Here, Weinstein is effectively saying guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Unfortunately, guns, as a fairly effective method of killing people, allow people who want to kill people to kill more people quickly. If there was an effective way to rid the country of all guns by banning them, it would be a good idea, but there isn’t (criminals will still have them), so it isn’t a good idea. We can scrap the H-1B visa program, however, and we can ban migrants from India from the country. We can disarm employers who seek to injure the American worker by importing foreign labor on the cheap.

Vivek says America’s founding fathers sacrificed their honor before their lives. Little slips like this tell you a lot about a person. He’s always comparing himself to America’s founding fathers because that is how he would behave in their shoes (if he actually wore any). America’s founding fathers risked their lives for their honor, not their honor for their lives. Their way of life is totally foreign to someone like Ramaswamy, who will do and say literally anything to get ahead.

It is important to realize that a large number of Republican lawmakers still see Trump as a bad dream from which the ‘Party of Reagan’ will soon wake up, even if they aren’t always forthcoming about this. They want to take us back to the ‘respectable’ Republican politics of Bush, McCain, and Mitt Romney, which is for them, the rerum naturae and not just the status quo ante. Young right-wingers have hardly known any other political landscape other than that dominated by Trump and are unable to see it for the exception that it is.

Just an astounding line.

Why is pinesap mogging?

There is something great and profound about Western man that should cause him to hesitate before mocking victims for their misfortune and recoil at those that would. This tendency is sometimes (errantly) given the title of “slave morality.” It isn’t just about winning the elections are being seen in public as a “victor” who brings repute to one’s family instead of a “victim” who brings embarrassment, but winning in the right way. Status is not the most important thing; there is a moral world behind appearance, behind etiquette and naked ambition. Western man feels as if he can lose before men and nonetheless win before God and that the approval of the latter is always worth more than that of the former. This is something like grace and magnanimity, but it is not just the desire to distinguish oneself from the crude and insecure rival and plebeian that accounts for it. It is borne of a deep compassion and humanism, a private conscience, that European man already had, at least in part, before his conversion to Christianity. The Stoics believed in an “inner citadel” of the soul free from the court of public opinion. Socrates went to his grave and was executed by the Athenian state at the advice of his Daemonion. There has always been an interiority to Occidental man that distinguishes him from Oriental man; it is the difference between shame and guilt that divides East from West.

The most vital types are, unfortunately, those foreign hordes of barbarians who would seek to lay waste to the West and build nothing better in its place.

Some of the least surprising news of all time.

The distinction between man and the animal for Nietzsche is that the animal, guileless and red in beak and claw, has yet to convince itself that it is not a creature of instinct. It is man who thinks himself a free actor who draws from the supra-sensuous reservoirs of good, evil, strength, and weakness, in realizing or failing to realize his instincts. Put more precisely, man does not even perform his impulses, it is his impulses that, in conjunction with his capacities, perform him, and persuade him that they are not mere impulses at all, but decisions decided out of indifference which only later ossify into habit; habits which he is morally responsible for.

Accusing your grandad of rape for hugging you without first asking for consent. Isn’t it just a normal thing that your aunt pinches your cheeks unprompted at Thanksgiving and your grandparents smother you before you’ve even said hello. This used to be called affection.

He really is the anti-wifeguy.

The jimmy neutron

Pointing left every time one is confronted with a sound criticism of a Republican candidate or lawmaker nullifies any possible evaluative standard we could use to hold Republican politicians accountable for their actions, and, more importantly, move them towards that which we consider positively desirable and necessary (for its own sake).

The response to genuine criticism of any and all Republican candidates cannot just be “but the Democratic alternative is worse.” JD Vance was in lockstep with Vivek this entire election cycle, from loaning him his political team in January of last year to sharing a stage with him and endorsing him in Ohio in August of this year. Now Vance is “disgusted” with his fellow Republicans for being justifiably critical of Ramaswamy’s appalling behavior.

Professional pro-life activists in America naturally abhor abortion but are totally complacent to all the behaviors and social mores that would make abortion desirable as a contraceptive measure. There is hardly a movement that has made less progress politically.