People won't put up with this...it's only a matter of time...government officials love to tell you what to do, and real Americans are getting sick of it...
Yes, and they are more likely to get sick of it and not put up with it if others keeping encouraging them with their dark mutterings. It's an old trick, and was used by the antiwar crowd in Iraq. They kept telling us that Americans were going to get sick of this soon enough, that electing new politicians might bring an end to it, exaggerating how opposed Americans were - all in an effort to make it come true. They encouraged the enemy to hang on and wait us out. It worked pretty well, didn't it? We also see these dark warnings on both the left and right about what Some People are just not going to put up with for long. "Not that I'm going to get violent, of course. But those others...I know lots of 'em. I hear what they say at work. If my political opponents keep acting as they do, why those volatile people are going to explode someday. I'm just sayin'..."
Gandhi used the same tactic on the British. "If you don't negotiate with nice peaceful Mahatma Gandhi, I can't answer for what those half-a-billion other angry people might do."
Since sooner or later somebody will explode, that's evidence for the volcano beneath.
ReplyDeleteI did see where someone set fire to a children’s playground equipment set because they were angry about children playing outside. That was on the side of enforcement rather than opening, though.
ReplyDeleteFYI, Grim if it's the one you posted on your site, that guy is claiming it happened in Boston and we've had no such thing in the local news. I Googled and found a comment thread claiming he lifted the photo from someone else's page:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.metabunk.org/threads/playground-arson.11216/
My neighbors are cops just outside Boston and I can ask if they heard of anything like this, but I'd wait for a better source before buying this.
It might have been this one:
ReplyDeletehttp://idahonews.com/news/local/caldwell-police-searching-for-neighborhood-playground-arsonist
“Playground arson” produced a surprising number of news stories when I searched for it.
The Iraq war is a very poor example. No one today, except a few shills for Israel, think that was in any way justified.
ReplyDeleteSykes, I am not a “shill for Israel” and I think it was justified. Both Gulf Wars were justified. I wish that we had done certain things better, and had better intelligence on certain things. But given the choice today between not doing anything and doing what we did, I would still choose the latter.
ReplyDeleteSometimes those "dark mutterings" are the first droplets of a preference cascade.
ReplyDeleteI think the Iraq War was morally justified. Saddam used rape rooms as a tool of state policy, was engaged in genocide against the Marsh Arabs, and was only restrained from a second genocide against the Kurds by the presence of 10th Group US Special Forces and the CIA. He had engaged in regional aggression and invasion and conquest.
ReplyDeleteI don’t think we were obligated to wage the war, but we certainly had sufficient moral justification to do so.
Ah, that Idaho story certainly does look similar. The date puts it in late February though, which makes it unlikely it was quarantine related. Best I can tell Idaho didn't have any closures until late March.
ReplyDeleteWe live across from a smallish playground/park, which is why I got curious how someone knew it was a protest fire. Bored teenagers seemed like the other obvious potential culprit, and there's gotta be some of those hanging around in most neighborhoods these days. I know we have a few who wander over and use the basketball court occasionally, hard to blame them for ignoring the closed sign. They must be bored out of their skulls.
Tangent: It strikes me that most neighborhood disputes arise either from pre-existing tensions or outsiders coming in and aggravating people. The kids using the basketball court across the street live two houses up, are quiet and stay for an hour, and I can't imagine anyone objecting. This time of year most of us who live here would be coming home every night to a street clogged with cars parked for little league games, which we endure for access to a pretty nice park within spitting distance the rest of the year. With that gone this year, we still come out pretty okay in the deal.
@ Brad - it can be hard to tell the difference between grassroots and astroturfing, but I think we are obligated to try. Most conservative sites eventually have people show up who try to assert that a race war or 2A rebellion with real shooting is going to be starting pretty soon now, and most liberals sites have firebreathers who come in to tell us that "the people" won't be held down forever, especially people of color. It seems like pump-priming to me.*
ReplyDeleteYet yes, you are right. Real movements based on dissatisfaction to not emerge from nothing. There are signs to be read.
* And many of all of these get around to blaming the Jews eventually.