bitterlyclingin
Silver Member
- Aug 4, 2011
- 3,122
- 425
- 98
"When the peasants revolt they can often be tricked into going home with some false promises and free beer"
[Baracky Obammunist is d@mn good at "Free beer". Remember the Harvard Prof and the Cambridge Police?
And the Secret Police. They're everywhere. When you muse about whether Al Sharpton, who had promised to be in the vanguard charging the lines of troops with fixed bayonets in Arizona in protest of their state's newly enacted immigration laws, would be heard to slowly go drip, drip, drip or to deflate rapidly with an accompanying rapid hiss when encountering the bayonets, your post gets deleted, especially when the websites sponsor includes Mr Sharpton as one of the narrators in their documentary.
When Hollywood produces a magnificent work like "Saving Private Ryan" the Hollywood Secret Police pass it over for the Oscars because its glorification of war goes against their beliefs, irregardless of the quality of your work. Same with Zero Dark Thirty. Better to reward a story about an Italian piano player in Italian with English subtitles.
The newspapers are the worst. They don't want to offend anyone, so your right to free speech is exquisitely limited therein, especially when the editorial board listens only to the community's squeaky wheels.
Freedom, however, the right to your own self determination, to do with your life as you see fit, to achieve the maximum possible out of your life is worth killing for. After all isn't that what your grandparents came here for? Isn't that why they starved and died at Valley Forge?
We're going to see a lot less of freedom in the immediate future. Baracky Obammunist desperately needs your take home pay because he needs to play Santa Claus to a magnitude of ten thousand to an awful lot of people, because 2016 is for all the marbles, its president for life Barack Obama time. State giving 100 Saudi Wahabee Islamic Holy Warriors US visas today, 100 US Obama voters tomorrow. You take away the Democratic party's ability to play Kris Kringle, showering its constituency with free stuff, it becomes a party without a purpose, like a man without a country.
As a result you're going to see a lot more Peggy Josephs in the coming four years.
Woman screaming; "He's going to pay for my groceries!!!"
Man questioning; "Where's he going to get the money?"
Woman screaming; "From his stash!!!!!!!!!"
Y'all know where Baracky Obammunist's stash is located by now
Senator Ben Cardin (D MD) described it best when he told CNBC's Maria Bartiromo his party wasn't going to stop playing Santa Claus until after they had spent every last cent in Mitt Romney's and the Koch Brothers' pockets, but the bad part is, just like the town drunk, the Democrats won't be able to just stop there.
We have had our "Shining City On The Hill." and personal safety and individual freedom are inversely proportional.]
"There are a few things worth knowing about revolutions. Most people don't participate in them, even if the history books often make it seem otherwise. Revolutions are thought up by small groups of people who then make it everyone's business. Or alternately they don't. And those are the revolutions that never happen.
Most people, at any given time and place, are dissatisfied with the government and believe, rightly, that whoever is in charge is guilty of stealing from them, oppressing them and making it impossible for them to live their lives in peace. And they also believe that things are not likely to get any better. Hope is a vanishing emotion that dissipates easily in the drudgery of ordinary everyday work. It may be taken out for a spin on historical occasions, but then it goes back into the barn where it sits for a while gathering dust until it is needed again.
There are however some known crossroads of revolution. A successful revolution usually doesn't happen among the thoroughly repressed. Those people tend to lack the motivation and skills to face down a modern army. When the peasants revolt, they can often be tricked into going home with some false promises and free beer. It worked more often with the serfs in European history than you would think. It's the middle class that you really have to watch out for.
People are not at their most dangerous when they're eating bread crusts and hoping that they won't die tomorrow. By then they're often broken, perhaps not individually, but as a society. It wasn't the people on the collective farms who challenged Soviet tanks in Moscow. Nor was it the Chinese farmers, now being bulldozed off their land, sometimes literally, who stood up to the tanks in Tienanmen Square.
The most dangerous people are the ones who have tasted enough freedom and prosperity to want to keep it. They don't think their leaders are godlike and they have enough education and competence to think the heretical thought that just about anybody could do the same job as the king, the emperor, the czar or the president. They have experience enough upward mobility to understand that a man's place in the world isn't fixed. It can and should be changed. And that is what distinguishes them from the serf. That is what makes them so dangerous.
Authority works best when it isn't challenged. Ceremony, whether it is that of an emperor or any lesser rank, invests authority with mystical force. Peer pressure and social conformity employ horizontal pressures to keep everyone in their place. Secret police and ranks of informers allow the regime to project an illusion of omnipotent force that seems to be everywhere at once. Reigns of terror create examples to intimidate anyone who might think of challenging the regime.
Revolutions strip away these illusions. The secret police run for cover or comically march out with clubs and guns against mobs, and get beaten to a pulp. The neighbor who rats on everyone sits home and stews in front of the television. And then the regime has no choice but to call on the army and hope that it still retains enough control over the officers and that the officers still have enough control over their men to do the bloody work of winning a civil war.
The army test is the acid test of a regime because it exposes the actual level of power of the regime, which relies entirely on its officer corps and its grunts to be willing to shoot people in the street. In Russia, the army proved unwilling to kill a bunch of civilians to protect a coup by their own superiors leading to the end of the Soviet Union and the fall of Communism.
After generations of worldwide terror, the great red beast was reduced to relying on the willingness of a handful of Russian kids in tanks to run over protesters. The kids, who had grown up on Western rock and roll, listening to old men preach about a coming revolution that was already older than the oldest man they had ever seen, while the echoes of capitalist dreams leaked through the Iron Curtain, chose to sit this one out. And Communism died in the streets of Moscow.
But where the Soviet Union fell, the Chinese Communist Party succeeded because they had men who were willing to run over other men with tanks. After all the great debates and posturing, the fate of hundreds of millions of people came down to the same things that all revolutions come down to, not cogent arguments or complex theories, but the willingness of some men to kill other men for a cause.
Communism also died in China. It had to. But the leadership class remained in power and their princes made it into a hereditary dynasty. In Iran, protests were pitted against the guns of the Revolutionary Guard. The regime won, but at the cost of shifting power to the Revolutionary Guard. In Syria, each side escalated, found foreign backers and is fighting a war in which the most ruthless bastards are winning. That is how the Communists ended up winning in Russia, but not after a long bout of murderous warfare in which all sides did horrible things and painted the land red. Any Russian naval officers with a sense of history watching the whole thing happen from a portside cafe are probably remembering how the same thing went down in the land of red snow.
It's the aspiring middle class that begins revolutions, but when they turn bloody enough, then they usually aren't the ones who inherit them. An ascending middle class begins revolutions to protect its privileges, only to see those revolutions hijacked by the fanatics, who to be fair, often began them, the lawyers who want to be executioners, the demagogues who fail at everything but street corner tirades and the psychopaths who drift in and then take over.
The American Revolution avoided being overtaken by these types of lunatics, though at times it was a closer thing than anyone realizes. If history had gone a little differently, Aaron Burr could very well have been our Robespierre. And General Lafayette could have been France's George Washington. Instead the American Revolution stayed in the hands of the people who wanted peace and prosperity, rather than radical social change, and France descended into blood and chaos at the hands of those who thought that revolution was worthless unless it allowed them to completely transform society.
The other kind of revolution, the Bastille kind, has managed to catch up with us. A vast territory and technological revolutions held it at bay for the longest time, but it was the aspiring middle class that eventually allowed itself to be seduced into mortgaging its political power, national integrity and economic freedom to gain an illusory peace and security in the form of a powerful government. And if there to be another revolution against it, it will once again come from the ranks of the middle class........."
Sultan Knish: And This is Revolution
[Baracky Obammunist is d@mn good at "Free beer". Remember the Harvard Prof and the Cambridge Police?
And the Secret Police. They're everywhere. When you muse about whether Al Sharpton, who had promised to be in the vanguard charging the lines of troops with fixed bayonets in Arizona in protest of their state's newly enacted immigration laws, would be heard to slowly go drip, drip, drip or to deflate rapidly with an accompanying rapid hiss when encountering the bayonets, your post gets deleted, especially when the websites sponsor includes Mr Sharpton as one of the narrators in their documentary.
When Hollywood produces a magnificent work like "Saving Private Ryan" the Hollywood Secret Police pass it over for the Oscars because its glorification of war goes against their beliefs, irregardless of the quality of your work. Same with Zero Dark Thirty. Better to reward a story about an Italian piano player in Italian with English subtitles.
The newspapers are the worst. They don't want to offend anyone, so your right to free speech is exquisitely limited therein, especially when the editorial board listens only to the community's squeaky wheels.
Freedom, however, the right to your own self determination, to do with your life as you see fit, to achieve the maximum possible out of your life is worth killing for. After all isn't that what your grandparents came here for? Isn't that why they starved and died at Valley Forge?
We're going to see a lot less of freedom in the immediate future. Baracky Obammunist desperately needs your take home pay because he needs to play Santa Claus to a magnitude of ten thousand to an awful lot of people, because 2016 is for all the marbles, its president for life Barack Obama time. State giving 100 Saudi Wahabee Islamic Holy Warriors US visas today, 100 US Obama voters tomorrow. You take away the Democratic party's ability to play Kris Kringle, showering its constituency with free stuff, it becomes a party without a purpose, like a man without a country.
As a result you're going to see a lot more Peggy Josephs in the coming four years.
Woman screaming; "He's going to pay for my groceries!!!"
Man questioning; "Where's he going to get the money?"
Woman screaming; "From his stash!!!!!!!!!"
Y'all know where Baracky Obammunist's stash is located by now
Senator Ben Cardin (D MD) described it best when he told CNBC's Maria Bartiromo his party wasn't going to stop playing Santa Claus until after they had spent every last cent in Mitt Romney's and the Koch Brothers' pockets, but the bad part is, just like the town drunk, the Democrats won't be able to just stop there.
We have had our "Shining City On The Hill." and personal safety and individual freedom are inversely proportional.]
"There are a few things worth knowing about revolutions. Most people don't participate in them, even if the history books often make it seem otherwise. Revolutions are thought up by small groups of people who then make it everyone's business. Or alternately they don't. And those are the revolutions that never happen.
Most people, at any given time and place, are dissatisfied with the government and believe, rightly, that whoever is in charge is guilty of stealing from them, oppressing them and making it impossible for them to live their lives in peace. And they also believe that things are not likely to get any better. Hope is a vanishing emotion that dissipates easily in the drudgery of ordinary everyday work. It may be taken out for a spin on historical occasions, but then it goes back into the barn where it sits for a while gathering dust until it is needed again.
There are however some known crossroads of revolution. A successful revolution usually doesn't happen among the thoroughly repressed. Those people tend to lack the motivation and skills to face down a modern army. When the peasants revolt, they can often be tricked into going home with some false promises and free beer. It worked more often with the serfs in European history than you would think. It's the middle class that you really have to watch out for.
People are not at their most dangerous when they're eating bread crusts and hoping that they won't die tomorrow. By then they're often broken, perhaps not individually, but as a society. It wasn't the people on the collective farms who challenged Soviet tanks in Moscow. Nor was it the Chinese farmers, now being bulldozed off their land, sometimes literally, who stood up to the tanks in Tienanmen Square.
The most dangerous people are the ones who have tasted enough freedom and prosperity to want to keep it. They don't think their leaders are godlike and they have enough education and competence to think the heretical thought that just about anybody could do the same job as the king, the emperor, the czar or the president. They have experience enough upward mobility to understand that a man's place in the world isn't fixed. It can and should be changed. And that is what distinguishes them from the serf. That is what makes them so dangerous.
Authority works best when it isn't challenged. Ceremony, whether it is that of an emperor or any lesser rank, invests authority with mystical force. Peer pressure and social conformity employ horizontal pressures to keep everyone in their place. Secret police and ranks of informers allow the regime to project an illusion of omnipotent force that seems to be everywhere at once. Reigns of terror create examples to intimidate anyone who might think of challenging the regime.
Revolutions strip away these illusions. The secret police run for cover or comically march out with clubs and guns against mobs, and get beaten to a pulp. The neighbor who rats on everyone sits home and stews in front of the television. And then the regime has no choice but to call on the army and hope that it still retains enough control over the officers and that the officers still have enough control over their men to do the bloody work of winning a civil war.
The army test is the acid test of a regime because it exposes the actual level of power of the regime, which relies entirely on its officer corps and its grunts to be willing to shoot people in the street. In Russia, the army proved unwilling to kill a bunch of civilians to protect a coup by their own superiors leading to the end of the Soviet Union and the fall of Communism.
After generations of worldwide terror, the great red beast was reduced to relying on the willingness of a handful of Russian kids in tanks to run over protesters. The kids, who had grown up on Western rock and roll, listening to old men preach about a coming revolution that was already older than the oldest man they had ever seen, while the echoes of capitalist dreams leaked through the Iron Curtain, chose to sit this one out. And Communism died in the streets of Moscow.
But where the Soviet Union fell, the Chinese Communist Party succeeded because they had men who were willing to run over other men with tanks. After all the great debates and posturing, the fate of hundreds of millions of people came down to the same things that all revolutions come down to, not cogent arguments or complex theories, but the willingness of some men to kill other men for a cause.
Communism also died in China. It had to. But the leadership class remained in power and their princes made it into a hereditary dynasty. In Iran, protests were pitted against the guns of the Revolutionary Guard. The regime won, but at the cost of shifting power to the Revolutionary Guard. In Syria, each side escalated, found foreign backers and is fighting a war in which the most ruthless bastards are winning. That is how the Communists ended up winning in Russia, but not after a long bout of murderous warfare in which all sides did horrible things and painted the land red. Any Russian naval officers with a sense of history watching the whole thing happen from a portside cafe are probably remembering how the same thing went down in the land of red snow.
It's the aspiring middle class that begins revolutions, but when they turn bloody enough, then they usually aren't the ones who inherit them. An ascending middle class begins revolutions to protect its privileges, only to see those revolutions hijacked by the fanatics, who to be fair, often began them, the lawyers who want to be executioners, the demagogues who fail at everything but street corner tirades and the psychopaths who drift in and then take over.
The American Revolution avoided being overtaken by these types of lunatics, though at times it was a closer thing than anyone realizes. If history had gone a little differently, Aaron Burr could very well have been our Robespierre. And General Lafayette could have been France's George Washington. Instead the American Revolution stayed in the hands of the people who wanted peace and prosperity, rather than radical social change, and France descended into blood and chaos at the hands of those who thought that revolution was worthless unless it allowed them to completely transform society.
The other kind of revolution, the Bastille kind, has managed to catch up with us. A vast territory and technological revolutions held it at bay for the longest time, but it was the aspiring middle class that eventually allowed itself to be seduced into mortgaging its political power, national integrity and economic freedom to gain an illusory peace and security in the form of a powerful government. And if there to be another revolution against it, it will once again come from the ranks of the middle class........."
Sultan Knish: And This is Revolution