I was lucky enough to read Abbie Hoffman's 'Steal the Book' as part of Modern American History at U of I, which led me to Saul Alinsky's 'Rule for Radicals'. That was 40 years ago, and the books were 10 years old then. They lay out pretty much the exact script that the Left does for every issue.
I have been amazed at the lack of creativity of the Leftists over time. They do the same thing over and over again. Wilmette recently decided to fly a Trans promotion flag as part of the Village flag display and declared everyone who objected to promoting chopping off our kids body parts to be haters and bigots. Then claimed that they were supporting a marginalized community by making an official Village policy of imposing their (bizarre) political views on everyone else.
They do the same thing every time
1) Make really ridiculous demands
2) Declare everyone who objects to their demand racists etc
3) Make their ridiculous demands official policy, or else the rule makers are racist/homophobes/bigots etc
Look at how Northwestern just followed the script with the freak protesters at Deering. NU gave in, paying a ransom to the freaks, and they still didn't leave the Deering Meadow.
And the general public falls for it again, and again and again, though it is nice to see some pushback against the College Marxists promoting terrorists.
There is commonality amongst the ever unsatisfied and protesting leftists not just amongst the subject matter, and the dupes who support them, but also their financial supporters and the elites.
The crazies went to school for years to perfect their anti-Israel and anti-Semitic plan that is being executed by paid outside agitators with substantial logistical support. Tents, coolers, flags, food, and drink.
The leftist administrations of America's once fine universities have zero leadership talent or ability and thus are overwhelmed by what would have been a "spanking and put to bed without supper" discipline in a former time. We should never have abandoned spakings. This is all the result of "time out" as family discipline.
There have to be outside agitators because this current breed of college student is so feckless and soft. They have to be driven and they are amiable with craziness.
Of course these are the same students -- and their predecessors -- who Biden paid off their college loans. That seems pretty damn stupid in retrospect.
Parting shot -- the terror implications of the open Southern border are beyond belief. In what world have our enemies not taken advantage of that open border to infiltrate terrorists? Remember Russian sleeper cells?
It's Bugs Bunny being completely obnoxious and violent with Elmer Fudd,.
Then Bugs puts on a granny outfit and pair of glasses and exclaims 'you wouldn't hit an old lady with glasses', to which Elmer gives in and gets assaulted again by Bugs.
Very well said. We are in very dangerous territory. Particularly due to the dangerous surveillance powers that Congress just gave the Obama-aligned deep state secret police. Maybe the mushy midwit liberal Obama worshippers can save us.
The Left’s transition has gone so far that they’re losing their own base. They’re left of left and this explains complicit support for the campus takeovers and more explicitly their open border policy. Core Democratic strongholds have turned and the Left has to buy votes via illegal immigration. The rampant expansion of urban decay even has the horrible leadership in cities like Chicago, NYC, and Denver rethinking their programs as it’s clear the Democrat machine has lost touch at the Federal level.
Once again, when they started hamding out ribbons for 12th place, the road to destruction was illuminated. The Left’s takeover of public schools has stolen our soul.
Great observations Mr Carter! Government has never been the solution to anything! What's the Reagan pull quote? "Scariest words in the English language, we're from the government and we're here to help!" Growing up in the tail end of the 60's with an SDS hippy older sister, I got to hear there warmed over totalitarian Marxist BS first hand! We're living under this reality, the counter culture is now the establishment, with an insatiable lust for power/control! Democrats and half the go-along get-along Republicans are so corrupt they don't know what it is they're killing. The ends always justifies their means! I pray for the country!
Back in the 60s, early 70s the Left spoke more openly. One of they said is that their greatest enemy was the "liberal establishment." Apparently they were offended by America's willingness to help the poor and minorities removing the incentives to violent revolution. And violent revolution is what they have as a goal.
"They hate freedom and capitalism. The US is the beacon of it and by every shred of evidence, it works pretty damn well. We have over 200 years of history that shows it works significantly better than any other place on earth or any form of government that has been tried since mankind walked the earth."
And why does it work?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.-- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,"
Not just any powers that sound good to us, but just powers ... powers that do not work against the reason government is instituted: to secure these rights.
When strictly respected, this sets limits upon our government operatives in their ability to reach into our lives - to "first, do no harm" as Hippocrates put it - and instead focuses their attention on the relative few, one-size-fits-all tasks where government's human operatives have the capability of reliably getting the answers right.
It neutralizes identity politics. It is respectful of all spiritual worldviews that are compatible with it, instead of giving one faith (that happens to see its gods in their mirrors) exclusive access to our institutions for its spread.
And strict allegiance to it maximizes the amount of distributed intellect applied to our problem-solving processes - engaging millions of people with common sense and proximity-informed insight that a "little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital" CAN'T possess - by incentivizing the responsible exercise of individual initiative instead of expecting government to solve one's problems FOR them and therefore submitting to its operatives.
But that does not always align with the socio-economic morality and sense of self-importance possessed by those who insist that their way is the One True Way and seek to disrupt our lives until we submit.
I have more than once said to a liberal politician:"Please do me a favor-don't do me any favors anymore", because their self-proclaimed self-righteousness and indignation and condescending arrogance prevents them from ever believing that it's okay to help someone to help themselves rather than just giving and walking away, which seems to be the Democrats' solution to almost every problem. When you provide opportunities, then those with motivation have been given an additional impetus to lift themselves up, but by not giving it away and having to earn it, you separate the wheat from the chaff.
One of the biggest problems on the far left is that they refuse to acknowledge that the extremists resorting to violence on their side of the political aisle have exponentially grown to outnumber the extremists on the right who present a threat by a factor of 20 or 30 at a minimum, just in the past decade. See summer of 2020 City riots.
The DNC in Chicago this summer will be an absolute s*** show, because we have a mayor, mayor BJ, who is not only far left, but is ineffective and will try to placate protesters and end up self-destructing by doing so.
We have a President, who during his State of the Union address, rather than confirming numbers with Israel where he could have gotten the truth, he just took mainstream media's reports, that took at face value fatality numbers stated by a known proclaimed terrorist organization that has now admitted to the Statistics Department of the nation of Great Britain that their figures are pretty much full of crap. Instead of 33,000 it's actually 22,000 because "we have 11,000 we can't account for".
Additionally, in the same time period since October 7th, more than 4,000 residents of Gaza would have died of natural causes based on averages and the terrorists do not differentiate between deaths from natural causes during wartime and deaths from combat.
Since Israel's military has killed 13,000 terrorists that means fewer than 5,000 civilians have been killed in this war.
Keep in mind, the erroneous report originally attributing Israel attacking a hospital earlier in the war that resulted in 500 deaths according to Hamas was actually the result of a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket that killed only 50 in a parking lot, not a hospital, and those numbers have never been revised downward by Hamas and the Gaza News Agency. That reduces fatalities by another 450.
Additionally, we have pictures and videos of the terrorists themselves posting on social media women and children holding rifles and engaged in combat and some of these children are not even teenagers yet, so to condemn the deaths of women and children in this battle is sheer folly. Their entire education curriculum centers around teaching hatred and must be changed or you're fighting a losing battle against terrorism.
Historically, Wars fought in urban landscapes are much more difficult and have higher fatality rates than other Wars, yet this is the first war in our lifetime in which more enemy combatants have been killed than civilians and yet you don't read that almost anywhere in the mainstream media and we have an ignoramus in the White House who should be pressing that and pushing that, to diminish the ignorance expressed by college students, but is afraid to do anything less than pander to his perceived voter demographic base. That is evidence of astonishing incompetence and obvious bias.
The most recent humanitarian aid truck to go to Gaza was hijacked yesterday by Hamas.
All the humanitarian aid that has been given to them for decades has been misappropriated, with material that was supposed to be used for water piping dedicated instead to building rocket launchers.
When will the Democrats call this out, if ever?
To condemn a military of a Nation defending itself against terrorists,which was the victim of an atrocious and heinous terrorist attack, when the ratio of enemy combatants killed versus civilians is 13,000 to 4500, and even the United Nations and Brown University State the average ratio is the reverse, is the height of ignorance and hypocrisy.
This nation's in a lot of trouble if Joe Biden gets reelected.
The Democrats cheat by taking inner city votes, where they have 80% to 85% of the votes and increase it by 5 to 10% in states where that's enough in the biggest cities to offset the majority in all other areas of the state and if you do the numbers, you can see evidence of that. If we do not address that, and the early returns of absentee ballots, then they will cheat their way to victory again. Those are just facts.
-->"Many liberals I know are trying to find a path to walk. Their psyche and stomach cannot take it if they vote for a Republican."<--
I attribute this dilemma to Team Sport Politics: My team wins, your team loses, by any means necessary, including changing the rules and moving the goal posts.
The concept entails belonging, affinity, identity, community. The voting dilemma, effectively partisan, challenges this concept. One's community is where personal responsibility and accountability occur--where respect is earned and given. Hence, identity and affinity. To abandon where one belongs is to be cast adrift at sea, alone and vulnerable, at odds with instincts for survival where the ties that bind, the bonds of social trust, are community, i.e., family and friends, clan and tribe.
These, of course, are the attributes that turns community into a crowd, and a crowd into a mob.
The result of voting is at a distance, with outcomes diffuse, but the act of voting is visceral--present and immediate in one's conscience, one's psyche, one's stomach. Likely, these subconscious effects are the cause of a significant amount of 'not voting' among the public.
You said "It’s the same undercurrent that exists..." I would argue it's not the same undercurrent; it's the same groups and people. It is all about what I call "Critical Woke Theory." I posted an article that, in part, states:
"Critical woke theory, emerging as an offshoot of broader critical and social theories, represents a distinct movement within contemporary socio-political thought. Characterized by a profound oikophobia, it exhibits an aversion or hostility towards the cultural and societal norms of one's own community. In the specific context of this theory, the 'community' refers to Western capitalist democracies, which are perceived as the primary sources of systemic oppression..."
Two Points. First, why Libs will NEVER side with the right, even though they are being eaten by the Left. They have been brain washed since they were in short britches that conservatives/Republicans are racists/homophobes/bigots, yada, yada yada. In their minds, there is NOTHING worse than being called a Republican or a conservative. Remember, these folks don't think, they feel. Therefore, since their ENTIRE view of themselves is of someone who "cares" for the poor, the blacks, the whatever oppressed group AND they really believe that us conservatives would actually love to see all those groups not only suffer but die, they will NEVER be able to come over and do the right thing. Need proof? In NYC and Chicago, just recently, they had an opportunity to replace two really awful, commie mayors with someone slightly less mentally disturbed. But in both cases, they went with same (NYC) and worse (Chicago). Being a Lib is who they ARE, not how they vote. You can't change someone's identity.
Second. About high speed rail in China vs. the US. Yes, property rights are a big difference. But I would argue that a much more important factor is population density. They have it and we don't. That is why HS rail or the subway or trains only make sense in dense cities like NYC, Chicago and SF. We simply don't have that many cities with enough density to make trains make sense. China is chock full of cities with populations north of 10 million.
Thanks. BTW, do you still think we are going to wake up to an S&P around 3500 one of these days?
I would add corporations, roughly companies of more than 100 employees - to collectivist haters of capitalism (paradoxically).
Re: violence of these "protests" - or, rather, riots. They have escalated to physical violence, not just to tents on a lawn. There are people attacked and injured (some critically) by these mobs. There are stockpiled arms and gas masks discovered by police in the occupied buildings.
Re: election: as someone noted in threads to NYPost: not the party who collects more votes but the one who counts. The question is: is the lesson of the last 4 yrs learned or not. I'd love to be optimistic, but - again, from the reaction (inaction) to pandemic loss of freedoms - I can not be.
Re: the infamous photo: a quote from someone X - the caption should be "Free Palestine! Free pizza!"
Thank you for saying these riots are not '68 protests - but also that agitators and instigators are the same radicals, professional leftie "revolutionaries", with the same ultimate goal of destroying Western civilization. And let's not forget - USA won the Vietnam war on the ground, but gave in to the pressure of "protests" and withdrew, and later didn't provide sufficient support for the South government, with predictable results.
Not only did the US win the Vietnam War it could have been won much more effectively, completely, and without the loss of 58K lives if it had been fought like we had fought WWII, that is, with a "total war" approach. If we had carried the war, particularly the air campaign, to the North, the war would have been over before it started. By telling the Commies that we would not cross the DMZ we took away the most effective deterrent available to any combatant, that is, the ability to impose your will on the opponent's population.
Winning a war is about accomplishing two things. Pulverize your opponent until he has no will to fight or pulverize your opponent until he no longer has the ability to fight. Some repeated carpet bombing of Hanoi and a few other population centers in the North would have accomplished the former.
I know this is ancient history but since this is an argument I was having in 8th grade civics class in 1973 with my commie teacher and haven't really made it since, I had to indulge.
I was lucky enough to read Abbie Hoffman's 'Steal the Book' as part of Modern American History at U of I, which led me to Saul Alinsky's 'Rule for Radicals'. That was 40 years ago, and the books were 10 years old then. They lay out pretty much the exact script that the Left does for every issue.
I have been amazed at the lack of creativity of the Leftists over time. They do the same thing over and over again. Wilmette recently decided to fly a Trans promotion flag as part of the Village flag display and declared everyone who objected to promoting chopping off our kids body parts to be haters and bigots. Then claimed that they were supporting a marginalized community by making an official Village policy of imposing their (bizarre) political views on everyone else.
They do the same thing every time
1) Make really ridiculous demands
2) Declare everyone who objects to their demand racists etc
3) Make their ridiculous demands official policy, or else the rule makers are racist/homophobes/bigots etc
Look at how Northwestern just followed the script with the freak protesters at Deering. NU gave in, paying a ransom to the freaks, and they still didn't leave the Deering Meadow.
And the general public falls for it again, and again and again, though it is nice to see some pushback against the College Marxists promoting terrorists.
It’s the same undercurrent that exists in the dedicated bike lane crowd, too.
If pedaling a bike on a busy city street is your thing, then move to Beijing. And yes Jeff, anyone who votes Democrat is a Marxist. End of story.
There is commonality amongst the ever unsatisfied and protesting leftists not just amongst the subject matter, and the dupes who support them, but also their financial supporters and the elites.
The crazies went to school for years to perfect their anti-Israel and anti-Semitic plan that is being executed by paid outside agitators with substantial logistical support. Tents, coolers, flags, food, and drink.
The leftist administrations of America's once fine universities have zero leadership talent or ability and thus are overwhelmed by what would have been a "spanking and put to bed without supper" discipline in a former time. We should never have abandoned spakings. This is all the result of "time out" as family discipline.
There have to be outside agitators because this current breed of college student is so feckless and soft. They have to be driven and they are amiable with craziness.
Of course these are the same students -- and their predecessors -- who Biden paid off their college loans. That seems pretty damn stupid in retrospect.
Parting shot -- the terror implications of the open Southern border are beyond belief. In what world have our enemies not taken advantage of that open border to infiltrate terrorists? Remember Russian sleeper cells?
God bless us all.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
Right, the border....relegated to the middle of the newspaper now. It's not the current thing anymore
When the shitheads reveal their game plan, we need to believe them. Rules for Radicals is the plan.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
It's Bugs Bunny being completely obnoxious and violent with Elmer Fudd,.
Then Bugs puts on a granny outfit and pair of glasses and exclaims 'you wouldn't hit an old lady with glasses', to which Elmer gives in and gets assaulted again by Bugs.
Our Republicans are the Elmer Fudds here.
Very well said. We are in very dangerous territory. Particularly due to the dangerous surveillance powers that Congress just gave the Obama-aligned deep state secret police. Maybe the mushy midwit liberal Obama worshippers can save us.
The tech enabled monitoring leads right to George Orwell's 1984 or Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451
That seems to be the plan.
Jihad Joe and his team are some sickos and may be getting kickbacks from CAIR, Soros, and the Mullahs
Tides Foundation, funded by the Pritzkers.....
The Left’s transition has gone so far that they’re losing their own base. They’re left of left and this explains complicit support for the campus takeovers and more explicitly their open border policy. Core Democratic strongholds have turned and the Left has to buy votes via illegal immigration. The rampant expansion of urban decay even has the horrible leadership in cities like Chicago, NYC, and Denver rethinking their programs as it’s clear the Democrat machine has lost touch at the Federal level.
Once again, when they started hamding out ribbons for 12th place, the road to destruction was illuminated. The Left’s takeover of public schools has stolen our soul.
Great observations Mr Carter! Government has never been the solution to anything! What's the Reagan pull quote? "Scariest words in the English language, we're from the government and we're here to help!" Growing up in the tail end of the 60's with an SDS hippy older sister, I got to hear there warmed over totalitarian Marxist BS first hand! We're living under this reality, the counter culture is now the establishment, with an insatiable lust for power/control! Democrats and half the go-along get-along Republicans are so corrupt they don't know what it is they're killing. The ends always justifies their means! I pray for the country!
Back in the 60s, early 70s the Left spoke more openly. One of they said is that their greatest enemy was the "liberal establishment." Apparently they were offended by America's willingness to help the poor and minorities removing the incentives to violent revolution. And violent revolution is what they have as a goal.
"They hate freedom and capitalism. The US is the beacon of it and by every shred of evidence, it works pretty damn well. We have over 200 years of history that shows it works significantly better than any other place on earth or any form of government that has been tried since mankind walked the earth."
And why does it work?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.-- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,"
Not just any powers that sound good to us, but just powers ... powers that do not work against the reason government is instituted: to secure these rights.
When strictly respected, this sets limits upon our government operatives in their ability to reach into our lives - to "first, do no harm" as Hippocrates put it - and instead focuses their attention on the relative few, one-size-fits-all tasks where government's human operatives have the capability of reliably getting the answers right.
It neutralizes identity politics. It is respectful of all spiritual worldviews that are compatible with it, instead of giving one faith (that happens to see its gods in their mirrors) exclusive access to our institutions for its spread.
And strict allegiance to it maximizes the amount of distributed intellect applied to our problem-solving processes - engaging millions of people with common sense and proximity-informed insight that a "little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital" CAN'T possess - by incentivizing the responsible exercise of individual initiative instead of expecting government to solve one's problems FOR them and therefore submitting to its operatives.
But that does not always align with the socio-economic morality and sense of self-importance possessed by those who insist that their way is the One True Way and seek to disrupt our lives until we submit.
Exactly. Of course, we have to respect each other....and since Marxists do not respect me I harbor the exact same feelings of disgust for them
I have more than once said to a liberal politician:"Please do me a favor-don't do me any favors anymore", because their self-proclaimed self-righteousness and indignation and condescending arrogance prevents them from ever believing that it's okay to help someone to help themselves rather than just giving and walking away, which seems to be the Democrats' solution to almost every problem. When you provide opportunities, then those with motivation have been given an additional impetus to lift themselves up, but by not giving it away and having to earn it, you separate the wheat from the chaff.
One of the biggest problems on the far left is that they refuse to acknowledge that the extremists resorting to violence on their side of the political aisle have exponentially grown to outnumber the extremists on the right who present a threat by a factor of 20 or 30 at a minimum, just in the past decade. See summer of 2020 City riots.
The DNC in Chicago this summer will be an absolute s*** show, because we have a mayor, mayor BJ, who is not only far left, but is ineffective and will try to placate protesters and end up self-destructing by doing so.
We have a President, who during his State of the Union address, rather than confirming numbers with Israel where he could have gotten the truth, he just took mainstream media's reports, that took at face value fatality numbers stated by a known proclaimed terrorist organization that has now admitted to the Statistics Department of the nation of Great Britain that their figures are pretty much full of crap. Instead of 33,000 it's actually 22,000 because "we have 11,000 we can't account for".
Additionally, in the same time period since October 7th, more than 4,000 residents of Gaza would have died of natural causes based on averages and the terrorists do not differentiate between deaths from natural causes during wartime and deaths from combat.
Since Israel's military has killed 13,000 terrorists that means fewer than 5,000 civilians have been killed in this war.
Keep in mind, the erroneous report originally attributing Israel attacking a hospital earlier in the war that resulted in 500 deaths according to Hamas was actually the result of a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket that killed only 50 in a parking lot, not a hospital, and those numbers have never been revised downward by Hamas and the Gaza News Agency. That reduces fatalities by another 450.
Additionally, we have pictures and videos of the terrorists themselves posting on social media women and children holding rifles and engaged in combat and some of these children are not even teenagers yet, so to condemn the deaths of women and children in this battle is sheer folly. Their entire education curriculum centers around teaching hatred and must be changed or you're fighting a losing battle against terrorism.
Historically, Wars fought in urban landscapes are much more difficult and have higher fatality rates than other Wars, yet this is the first war in our lifetime in which more enemy combatants have been killed than civilians and yet you don't read that almost anywhere in the mainstream media and we have an ignoramus in the White House who should be pressing that and pushing that, to diminish the ignorance expressed by college students, but is afraid to do anything less than pander to his perceived voter demographic base. That is evidence of astonishing incompetence and obvious bias.
The most recent humanitarian aid truck to go to Gaza was hijacked yesterday by Hamas.
All the humanitarian aid that has been given to them for decades has been misappropriated, with material that was supposed to be used for water piping dedicated instead to building rocket launchers.
When will the Democrats call this out, if ever?
To condemn a military of a Nation defending itself against terrorists,which was the victim of an atrocious and heinous terrorist attack, when the ratio of enemy combatants killed versus civilians is 13,000 to 4500, and even the United Nations and Brown University State the average ratio is the reverse, is the height of ignorance and hypocrisy.
This nation's in a lot of trouble if Joe Biden gets reelected.
The Democrats cheat by taking inner city votes, where they have 80% to 85% of the votes and increase it by 5 to 10% in states where that's enough in the biggest cities to offset the majority in all other areas of the state and if you do the numbers, you can see evidence of that. If we do not address that, and the early returns of absentee ballots, then they will cheat their way to victory again. Those are just facts.
-->"Many liberals I know are trying to find a path to walk. Their psyche and stomach cannot take it if they vote for a Republican."<--
I attribute this dilemma to Team Sport Politics: My team wins, your team loses, by any means necessary, including changing the rules and moving the goal posts.
The concept entails belonging, affinity, identity, community. The voting dilemma, effectively partisan, challenges this concept. One's community is where personal responsibility and accountability occur--where respect is earned and given. Hence, identity and affinity. To abandon where one belongs is to be cast adrift at sea, alone and vulnerable, at odds with instincts for survival where the ties that bind, the bonds of social trust, are community, i.e., family and friends, clan and tribe.
These, of course, are the attributes that turns community into a crowd, and a crowd into a mob.
The result of voting is at a distance, with outcomes diffuse, but the act of voting is visceral--present and immediate in one's conscience, one's psyche, one's stomach. Likely, these subconscious effects are the cause of a significant amount of 'not voting' among the public.
Yes, and confirmation bias
Looks like the police at UT Austin responded by any means necessary. It’s really strange that the woke is response has been a big “how dare they!”
You said "It’s the same undercurrent that exists..." I would argue it's not the same undercurrent; it's the same groups and people. It is all about what I call "Critical Woke Theory." I posted an article that, in part, states:
"Critical woke theory, emerging as an offshoot of broader critical and social theories, represents a distinct movement within contemporary socio-political thought. Characterized by a profound oikophobia, it exhibits an aversion or hostility towards the cultural and societal norms of one's own community. In the specific context of this theory, the 'community' refers to Western capitalist democracies, which are perceived as the primary sources of systemic oppression..."
Two Points. First, why Libs will NEVER side with the right, even though they are being eaten by the Left. They have been brain washed since they were in short britches that conservatives/Republicans are racists/homophobes/bigots, yada, yada yada. In their minds, there is NOTHING worse than being called a Republican or a conservative. Remember, these folks don't think, they feel. Therefore, since their ENTIRE view of themselves is of someone who "cares" for the poor, the blacks, the whatever oppressed group AND they really believe that us conservatives would actually love to see all those groups not only suffer but die, they will NEVER be able to come over and do the right thing. Need proof? In NYC and Chicago, just recently, they had an opportunity to replace two really awful, commie mayors with someone slightly less mentally disturbed. But in both cases, they went with same (NYC) and worse (Chicago). Being a Lib is who they ARE, not how they vote. You can't change someone's identity.
Second. About high speed rail in China vs. the US. Yes, property rights are a big difference. But I would argue that a much more important factor is population density. They have it and we don't. That is why HS rail or the subway or trains only make sense in dense cities like NYC, Chicago and SF. We simply don't have that many cities with enough density to make trains make sense. China is chock full of cities with populations north of 10 million.
Thanks. BTW, do you still think we are going to wake up to an S&P around 3500 one of these days?
I would add corporations, roughly companies of more than 100 employees - to collectivist haters of capitalism (paradoxically).
Re: violence of these "protests" - or, rather, riots. They have escalated to physical violence, not just to tents on a lawn. There are people attacked and injured (some critically) by these mobs. There are stockpiled arms and gas masks discovered by police in the occupied buildings.
Re: election: as someone noted in threads to NYPost: not the party who collects more votes but the one who counts. The question is: is the lesson of the last 4 yrs learned or not. I'd love to be optimistic, but - again, from the reaction (inaction) to pandemic loss of freedoms - I can not be.
Re: the infamous photo: a quote from someone X - the caption should be "Free Palestine! Free pizza!"
Thank you for saying these riots are not '68 protests - but also that agitators and instigators are the same radicals, professional leftie "revolutionaries", with the same ultimate goal of destroying Western civilization. And let's not forget - USA won the Vietnam war on the ground, but gave in to the pressure of "protests" and withdrew, and later didn't provide sufficient support for the South government, with predictable results.
Not only did the US win the Vietnam War it could have been won much more effectively, completely, and without the loss of 58K lives if it had been fought like we had fought WWII, that is, with a "total war" approach. If we had carried the war, particularly the air campaign, to the North, the war would have been over before it started. By telling the Commies that we would not cross the DMZ we took away the most effective deterrent available to any combatant, that is, the ability to impose your will on the opponent's population.
Winning a war is about accomplishing two things. Pulverize your opponent until he has no will to fight or pulverize your opponent until he no longer has the ability to fight. Some repeated carpet bombing of Hanoi and a few other population centers in the North would have accomplished the former.
I know this is ancient history but since this is an argument I was having in 8th grade civics class in 1973 with my commie teacher and haven't really made it since, I had to indulge.
We have to stop shrugging. When HIllary Clinton shouted, "What difference does it make?" we know now exactly ignoring it is making a difference.