wonder if Canelo is descended from one of those micks.
Doubtful, since the US Army tracked down every San Patricio they could find and executed them, plus 1848 was a long time ago. More likely descended from some Mick who had to leave the Isles in order to avoid arrest, and settled on Mexico as a tolerable hideout.
Yes.
I was wondering if the Rock-center statue is supposed to be Yakub, but then I realized the head dome isn’t nearly big enough.
Can I have a pony, too? I’d like all that and a pony. Make my pony a Unicorn!
Btw, has it occurred to anyone that the mass refusal to work for crap wages when unemployment pays better, is the modern equivalent of a General Strike?
It is not.
Shadowstats has a track record, unlike every rando commenter / poaster. Instead of reading what Joe said to Bob who said something to Powell…
Read and learn.
DeBlasio has his day all planned out.
https://nypost.com/2021/05/24/de-blasio-to-kneel-in-honor-of-george-floyd/
In the days since election results gave the world Donald J. Trump and the rise of demagoguery,
No. Just no.
Why is Unz.com such a magnet for morons?
The Roman church is a category of the mind.
Of course, we assuredly can thank ex-President Trump for exposing QANON to his followers. Almost like he was marketing it to them...https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00257-y
QAnon’s astonishing success in mobilizing women points toward a characteristic shared by virtually all populist movements that makes populism as a political form particularly hospitable to deployments of femininity. As scholars of populism have long observed, one of the hallmarks of populist movements is their pitting of a uniquely virtuous and unfairly disadvantaged “people” against a corrupt and entrenched “elite” (Kaltwasser et al. 2017, 4). In figuring the people as pure, innocent, and vulnerable, populists, whether wittingly or unwittingly, imbue the people with unmistakably feminine characteristics. With the people always already implicitly feminized by the very nature and structure of populist discourse itself, populists are able to target women with the kind of explicitly gendered appeals we see at work in the QAnon movement with relative ease.Of course, populist invocations of “the pure people” vs. “the corrupt elite” can also be tailored in ways that downplay these gendered connotations in an effort to unify the people by making gender “an almost unnecessary or even irrelevant category” (Abi-Hassan, 2017, 428). This gender-neutral approach can also work to facilitate women’s participation in populist movements by affording them an opportunity to take their place alongside men as members of the undifferentiated mass of the people. The QAnon movement, at times, operates in this register. For example, its most famous slogan—Where We Go One We Go All—embodies just this sort of appeal to an unmarked and genderless “we.” Nevertheless, it is when populist movements appeal to us as specifically gendered beings with deep-set investments in our masculinity and femininity that they are at their most potent. Such gendered appeals are, without a doubt, one of QAnon’s most significant sources of power. Depending on the nature of their gendered investments, supporters can participate in the QAnon movement as either masculine protectors of the republic who swear an oath to defend the Constitution and become “digital soldiers” in Q’s army or as feminine guardians of hearth and home who organize rallies and social media campaigns to protect children from sexual and moral contamination (Sommer, 2020). The multivocality of its gendered appeals is crucial to QAnon’s success.Nearly a decade before QAnon became a going concern, gender and politics scholars noted the central role women were playing in another U.S.-based right-wing populist movement, the Tea Party (Sparks, 2014; Deckman, 2016; Schreiber, 2016). One of the most remarkable facets of the Tea Party, a reactionary movement that emerged in the early months of Barack Obama’s first presidential term to champion a blend of economic libertarianism, cultural traditionalism, and nationalism, was its overwhelmingly female leadership. 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and former Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann were two of the movement’s most prominent national leaders and studies of grassroots Tea Party organizations have suggested that women were similarly dominant at the local level (Lo, 2012; Deckman, 2016). What facilitated women’s unprecedented levels of engagement with Tea Party populism? According to Deckman, Schreiber, and Sparks, gendered (and, as Sparks perceptively notes, also raced) scripts of maternal guardianship were key to galvanizing Tea Party women. By positioning themselves as “mama grizzlies” rearing up to protect their “cubs” from the predations of tax and spend liberals, the “motherhood frame,” as Deckman calls it, allowed Tea Party women to connect longstanding conservative policy priorities like cutting entitlement programs and expanding gun rights to their maternal duty to defend children and families (2016, 3). Sparks further describes how this “motherhood frame” worked to legitimate Tea Party women’s performances of political anger. “Occupying political positions as ‘mama bears worried about their families,’” Sparks explains, “… offers Tea Party women a way to publicly perform anger that simultaneously defeats the usual charges that angry women are irrational and shrill” (Sparks, 2014, 19). The same maternalist tropes that drew women to the Tea Party also draw them to QAnon, a movement that is far less beholden to libertarian ideology but that affords women similar opportunities to embody their “natural” role of maternal guardian.
Replies: @Too Long Didn't Read, @Che Blutarsky
During his presidency, Trump frequently retweeted followers linked to the notorious conspiracy theory QAnon, a narrative that originated in 2017 and claimed that a powerful cabal of Democrats and elites are trafficking and abusing children — and that Trump is fighting them. Although Trump never endorsed QAnon, he repeatedly refused to condemn the conspiracy theory in interviews and once praised its followers for their support.One debate in the conspiracy-theory research community is whether Trump has pushed more people into QAnon, or whether he just emboldened those who already believed. Polling suggests that QAnon adherents remain a small, if increasingly vocal, minority, says Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami in Florida who has been tracking public support for several years. Others argue that polls don't necessarily capture radicalization at the extremes.QAnon has clearly gained ground under Trump in recent years, says Joan Donovan, a disinformation researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The activity that she and her team monitor online, as well as the real-world protests and political rallies taking place, add up to “a growing interest in or dedication to these ideas”, she argues.
And yet you know less than zero about many things.
History is not a monolith. There were huge variations in the way people lived. Warfare for land or slaves no longer makes the slightest bit of sense for developed peoples. Their governments are also not chained to an individual's whims. There are even many better things to do.
Nah, it’s just that the last half of the 20th century has somehow sustained the fantasy in “The West” that “life and death struggles” are actually rare and can be managed by media talk.
Warfare for land or slaves no longer makes the slightest bit of sense for developed peoples. Their governments are also not chained to an individual’s whims.
Have you discussed this with the leadership of the Taliban, or PRC President Xi?
lol @girls pretending to be adults.
The authors of the constitution were working in society that was largely decentralized, with no large power block in control of the whole country. Of course, much of the impetus behind doing the constitution came as a result of Shays rebellion in Massachusetts. There was also a cabal desiring to buy essentially defaulted state war bonds for pennies on the dollar, and then have a way to have them paid off by a federal government.
Sure, some things are dangerous, and there are less-intrusive ways of helping and perhaps, if absolutely necessary, to regulate them. However, all of that depends on WHO/WHOM. WHO is doing the regulating, and WHOM are they controlling? The authors of The Constitution understood this, but civics education is so poor now that nobody under 60 even understands this.
The sugar in chocolate is more addicting. No one is over consuming 99% cacao dark. As to caffeine, I've cut back and don't consume it after 10am; the effects on sleep have been positive, but that was a matter of reading the science about half-life in the body. Would I ban it? No, because I can imagine times I might need to affect sleep cycles to stay awake.
Chocolate is “addictive” and “mind-altering.” So is coffee. Shall we give our overlords the power to limit our consumption of those things as well?
Here is a little tidbit for you: Hardly any “mind-altering” substance you have been programmed to fear is as dangerous as you have been told it is. Have you ever tried one?
If you really want to control how people consume “dangerous” substances, then why don’t you try controlling their consumption of alcohol?
Of course we haven’t had politics for a long time.