Moderates United

I read Jill Stein is collecting more, and yet more, money to ask for recounts in three States where there is no evidence of fraud whatever.  The closest count was in Michigan, where Trump won by more than 10,000 votes, and that has been counted twice.

This is unprecedented in the modern era.  Nothing like it happened in the 20th Century, and as I said, Gore only asked for a recount in Florida, where it was extremely close.

PARTICULARLY given that Hillary made a campaign issue out of accepting the results of the election, the hypocrisy stinks to the high heavens.  It is unbelievable.  At a minimum, she is not making public appearances telling people to go home and accept the election the way she said was right and proper when she thought it was Trump who would be doing the losing.

This whole thing is destabilizing, and the opposite of graceful reconciliation.  Jill Stein is showing herself a partisan, unpatriotic hack. I have had a few nice things to say about her.  I retract those.  She has nothing to offer anyone, if this is how she stands on “principle”.  She is a shallow, disingenuous, self interested nobody.

And again, imagine if a different result occurs, perhaps by them stuffing unattended ballot boxes with fake Trump ballots, to enable them to fraudulently claim fraud? I think literal fighting in the streets, with real death tolls, is not beyond the pale.  We used the ballot box to fight our war, and we won.  To have it taken now for any reason will not be pleasant.  It will mean the government no longer belongs to the people.

These assholes should stop all of this right now.  It seems likely all of it is in any event useless, but it is certainly unprecedented, destabilizing, and the opposite of what THEY THEMSELVES proclaimed proper behavior.  Their lies are on full display for all to see.  No genuinely decent human being can any longer associate themselves with such a classless, disrespectful, whiny, contentious, criminal enterprise as the Democrat Party.

It’s not at all impossible that Democrats can still ballot stuff enough boxes in these “recounts” to influence the election.  As long as they want to pull these bullshit stunts, I think Trump ought to target States he lost, like Virginia, and any other states where it is likely many illegals voted, and ask for recounts within the timelines allowed.  It is conceivable that the Democrats could still pull off massive fraud–and I want to point out they are the only ones who have ever, to my knowledge, been credibly accused of it–and get the votes they need after the deadlines for recounts have run out in other States.

I don’t know all the details, but it is fucking obvious that these assclowns are doing exactly what would have horrified them if it had been done by Trump and his supporters, and they are doing something which has never been done in modern American political history.

My feeling is if they pulled it off somehow, many of them would die in the streets.  They think they are tough, but the people with combat experience and most of the guns will be filled with a rage that will not be quenched through pleas for calm, or fear of a law which will show itself as being useless and vitiated if we put Hillary in office.

It is astonishing to me–well, not really–that the same people who mocked conservatives for believing in rigged elections, and who excoriated Trump for refusing to say if he would accept the results of the election, are now doing all of the things they said should not be done, and they are doing it without a SHRED of recollection of propaganda memes they were repeating with enthusiasm three weeks ago.

What the Democrats have become really is emotionally and intellectually unwell. They are sick in their spirits.  Trump was honest: he said let’s see how things turn out.  Hillary was DISHONEST, in that she said absolutely, categorically she would accept the results without question, and yet has made no effort to call off the people trying to undo the election, as if a 5 million signature petition to State Electors should mean shit when over a 100 million people just voted.

In my lifetime, there has NEVER been a more sustained and organized to overturn the results of an election.  In 2000, it really was very, very close.  But even in that case they were not calling for recounts in multiple States as the Democrats are, and there was ZERO effort to influence the Electors. They did not even play into it.

I try to be patient. I try to pretend these people honestly believe that they believe something.  But the fact is they don’t.  They have no core beliefs.  There are no ideas which are sacred, other than conformity itself.  By the tens of thousands they blogged about how awful it was that Trump would not agree to accept the election results, and how wonderful and responsible it was that Hillary did.

Then they get a result they don’t want, and ALL OF THIS is forgotten instantly.

I have said often I cannot fit my mind into boxes that small, but it is worse: to be on board with these clowns, I would have to systematically transfer my consciousness from one small box to another regularly, all while claiming that was where I was all along. I would have to forget where I was, and avoid thinking about the fact that I would likely soon need to move.

None of this is consistent with mental health.

From time to time, despite your best efforts at misery and woe, the tides will toss you moments of genuine grace, contentment, and joy.  When this happens, pay attention.  These are the seeds of genuine wisdom.  They come and go at their pleasure, but you can make their acquaintance in the process.

I have tried to do Gratitude exercises repeatedly, but they are swamped in the face of underlying negative emotions, underlying tensions, which I have found only give up their grip with focus and conscious unwinding.

But we are all blessed–admittedly very rarely for many of us–with the real deal, with genuine gratitude.  Pay attention when this happens.  Do not force these feelings, and certainly do not try and conjure these feelings.  Regard them like a deer that has happened on your lawn in the early morning.  Be gentle.  Be calm.  Be welcoming.  And when it leaves, reflect on what happened.  You have been gifted a small wisdom, a small spark, that over time can be turned into an enduring flame of, perhaps restless, but real well being.

I was talking with my oldest about the limits of free speech.  Some of you will recall a time when even Democrats would defend the right of the KKK to march in public, to express its views in public.  There was a particularly controversial march I recall as being in Skokie, Illinois.

Most college kids would say that there is a range, but we should not accept anyone outside that range.  My point was this: how can you engage in dialogue, and help evolve, people with whom you refuse to speak, and whose opinions you systematically denigrate and shut out of the public conversation?

Let us say someone IS a KKK member.  They have perhaps 5,000 members in this country.  What benefit accrues to the world, to society, to decency, when you shout them down and tell them they can’t talk, that their opinions are completely wrong, that they are evil and should die?

Do you change their minds?  No, in most cases, they will cling to them more tightly.  No conversation happened.  No meeting of the minds, no baring of the souls.

The intent of the Left, of course, is to give the shouting-down the power of law, such that non-conformists are arrested and hauled away to someplace they can’t talk any more.  This breeds fear, of course, which is their intent, but what it does not breed is social integration, openness, spontaneity, or the social complexity which alone enables GENUINE social evolution.  What it is, of course, is a retrogression to the Salem Witch Trials, or the Spanish Inquisition, or to any other social form which brooked no difference, and which punished it with death.

Genuine emotional intelligence WELCOMES the expression even of hateful views.  People can be influenced.  It may take time.  It may take generations, but influence is the only way in which REAL change happens in a world which is not a shitty disaster filled with people foaming at the mouth and a terrified populace living in the “dark” world the Left so easily projected onto Trump.

It has no doubt occurred to the authoritarian minds who represent the core of the current professional Left, that they could compile lists of names from social media and systematically discriminate against them.  The overt pretext would be the conflation of Trump support and racism and other -isms which in this present world constitute dissidence/deviance/non-compliance.

Logically, as objects of systemic discrimination, the remedy in the current world would be either judicial protection, or if we want to take the logic of the Left and use it against it, some form of Affirmative Action in places like universities which are systematically lacking in diversity.

Given the cauldrons of pernicious indoctrination so many of our public schools have become, I personally would support the latter option.

Consider this: it is certainly the case that people who lack practical talent, and lack professional grade social skills both gravitate to academia, and to Leftism.  But consider also that the practical necessity of conformity in any university career to the social norms of one’s colleagues is absolute, and you get a system which is virtually guaranteed to exclude conservatives.  On the one hand, conservatives shun such careers because they know they will be hated, and on the other only Leftists can count on promotions and tenure.  There is a both a self selection process and an institutional selection process.

The likelihood of being either forced to hide my politics for a long period of time, or to face an inability to get a good tenured job, was one of the factors which played into my own decision not to continue graduate school in the Humanities.

Republicans in many quarters literally are pariahs.  We are discriminated against, to the extent possible.  We are being beaten in the streets by people who proclaim love and practice extraordinarily prejudicial violence.

Now is the time for such policies.  Trump can simply declare that universities receiving public money must demonstrate a commitment to ideological and cultural diversity.

If you are not often on the edge of fucking up, you are likely complacent. If you are not aware of this, you likely lack the humility to hear what is being whispered in your ear.

I try not to focus on trivia, but thought I might throw my two cents in and say I watched what the main guy said, and it was not insult, or particularly demeaning or awful.  I think, as I said, that the paradigm from which it came–that Trump is intolerant and that Obama IS tolerant–is misguided and wrong, but my goodness I don’t want us to start acting like the whiny crybabies on the Left.  Let it go.  It wasn’t that bad.  It really wasn’t.  For a New Yorker in front of a New York audience, it was in fact quite mild and even-tempered.

They called on Pence to stand up for ALL Americans.  Can they honestly claim to believe, without guilt or a long list of qualifiers, that Obama or the Democrats generally, have stood up for ALL Americans?  No, they have stood up for a series of special interest groups, which all together still do not constitute a majority of Americans.

Look at the red on the Electoral Map.  Those are the Americans who feel Obama and the Democrats failed to stand up for them. On the contrary, they felt it their duty to stand up TO them, to people who feel no shame in patriotism, or the path of our history, or in traditional families, or belief in God and the Christian faith, in hard work, personal responsibility, and the huge importance of political freedom.

To paraphrase James Watt, if we got two trannies, a queer, 3 jews, 5 blacks, a cripple, someone with an IQ under 50, a spastic, 2 each of @black women, @asian women, @hispanic women, @white women, and ALL OF THEM THINK THE SAME, we have a room full of drones, still.  There is no meaningful diversity.

Politically, the diversity that MATTERS is thinking differently, approaching problems differently, coming from differing cultures we do not have to apologize for.

Trump, unlike Obama, will in my view stand for all Americans.  It’s about damn time somebody did.

Edit: as I think about it, is literally seems to be the underlying thought process that you can commodify difference, that it is a measurable thing, and not something much more subtle, such as the difference in personalities between two sisters.

I had a related bigger thought today I am going to need to mull over a bit, and likely smoke on.

I see the list of Electors in the States which did not swing Hillary has been published, and death threats are being made against some of them.  One, I would hope that the police are getting involved, because any threat against ANYONE, much less someone performing a role within government, is illegal.  Terroristic threatening should be punished, punished massively and punished publicly through announced arrests.

Second, though, even in the highly unlikely event this violence is making people more, not less, likely to change their votes, Trump could easily present a credible case that the election was unfairly influenced by organized, illegal activity, which could potentially be prosecuted under RICO.  Their threats are most likely going to have the effect of increasing the relish with which the Electors will vote Trump, but will in any event become a separate factor in the lawsuits which would undoubtedly follow an unprecedented Elector coup d’etat.