Why this isn’t something a conservative would, or should say:
If you’re ready to burn down the world, you’re part of what’s wrong with the world. There are plenty of places on this planet where “burning it down” has been tried — Syria, Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, the territories of Boko Haram — and the results are never anything short of catastrophic. It’s easy to forget, but even in the toughest of times, Americans are incredibly blessed compared to those living everywhere else. Our wealth, our spirit, our untapped potential, and our capacity for renewal are mind-boggling. And yet some significant portion of the population relishes the thought of sending it all up in flames.
You dare not call yourself conservative if you belong to this arson-minded mass. Conservatives are here to preserve, create, and build, not to ignite and destroy. Insofar as the torch is an American political tradition, it’s not a conservative one — it’s the recourse of our country’s worst radicals, from the Klan to the Weather Underground to the Black Panthers to Timothy McVeigh.
Victor Davis Hanson calls what we’re witnessing “Republican nihilism,” a dangerous strain of the historical perspective that there is nothing to approve of in the current social order. It’s a self-evidently ludicrous perspective when applied to our country as it stands today.
If you think that Trump will be a conservative, in any way, you’re deluding yourself.
I understand the truth of this, but I also understand that a government rules only with the consent of the governed. I’m sure the American colonials were a lot better off than someone in sub-Saharan Africa, but they rebelled anyhow. If enough Americans feel like they are being treated as indentured servants of the elites on the coasts, they are going to rise up, and you are not going to be able to convince them that they should not because they’re relatively well off.
It doesn’t matter that Trump is no conservative. What matters to the average Joe is that Trump has not (yet, anyway)betrayed him in the service of the political elite. All the rest have, so there’s not really even a choice anymore.
What matters to the average Joe is that Trump has not (yet, anyway)betrayed him in the service of the political elite.
Aw, rubbish. Trump *is* a charter member of the New York political elite. He has raped the taxpayer repeatedly, over the years, to bail out his bad business investments. And Trump supporters love him for it.
Trump tells the Archie Bunkers that they are the elite. “I love the poorly educated. They are the smartest people.” He promises that they will receive the same kind of handouts and preferential treatment his company has gotten — and trusts that the “smartest” people will never ask where the money is going to come from.
All of this camouflaged by Orwellian NewSpeak about the “GOP elite.”
Edward, you gotta face facts. The average voter / average Joe doesn’t give a shit about what you said yesterday. It’s what are you going to do for them now? That’s the sad state of the North American voter today. I’m seeing it here in Canada too. Short memories and a total inability to think critically.
Where have we heard this argument before? “Overthrowing a dictator is pointless because another dictator will just rise in his place!” Yes, that’s probably true for people with no appreciation of liberty.
Are the “burn it down” people really advocating turning the USA into Somalia? Not supporting the GOPe doesn’t mean the USA turns into Somalia. Even supporting Trump doesn’t mean we become Somalia. Trump isn’t conservative, he also isn’t Hitler or the Destroyer of Worlds. Trump isn’t going to change anything, he is a business as usual candidate not a “burn it down” candidate.
What else is a “burn it down” position? One could argue voting for Cruz, Hillary, or not at all is. How many GOPe have said they would vote for Hillary? The author tries to make it so the altright fringe are the creators of “burn it down” rather than Ace of Spades. Who does Ace endorse?
The only candidate that would turn the USA into a Somali like state is Sanders. While people fear that Trump might be authoritarian, Sanders already has his army of brownshirts, where potential violence isn’t just a worry but actual violence already a reality. But I guess people will say that Democrat “protesters” are mostly peaceful no matter how many fights they start, cops they assault, ambulances they prevent from responding, or events they shut down but Trump is the totally violent one because a “protester” double fistpumping the finger got punched while being escorted out.
The altright are abhorrent but also very small in numbers. The author has two clips as evidence for his claim that all of Trump’s supporters are racist. One is a man saying go back to Africa if you are African before you are American. This is actually the opposite of racism. Its an appeal to not identify by skin color but unite as Americans. What were people yelling at him to make him say that? We don’t know but there are people yelling at him to go back to Europe. Anyone who has watched Democrats protest know that rhetoric like this is very common. Where is the condemnation of something that we see at every single Democrat protest on a much much larger scale?
The guy saying go to Auschwitz is actual anti-semitism. I wonder how he feels about Trump’s Jewish daughter? Here again we don’t get to hear what was yelled at him prior to his insulting retort. No one should accept this or condone it. But once again Democrat protesters say anti-semitic things at every protest. They have an entire anti-semitic movement that colleges and cities participate in.
By all means lets condemn random people provoked into incivility but we should also be looking at what is being said by the people doing the provoking. Right now, we have a system where Democrats, in mass, can say any racist, bigoted, anti-semitic things they want and no one calls them out.
We don’t know but there are people yelling at him to go back to Europe.
So? Trump and his supporters (more than just one man) are telling Silicon Valley workers to go back to Asia. Two wrongs don’t make a right. The difference — and this is an important difference, listen carefully — is there is zero chance that the Trumpistas will be deported back to Europe. It is conceivably possible, if Trump supporters get their way, that software workers in Silicon Valley could have their H1b visas lifted.
There’s a difference between a remark shouted by a few political protestors which no candidate, including Bernie Sanders, has supported, and an idea that has actually been mooted by candidate Donald Trump.
Both statements may be equally repugnant, but Trump’s statements are far more dangerous.
Consider what might happen if Trump succeeds. Arizona CJ and other posters would have us believe that those Silicon Valley jobs will simply be filled by native-born Americans. Alas, it isn’t that simple. Software developers are not interchangeable cogs, like workers on Henry Ford’s assembly line. There are many jobs which are so specialized that there may only be five or six people in the entire world qualified to fill them, and those people may already be employed and not willing to switch jobs. I’m not talking about CEO-level jobs, either, I’m talking about relatively low-level programming jobs that require in-depth expertise with specific algorithms and technologies.
I’ve seen jobs go vacant for years because not a single qualified applicant walked through the door. In some cases, the hiring manager could tell you the names of the few people in the entire world who had the required experience, and knew them personally, but none of them were available, Now, imagine that situation repeated a thousands of times in high-tech industries across the United States. Expelling foreign workers would be a crippling blow to US industry and a great boon to our competitors. And the upside to this is, what? It would not mean more jobs for the Archie Bunkers. I guarantee you, Archie could get a job in Silicon Valley in a heartbeat, if he could pass a technical interview. The fact that he can’t pass a technical interview may be a bitter pill for Archie to swallow, but kicking foreign workers out won’t suddenly make him an expert in coding neural-net-based video compression algorithms. What it will mean is lower overall productivity, which translates into fewer jobs for everyone, including Archie.
I, a native-born American, would probably fail the interview for “an expert in coding neural-net-based video compression algorithms” because I would say straight out that neural nets are a lame way of performing video compression.
There is probably a lesson in that.
Paul, I think you’re wrong. Think about the amazing compression your brain is doing to process the visual information your brain is receiving. Neural networks have weaknesses as cognitive models, but given the solid engineering achievements they’ve recently allowed us to make (ironically, via GPUs), I’d hardly say that they are a lame way to think about improved video compression.
Bob, neural networks are ideally suited for problems which are hard to characterize as simple algorithms, particularly if there are a large number of interdependent variables and some unknown variables. Video compression on the other hand is purely algorithmic. Now, if you were to take the compressed video and try to extract features from it, recognizing things, then you’re into neural net territory.
You can obtain better compression by extracting features. Taking a video and reducing it to the text string
“brown labrador retriever running in a grassy field” is rather lossy, but that’s some excellent compression!
That’s not video compression. The signal to noise ratio is less than 1. That’s object recognition, a completely different problem.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right. ”
First, people have to admit there are two wrongs. There is a massive double standard here. And I do think what Democrats were yelling in order to provoke responses is important. There is a big difference between a couple random people saying something and a coordinated, systemic, and party wide ideology of racial chauvinism as the Democrats have.
” The fact that he can’t pass a technical interview may be a bitter pill for Archie to swallow”
Maybe they don’t view themselves as silicon valley wannabes and see h1b visas affecting them in their own lines of work?
You have a very derogatory view of others for someone so concerned with derogatory views.
Maybe I missed it, but I don’t think Trump’s position is zero immigration or zero h1b visas and people’s whose visas expire are not deported.
Right now, we have a system where Democrats, in mass, can say any racist, bigoted, anti-semitic things they want and no one calls them out.
People have been calling them out for decades. Didn’t you just do so?
And in case you don’t recall, the anti-immigration fever began in heavily Democratic California. Even today, I run into many die-hard Immigration Warriors who are life-long Democrats. Look at how many Democrats have been crossing over to vote for Trump in the primary. For that matter, *look at Trump himself*. Why don’t you call them out?
One of the marvelous things about the University, especially in STEM disciplines, is that people from foreign and distant lands are not some academic abstraction, they are your academic colleagues, students, and even your deans. We probably have as much if not more cross-cultural contact than people in State Department or military service — it is probably a reason the military sends their people to us for training, and I probably have had people from “the other side” of recent conflicts in my classroom as well.
Let’s just say that the view that there are no Americans to fill the technical positions may be a tad overstated?
Contrary to popular belief, universities are not the font of all knowledge. There’s a reason why companies pay fresh-outs less than experienced employees.
Ask yourself why the US Army snatched up Von Braun and his associates after World War II. Why didn’t they just send their soldiers to the university to be trained as rocket scientists, instead of hiring a bunch of ex-Nazis? It was because they had practical skills and experience which university students, professors, and “even the deans” didn’t have. It’s the same way in industry today.
Being a dean of computer science does not mean you know more about search-engine architecture than a Google employee. Or anything at all about the subject. (Dean is an administrative post, not a magic grant of knowledge that makes someone an expert in all fields.)
I worked on one team where nearly every employee had a PhD in computer science. I was one exception. The other was the team leader, who didn’t even have a CS degree. His only academic degree was a BA in math, but no one doubted that he knew more about his particular specialty than anyone else on the team.
If you read carefully what I wrote instead of reflexively countering with a polemic on why you are right and I am wrong, you may have picked up on the Dean here in the College being foreign-born?
In countering the anti-immigration sentiment in “winger” circles, do you suppose you may be channeling the default anti-higher education sentiment in those same circles? If your perch is in commerce rather than academia, who do you think is training and recommending the immigrant interns and H1B people coming your way? Me.
Do you suppose, hypothetically speaking of course, that sitting astride the pipeline supplying your indispensable foreign-born technical experts that I may know, maybe, perhaps, a tiny bit about their qualifications?
As to Von Braun and associates, “snatched up” is perhaps an apt term — and the reason for this probably has more to do with Von Braun and his people preferring to be in our custody rather than “guests” of Soviet Russia? The Von Braun group was one team of many who contributed to the Moon landing.
I don’t care if the dean is from Mars. It doesn’t matter whether a candidate is a foreigner but whether he’s the particular foreigner who has the skills a company needs.
If a company needs an expert on numerical analysis of fusion reactions, it can’t always go out and hire someone from the local university. There may not be anyone at the local university who has that expertise (and even if there is, he may not want to switch jobs). The closest person who matches the requirements might happen to be on the other side of the world.
Companies *do* recruit from local universities, whenever possible. Especially at the entry level. No company wants to pay relocation and travel expenses if they don’t have to. But they don’t always have a choice. (Even in academia, faculty-search committees look beyond their own campus for candidates, right?)
The other thing about many of the Trump people, did you stop to think that they are indeed Democrats? That Mr. Trump is in reality neither a Libertarian nor a Movement Conservative is what they want? That they view our plans to put public-sector employees out of work with equal skepticism as Secretary Clinton’s plans to put coal miners out of work?
So why don’t they vote for Clinton or Sanders? Yeah, why don’t they? But are you supposing that because they are fed up with the disdain for the American Melting Pot, working-class values, the 2nd Amendment, and hydrocarbon fueled work and recreation, that they have become disciples of Hayek and acolytes of Ayn Rand?
So why isn’t Mr. Trump running as a Democrat? You really need to ask that question? Next!
Like Bloomberg, Trump is not running as a Democrat because he saw a better opportunity in running as a Republican, because the rubes.
The other thing about many of the Trump people, did you stop to think that they are indeed Democrats?
I probably did, since I wrote: “Look at how many Democrats have been crossing over to vote for Trump in the primary. For that matter, *look at Trump himself*.”
But are you supposing that because they are fed up with the disdain for the American Melting Pot, working-class values, the 2nd Amendment, and hydrocarbon fueled work and recreation, that they have become disciples of Hayek and acolytes of Ayn Rand?
Not supposing that at all. Who was the Trump supporter here who recently dismissed Hayek as an ignorant member of the establishment elite? Not to mention that both Hayek and Rand were foreign immigrants — and Rand even immigrated illegally!
I don’t see why you assume support for the Second Amendment either, given Trump’s past record on gun control (despite his “life membership” in the NRA, which only proves that he wrote a $1000 check — or maybe $500, if he bought it during a special offer).
Because the rubes?
It is like the unctuous and patronizing statements of our latter-day Eleanor Roosevelt, who is going to make our electric supply expensive and unreliable (wasn’t cheap, reliable electricity a New Deal program?). Who is going to spare mine workers the depredations of their health in “keeping the lights on” and “retrain” them in building the expensive and unreliable substitutes for coal?
Rand, for the sake of everything we agree upon, could you please “walk back” that last statement?
I’m not going to vote for Hillary.
Agree with Paul on walking back the statement. There is a reason running as a Republican is better for Trump. It certainly isn’t because Hillary was inevitable.
OK, sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that there are more rubes among Republicans than Dems. I assume he ran as a Republican because the base is currently much more angry and gettable in that party.
“People have been calling them out for decades.”
Not the media or other Democrats, the people who say that ending stuff like that is their life’s purpose.
Some random guy on the internet in the comment section of a niche blog isn’t the same as an anchor of a big 3 tv network.
Are the “burn it down” people really advocating turning the USA into Somalia?
Of course not. But sometimes there are unintended consequences.
Liberal slogan: Feel the Bern.
Conservative slogan: Let it Bern.
I voted for someone other than Trump, but from where I sit, the only people wanting to burn it all down are Romney and Kasich. If you intend to throw the convention to avoid letting the popularly elected candidate take the nomination, then don’t lecture me about “burning it all down”.
The last two cycles, I voted for the Republican as the better of two bad options. I did not run around saying, ” no way I would vote for Romney, I rather vote for Obama”. But for this cycle, that is what Republican Washington insiders are saying to Fox News. If you think voting for Hillary is the answer, then you are the one burning it down.
I don’t know why anyone fantasizes that I would consider voting for Hillary as “the answer.”
Rand, are you a Republican Washington insider telling Bret Baier you would vote for Hillary? I never thought you were.
I guess I’ve been outed.
I see now. I used “you” rhetorically. I assumed it would be understood to reference the subject of the previous sentence.
Who was it again calling Tyson a pedant?
“But for this cycle, that is what Republican Washington insiders are saying to Fox News.”
After making a big fuss about loyalty oaths and what not. Ace has it right about how the GOPe always wants people to go along with them in a coalition, to compromise in their direction, but then never returns the favor to the people who put them in office.
I very much prefer Cruz or Rubio to Trump but seeing the the GOPe act this way really gets my goat, especially talks of convention shenanigans.
This: I very much prefer Cruz or Rubio to Trump but seeing the the GOPe act this way really gets my goat, especially talks of convention shenanigans.
“I voted for someone other than Trump, but from where I sit, the only people wanting to burn it all down are Romney and Kasich. ”
And Rubio:
The moment I saw Rubio tell Ohio voters that if they cannot vote for him (Rubio) they should vote for Kasich…..was the moment I knew Rubio was bought by the GOPe.
Not that I didn’t have my suspicions before….
But that’s when I knew he was well and truly bought.
I’m trying to be generous in relation to Rubio. Personally, as I did in 2008 and 2012; I could support the Republican nominee even if it was Rubio. When Kasich was a Congressman, I thought very highly of him. I did support Romney. Alas, because I refuse to hate on Trump, I see that I’m lumped in as a Trump supporter.
It’s been years, but I find myself listening to Limbaugh regularly again. I see he is getting the same treatment I receive from the establishment because he dares to note exactly why Trump is gaining support. I don’t need to listen to Limbaugh, because he isn’t telling me anything I don’t otherwise know and figured out months ago.
The establishment will not tolerate Cruz. They made a deal with Trump under the guise of keeping him from running third party, but primarily keeping him in the race to pull votes from Cruz. Except Trump pulled in votes from disgruntled Democrats and Republicans. Cruz is still getting the support from conservative TEA party types, but not enough to beat Trump, which is the only part of the GOPe strategy that is working. What didn’t work is that Trump support grew faster than it did for Bush and Rubio.
Kasich is only in to syphon enough votes to keep either Trump or Cruz from getting the necessary delegate count. It probably won’t work, and if it did (because Rubio stays in to do the same), the outcome from the RNC convention will be a massive division that will not GOTV. As Limbaugh notes, the only way to stop a Trump nomination and win in November is to get behind Cruz. Given that option, the establishment rather vote for Hillary.
A forest needs periodic fires to clear out the deadwood. And every so often one particular tree needs watering.
People are not trees. I have heard people speak of removing other people they don’t want in their organizations with that term. People who think they can fire their citizen workers and replace them with more malleable foreign workers. Like those who do-what-they-are-told and code the neural-net-based video compression algorithm without telling you that it is a lame idea or that your algorithm is encumbered by patents or some such thing.
Perhaps I was too vague in my attempt to connect the title of this blog post with Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”
Let them eat steak.
We are not “Blessed” to be living in such a great country. It is great because our fore-fathers worked very hard to ensure it wasn’t some 3rd world crap-hole and we continue that work today.
No higher spirit made America a place where poverty, constant civil war, and dictatorships no longer exist. It isn’t the result of praying hard or asking the “Gods” to save you – this country is where it is because we choose to make it so.
Who is “we”? Because the forefathers you speak of certainly disagreed with you.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal and endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights.”
Take away that statement and what is the difference between freedom and dictatorship except a matter of personal preference? And many times in history, people have preferred the latter.
The founder’s religious beliefs certainly informed their views on the constitution and the bill of rights but you are right to say that the way our country was shaped didn’t just magically happen, it took a conscious effort and a lot of hard work.
That doesn’t mean we aren’t blessed, or fortunate, to live here as well.
What do you think of Hillary supporters voting for Kasich in Ohio?
I think Hillary realizes that Trump’s negatives are not as bad as hers, and his name recognition will likely be enough to beat her. Further, Trump has shown to be resistant to media assault. So she rather help the GOPe due its stupid party thing. It’s not like she needs primary votes, because she is getting her nomination via super-delegates.
Looks like Trump has already got the left and right working together 😉
Looks like Trump has already got the left and right working together 😉
“Burn it down” won’t turn America into Somalia. Allowing Somalis into America will turn America into Somalia.
“Burn it down” won’t turn America into Afghanistan. Allowing Afghans into America into Afghanistan.
America did try the “burn it down” option, it was called The American Revolution. America didn’t turn into a Turd World sh*thole back then.
The people in charge were much better educated then.