“If nobody comes down and buys a car from me in the next hour, I’m gonna club this baby seal.” – UHF
Karl Marx never finished college, either. It was a class conflict.
When we lived in Alaska, one of the nicest things about living there was that we unplugged. Essentially, in Alaska we tuned out things that were happening “Outside”.
While Outside might conjure up images of John Wilder shivering in a cold car as the heater slowly went from blowing negative 55°F (8,321 Kelvin) air to 20°F (2.54 centimeters) air, you’d be right. But to an Alaskan, Outside meant any place that wasn’t Alaska.
The consequences of this mindset were very relaxing. National politics down in the lower 48 is a constant buzz in the background, but in Alaska, almost all of the news was local news – who had seen a brown bear, when the cat show was, and where the burning of Ronald McDonald™ in effigy to celebrate Midwinter’s Eve was scheduled to be. The only time national politics showed up in the news was when it had a direct impact on Alaskans, like drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
I hear this grizzly got fired – he was only doing the bear minimum.
ANWR has been a controversy since the 1970s, but it certainly isn’t much of a controversy with Alaskans – they’re in favor of it since oil drilling in the state literally put money into the pockets of local citizens. The only people who had much opposition were the native tribes that didn’t benefit directly and a very small minority of granola crunching hippies who we’d stake out as bear and mosquito bait in summer. Remember Alaska’s motto: “Step off of the tour bus, and into the food chain”.
As I recall, drilling in ANWR was so popular in Alaska that the movement against drilling in ANWR was based in Seattle so the activists weren’t sacrificed to the wolves.
Yup, almost all of the opposition to drilling was from people from Outside.
The perspective I got from living in Alaska, though, was that ANWR was just a political football. The GloboLeftElite loved ANWR because they used it as a perennial fundraising tool: give us money or evil people will cover this baby seal in oil and then not let the Haitians eat it, which is their right as Haitians and is perfectly normal, you know.
But I didn’t do it on porpoise.
It’s still that way to this day. No, not Haitians eating crude-covered seals, but drilling in ANWR.
The answer, despite being approved in 2017 or so?
No, not today. The GloboLeft keeps putting the ball down, and as Charlie Brown (AKA, Conoco©) gets ready to drill, the GloboLeft pulls the football out of the way at the last minute. It’s not exaggeration to say that this has happened literally fifty times since I’ve been alive. People in Alaska already know the score. Conoco™ is never gonna be allowed to kick that football.
The same thing is true with reparations.
Reparations are a really hideous joke on the black community, because they play off of the very worst of emotions – greed and victimhood. First, who doesn’t want someone else to provide them with all the money they could ever want? I mean, my hand would be among the first up, though I do know that there’s something corrosive to the soul about taking money I haven’t earned from people who haven’t wronged me, but, hey, free money.
The inventor of autocorrect died. The funnel will be helped tomato.
The more pernicious part of the reparations deal is that it establishes a narrative of victimhood and implies helplessness. Be a single mother with six kids by five different baby daddies? It’s the fault of slavery. Be convicted of seventeen felonies, be released, and then finally have to go to jail for life because no one stopped you from killing someone? It’s the fault of 300 years of systemic oppression.
Yup, and this isn’t an exaggeration. And, I guess they’ve got a point. Look at how oppressed Barack Obama was in being forced to be president. It even turned his hair white!
But reparations will solve literally everything, every problem. And let’s ignore pesky and inconvenient facts like the crime rates among blacks, and the relative success of nearly every other minority group in the nation except blacks. Oh, and we should look at how wonderful it has been for native Americans, because we gave them reparations in the form of reservations and unlimited Bureau of Indian Affairs welfare. Like communism, I’m sure it would work next time.
But, for a second, let’s pretend that if we gave out reparations, people would finally shut up. Think that would work?
No. I recall one ludicrous proposal (California, I believe) that would have given black people something like $3,000,000 each. The response? “It’s a good start, but it’s not enough.”
This is Dr. Evil level of economic understanding . . . .
What’s enough? Nothing is enough. There is absolutely no amount that will ever be seen to be enough, because there has been a force-feeding of victimhood for decades into the black community, and to say, “Okay, white guys, we’re even now,” would be contradictory to every bit of victimhood that they rely on to get them through the day. From personal experience in dealing with victims, they relish the pity, and will do absolutely anything to hold on to their victim status.
Also, there is no way that black people will ever get the sky-high sorts of compensation that they’re looking for (millions of dollars in cash, freedom from taxes, a free house, and $70,000 a year for 80 years was one proposal). Perhaps they might get another MLK, Jr. Street or a George Floyd Square, but they’ve already got two national holidays plus Kwanza.
Whatever Kwanza is.
Teach your children about Kwanza in a responsible manner.
No, just like ANWR was a football to money-farm GloboLeft-leaning women with too much disposable income who wanted to virtue signal that Haitians should be allowed to eat all the seal meat they wanted, reparations are a mechanism to vote-farm the black community for whoever promises them the best package that they’re never going to get.
And even that won’t eliminate the “economic understanding gap”.
I’d make a comment here about the ludicrousness of printing another few trillion dollars and then just giving it away as a cure to inflation, but since we’ve long since ceased being a serious nation in any respect, I’ll skip it. Perhaps we’re hoping to spend ourselves into the relative economic prosperity of, say, Spain or Mauritania, where they still have tens of thousands of slaves.
Dang, I shouldn’t have mentioned that, since now the Mauritanians will want reparations from the United States for slavery since I’m sure that somehow the United States is responsible for blacks enslaving blacks 4,017 miles (16 kilograms) away from the United States.
ANWR will likely never be drilled, and black people will likely never get more than a token sort of reparations. And that’s fair, because no living black person was ever subject to legal slavery in the United States, though now we do have unpaid internships. At charities. That don’t want us to drill in ANWR.
I guess you could say the drilling system is rigged.
“Perineal fundraising tool”? Typo, autocorrect gone mad, or a clever comment on the fundraising issue? Still trying to figure this one out.
Hahaha! It actually was an autocorrect. Fixed.
I’m gonna get tarred and feathered for saying this, but I sincerely believe “reparations” have already been paid in full by the 620,000 Union soldiers and sailors of the US Army and US Navy who died to give slaves their freedom in the Civil War. One out of every four men who left their homes to fight for the freedom of slaves never returned.
https://www.battlefields.org/sites/default/files/styles/wysiwyg_75/public/thumbnails/image/Gettysburg_LOC00168u_HarvestOfDeath_HRsmaller.jpg?itok=UWTWwRlG
https://john-banks.blogspot.com/2017/12/fredericksburg-casualty-list-ny-daily.html
https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-soldiers.htm#fq%5B%5D=Side%3A%22Union%22
Sadly, this fact has been dropped from the education and thus the national consciousness of Americans, and has been replaced by a somewhat different narrative.
https://thefederalist.com/2024/09/19/tax-funded-group-sends-anti-white-pro-trans-board-books-to-wisconsin-daycares/
Paid in full.
I’ve long been in the “Reparations + Repatriation” camp. Every Black gets $5,000,000 in whatever currency, dollars, Euros, silver, they want. And, a one-way ticket to Africa. Any Black who tries to come back is shot on sight.
How many would take it?
Ricky, The War of Northern Aggression was NEVER about freeing slaves. It was pure economics, as “The South” paid 75%+ of the federal budget through tariffs. Lincoln admitted as much. Plus, it was an excuse to eventually plunder our wealth.
The same class of GloboHomoElites that started that war are the same ones that oppose ANWR, support reparations and say communism/transgenderism is the answer.
I totally agree with all that you say. But wars require “good causes” to justify them to the common people that sacrifice and die for them. The abolition of slavery was just about the only “good” thing that came out of the Civil War to justify the mindboggling slaughter – that, and Preserving The Union to take on Hitler and win 75 years later.
The Federal government could theoretically have allowed black slaves to continue working in the South to recover the agrarian Southern economy faster and keep those sweet, sweet tariffs coming. The Federal government could also have demanded “reparations” from the defeated Confederates and kicked off centuries of “Shiite / Suni” style resentments that would divide whites still today. It did neither of these. Thank goodness.
Within fifty years of the Civil War by 1913, though, the Federal Government found more lucrative ways of plundering our wealth than slavery and reparations – namely, the Federal Income Tax and Federal Reserve Bank.
As an aside, and at risk of a sweeping overgeneralization, while the Civil War era focused on the immorality of slavery, the post-Civil War era through today has focused on its irrelevance. Wealth was not to be found in the continued labor of Southern blacks but in the industrialization of the mid-West and West. (And America is insanely lucky we had the West to function as such a pop-off valve after the Civil War). A slave consumes 2000 food calories per day in food. That’s 2000*365 = 730 kilocalories per year, which defines a maximum amount of work it is possible to obtain from any slave. A gallon of gasoline has an energy content 31 kilocalories. So filling up the gas tank in your car a single time provides you with more work that a single slave can do in a year.
There is no place for slaves in a modern industrial society. The fact that we have black slavery today in places like Springfield OH and Greely CO and many other places only shows that ‘Murica is in a Hemmingway style (slowly, then suddenly) slide downward from that society.
https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/375011/feds-and-state-ag-investigate-an-alleged-human-trafficking-empire-run-in-springfield-ohio/
https://www.ufcw7.org/l7press/2024-09-24-ufcw-local-7-condemns-jbs-for-abusing-immigrant-workers
Ricky:: “The Federal government could also have demanded “reparations” from the defeated Confederates ”
Actually they did get reparations. Ever hear of carpet baggers. Wholesale stole land and whatever property that stood after the war. Southern couldn’t hold office (nor I think, vote).
It wasn’t about slavery. Just how many people would really show up to risk their lives for a region they despised and for a people they didn’t consider people. It would be more likely for people now to fight over abusing beagles than the slavery issue of the day.
Well, well, well, JW, you’ve finally gone and done it. You’ve come out and exposed the black community for the anchor that it really is, dragging on the ship of American prosperity. Welcome to the dark side. We’ve been waiting for you.
The only quibble I have with your excellent analysis is what Ricky also mentioned – ‘reparations’ of one sort or another have been paid, in full, with interest compounded, since at least 1861. The slate was wiped cleaner than a Hilary Clinton server long ago and as far as I can see, nobody owes nothin’ to nobody.
Sadly, the extensive coddling of American blacks that has already been done has emboldened them while stoking their greed. We’ve given them an inch, a foot, a yard, and now they have their sights set on a mile (3.1415 megaparsecs). ‘Reparations’ is a bottomless well that all the White self-flagellation and good intentions can never hope to fill.
My solution? Sure, give every descendent of slaves his millions. In Zimbabwean dollars. Upon relocation to Zimbabwe.
Well, Zimbabwe adopted the US dollar, so . . .
“Reparations” serves a similar purpose for Democrats as being pro-life did for Republicans, it provides a carrot they could keep dangling to get us to show up to vote for terrible candidates like Mitt Romney and John “Burning in hell” McCain. The last thing Democrats want is to actually give blacks reparations because once they do and nothing changes in the black community other than a lot more gold teeth and spinning rims, people might start to realize the only problem in the black community is that it is full of black people.
Again, it’s Lucy’s football.
My brother and I have backpacked in the Sierras every summer since HA – 0ver 50 years ago. We enjoy a clean outdoors. He also is a lifetime member of the Sierra Club. Several years ago he backpacked a couple of weeks in ANWR, including across the area they want to drill. It’s a semi-frozen swamp full of biting flies, looking NOTHING like the left-provided pictures of the mountains in the region… . His comment on returning: “Drill it.”
Yup. Nothing there.
‘The only people who had much opposition were the native tribes that didn’t benefit directly and a very small minority of granola crunching hippies who we’d stake out as bear and mosquito bait in summer’
Really, the most humane option for everybody. Including the hippies. Tell them they are saving the environment for starving bears and skeeters. They don’t HATE bears ‘n skeeters now, do they?
As for the tribes, tell them to open up a casino, like everybody else. It’s what, almost 2025 now?
Mikey likes it.
Caribou don’t have much cash. Most of the Native Corporations in Alaska have legit businesses, some grossing tens of millions. Look up “Doyon”.
Liberia is a shining example of where those wanting reparations need to go. I’m willing to use tax dollars to pay for their plane ticket, but that’s all.
https://alexanderscipio.substack.com/p/reparations-political-ideologies
I hear it’s lovely during revolution season.
i looked at that picture and the 1st thing that came to mind was “i wonder if it’s painful to be that stupid”
I think it must be. Look at her facial expressions.
There are so many things eating at this country, I’m surprised everyday when it’s still here. What a waste we have made of our heritage, bounty, and grace. Reparations. Yeah, that’ll fix things.
Exactly.