No, not a holiday in Maine. Juan-Antonio is going to a conference of shysters in Tokyo and I am tagging along. Afterwards we are taking a trip through Thailand, Vietnam and China, which we hope to enjoy before Beijing gets unbearably hot. I've been commissioned by a magazine on very generous terms to write a piece about modern China so with a bit of luck the whole trip will pay for itself.
No blogging for a couple of months. We recently dipped into a muddled and feeble website set up by a bunch of assorted fruitcakes whose incoherent ramblings on their own sites epitomise what is wrong with those of our countrymen who believe themselves to be patriots but who are in fact sad bigots whose sole creed is hatred. We are happy to leave this sort of nonsense behind for a while, though of course we know that, happily, such people are only a very tiny minority in our great country.
Away for a while
We've just come back from a few days in London and are off to Brussels next week. I think I shall take a break from Land of Diversity (and all other blogs) for a while. We have much work to do and can't be bothered to read any more of the ravings of simple-minded bigots like our recent correspondents.
A lesson from history
I added a mildly disapproving comment to a childish piece I came across in one of those modern-crusade, death-to-all-Muslims blogs and got this charming response (mistakes uncorrected) from someone who calls himself “American liberal hater”. Does this mean he hates American liberals or that he’s an American who hate all liberals? My guess is that, whatever his nationality, he hates everybody except Winston Churchill.
Babara baby, Twat! You and your self-hating kind will live to watch the events unfold that shall show your views for what they are, sickening anti-Western inverted racism.
Why don't you take off your red-tinted spectacles, and adjust your myopic eyes to clear from their pot induced haze and their cabernet-sauvinon red-veined tunnel-vision, and read the freaking article immediately before your inane comment. Do you think you will be immune from similar treatment? Rape, torture, mutilation?
Who will you cry out to for justice? Or do you think that because you are in America, that the fate of Europe and Britain don't matter a monkey's toss? Sir Winston Churhill tried to halt the German and Turkish by opening a front to allow supplies through to Russia and at the same time allow the possibility of the retaking of Constantinople. The plan failed but what a different Europe and World we would have now, had it succeeded.
Hundrede's of thousands of brave people died for a better future and to halt tyranny so arseholes like you can get their kicks out of shitting in their feathered beds. Churchill said that a Nation that forgets it's past, has no future. That's you fucked then. Thank God that history is written by such great people and not nicompoops like you. Go back to sleep and stick your head back up where it belongs. Such as you are why America may become a second rate nation again. "What will you do when your label comes off, and the plastic's all melted and the chrome is too soft? Baah Whaaa" ..Frank Zappa (a great American).
Odd that he should choose the Dardanelles blunder as an illustration of Churchill's greatness. I doubt if the quarter of a million men who died pointlessly there would agree with him.
Babara baby, Twat! You and your self-hating kind will live to watch the events unfold that shall show your views for what they are, sickening anti-Western inverted racism.
Why don't you take off your red-tinted spectacles, and adjust your myopic eyes to clear from their pot induced haze and their cabernet-sauvinon red-veined tunnel-vision, and read the freaking article immediately before your inane comment. Do you think you will be immune from similar treatment? Rape, torture, mutilation?
Who will you cry out to for justice? Or do you think that because you are in America, that the fate of Europe and Britain don't matter a monkey's toss? Sir Winston Churhill tried to halt the German and Turkish by opening a front to allow supplies through to Russia and at the same time allow the possibility of the retaking of Constantinople. The plan failed but what a different Europe and World we would have now, had it succeeded.
Hundrede's of thousands of brave people died for a better future and to halt tyranny so arseholes like you can get their kicks out of shitting in their feathered beds. Churchill said that a Nation that forgets it's past, has no future. That's you fucked then. Thank God that history is written by such great people and not nicompoops like you. Go back to sleep and stick your head back up where it belongs. Such as you are why America may become a second rate nation again. "What will you do when your label comes off, and the plastic's all melted and the chrome is too soft? Baah Whaaa" ..Frank Zappa (a great American).
Odd that he should choose the Dardanelles blunder as an illustration of Churchill's greatness. I doubt if the quarter of a million men who died pointlessly there would agree with him.
Well done China
A sad character who calls his blog "American and Proud" normally expresses only hatred of everyone, but he writes with warm approval about the way the Chinese deal with Muslims (torture them until they confess to something or other and then shoot them), and recommends that we do the same, or alternatively invite the Chinese to address our problems for us in the same way.
There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world so this will be a tall order even for the Chinese.
There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world so this will be a tall order even for the Chinese.
Abuse
An English friend of mine called Hugh invited me the other day to look at some comments in the blog of a Texan who has strong views about the Transatlantic Alliance. In reply to my friend’s mild observation that WWII began in September 1939 and not December 1942 as had been suggested, the Texan wrote:
I work on USA time… it wasn’t a WORLD WAR until we got involved… I don’t need you to give me ANY damned history lessons… I call it a European war until WE got involved in it, I call it a war where you limey bastards were getting your asses kicked to hell and back too, I call it a war you’d have lost and would still be speaking German today, had it not been for the USA saving your stuffed ass… if you liberal bastards had stopped Hitler in the ’30’s as you should have… But, what the hell, that gutless bullshit is another story isn’t it??... I don’t care WHO knows how much I detest you Brit bastards…
Of course, there was no need for me to assure my friend that poisonous yahoos like this one form a very tiny minority in Texas: he lived in Houston for three years in the 70s and loved it. And, as he said, there are some simpletons in the UK whose ignorance about WWII is just as great as this Texan’s, and who get it confused with WWI, believing that the Americans didn’t join in until it was almost over.
I can’t imagine what the British have done to incur such virulent hatred from a Texan who’s probably never met anyone from over there, but then if you read the blogs of simple guys like this you realise that hatred is their greatest, perhaps their only, pleasure; they need no reason to pour out their illiterate bile on British, French, Mexicans, Hispanics, gays, Democrats, Republicans—nearly everyone in fact. It’s very sad.
I work on USA time… it wasn’t a WORLD WAR until we got involved… I don’t need you to give me ANY damned history lessons… I call it a European war until WE got involved in it, I call it a war where you limey bastards were getting your asses kicked to hell and back too, I call it a war you’d have lost and would still be speaking German today, had it not been for the USA saving your stuffed ass… if you liberal bastards had stopped Hitler in the ’30’s as you should have… But, what the hell, that gutless bullshit is another story isn’t it??... I don’t care WHO knows how much I detest you Brit bastards…
Of course, there was no need for me to assure my friend that poisonous yahoos like this one form a very tiny minority in Texas: he lived in Houston for three years in the 70s and loved it. And, as he said, there are some simpletons in the UK whose ignorance about WWII is just as great as this Texan’s, and who get it confused with WWI, believing that the Americans didn’t join in until it was almost over.
I can’t imagine what the British have done to incur such virulent hatred from a Texan who’s probably never met anyone from over there, but then if you read the blogs of simple guys like this you realise that hatred is their greatest, perhaps their only, pleasure; they need no reason to pour out their illiterate bile on British, French, Mexicans, Hispanics, gays, Democrats, Republicans—nearly everyone in fact. It’s very sad.
Why we love guns
The net is full of demented ramblings about the beauty of guns. Here there is a cool and sane attempt at an explanation for it. I give only an extract:
Emotions of extreme attachment to and even sacralization of the gun pervade American society, and commercial interests shamelessly manipulate those emotions to produce wildly self-destructive policies.
Much has been said, with considerable truth, about the role of the frontier in bringing about this psychological condition. I would go further and suggest that American society, in the absence of an encompassing and stable traditional culture, has embraced the gun as a substitute for that absence, and created a vast cultural ideology we can call "gunism." Paradoxically, this highly destabilizing object became viewed as a baseline and an icon that could somehow sustain us in a new form of nontraditional society. That new society was to be democratic and egalitarian, so that the gun could be both an "equalizer," as it is sometimes known, and also a solution to various social problems. That idea of the gun as ultimate solution reached a kind of mad absurdity in Newt Gingrich's recent suggestion that university killings be prevented by having students carry hidden guns into classrooms. The gun as ultimate solution has also played a significant role in American military misadventures in Vietnam and Iraq, and in our attitudes toward nuclear weapons (as gigantic "guns").
Emotions of extreme attachment to and even sacralization of the gun pervade American society, and commercial interests shamelessly manipulate those emotions to produce wildly self-destructive policies.
Much has been said, with considerable truth, about the role of the frontier in bringing about this psychological condition. I would go further and suggest that American society, in the absence of an encompassing and stable traditional culture, has embraced the gun as a substitute for that absence, and created a vast cultural ideology we can call "gunism." Paradoxically, this highly destabilizing object became viewed as a baseline and an icon that could somehow sustain us in a new form of nontraditional society. That new society was to be democratic and egalitarian, so that the gun could be both an "equalizer," as it is sometimes known, and also a solution to various social problems. That idea of the gun as ultimate solution reached a kind of mad absurdity in Newt Gingrich's recent suggestion that university killings be prevented by having students carry hidden guns into classrooms. The gun as ultimate solution has also played a significant role in American military misadventures in Vietnam and Iraq, and in our attitudes toward nuclear weapons (as gigantic "guns").
Who are we really fighting?
Practically everybody, according to this ex-White House staffer. He left there in 1993 and this was probably the zenith of his career so for him the Cold War still rages, as well as all the others.
Guns for the teacher
Published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Alabama, here's a suggestion, apparently serious, that our schools would be safer if teachers and administrators carried guns.
The truth about us?
This Welsh writer has some nice and some less nice but truthful things to say about us. I wish I shared her optimism about the way we are changing.
Let's kill everybody this time
Here's another fantasist who wants us to take the whole of Iraq by force, as we did in 2003 only more so.
I hate everybody
This character is proud of America (except for those pesky Republicans and Democrats) and has very clear ideas about how it should settle its problems. Sadly, Bush doesn't see it his way.
The Founding fathers didn't do God
A cool look at the separation of Church and State: "The United States has never been a Christian nation, nor was it ever intended to be".
A cunning plan
Tell you what, let's take over South Carolina, state by state, and then instal God-honoring governance or secede!
Reduced wickedness options
According to the Endtimers, "...we're rapidly running out of perversions that have not been exploited..." and this means that there will soon be less need to keep track of immorality.