Q&A About Days of Rage

There’s no perspective, actually. This isn’t a book that offers an analysis. The author states from the start that he doesn’t want to take a position and he stays true to that, at least in the 80% of the book that I’ve read so far.

Days of Rage narrates what happened. It doesn’t evaluate or judge. The author is way to the Left compared to me, which I notice, for example, in his wholesale acceptance of the Left’s narrative of race relations in the US. But he abstains from offering any judgment. You could absolutely read the book and conclude that the Weathermen, the BLA, the SLA, and all the rest of them were completely justified in everything they did. Or you could conclude the opposite.

The value of the book isn’t in its perspective, which it pointedly avoids giving. It’s in the extraordinary amount of research that Burroughs did. You could find all this information yourself but you’d have to dedicate years to seeking out all the books, records, interviews, etc.

Some of the groups Burroughs describes are more interesting than others. I was bored by the chapters on Puerto Ricans and enjoyed the ones about the Weathermen a lot more. You might see it differently, of course. But please don’t worry that you’d get brainwashed into any system of beliefs by this book. Burroughs wanted to give a comprehensive narrative of what happened and he definitely achieved that.

Qatar Money

Well, that was a major waste of money given that there’s only a handful of students in the whole country who know what Qatar is.

The idea that there are any Muslim, Arab or Qatari values represented in US higher ed is laughable.

People should stop looking for foreign influences and look closer to home. If Qatar never existed, would the US higher education be any less woke? Of course not. Then let’s stop wasting our time and concentrate on what is actually causing the problem.

Gifted and Talented

I detest the fellow but here he’s right. The words gifted and talented should be eliminated altogether from elementary schools. Teachers who mention these words in school around such small children shouldn’t be working in education.

I’m saying this as somebody whose favorite author in elementary school was Theodore Dreiser and who could read him and write about him fluently in three languages. The absolute last thing I would have wanted at nine was to be called gifted and talented and streamed away from my very few friends into a freak class.

Thankfully, even my narcissistically afflicted mother was lucid enough to realize that it’s not OK to do that to a child and refused all attempts to gift-and-talent me into skipping a couple of grades.

“Yes, but what if she’s bored in class with regular kids?”

I was deathly bored in class. This helped me develop a rich inner life and now I’m never bored.

So yeah. Elementary school! These are tiny kids. They don’t need to prepare for the competitive workplace just yet.

Why Is the FBI Woke?

After the Weather Underground’s seven-year bombing campaign, three senior FBI men were heading toward a criminal trial. And not a single Weatherman.

Days of Rage.

For those who are wondering why the FBI is so lefty, Bryan Burroughs’ book provides the answer. The FBI agents who hunted the left-wing terrorists in the 1970s were rubbished, persecuted, and prosecuted for ridiculous things like steaming open and reading the terrorists’ letters. Twenty, thirty years of stellar records of serving their country amounted to nothing. Risking their lives to stop the terrorist criminals meant bupkes. FBI agents saw Dohrn, Ayers, Boudin, and the rest of the murderers rewarded with honors and high-paying jobs for terrorizing and killing people. The agents, in the meantime, were ground into the dust for trying to stop these lunatics from committing more murders.

Is it surprising that there’s a shortage of people at the FBI who are interested in stopping today’s Dohrns and Ayerses? The terrorists saw every one of their ideas become accepted, celebrated, and aggressively imposed. Why shouldn’t the FBI run around, investigating imaginary nooses at the behest of Weathermen’s students?

I once again repeat my suggestion that nobody should immigrate into this country without reading Days of Rage very carefully and getting tested on the knowledge of the material.

Is It a Loop?

I promise I’m not trying to be difficult but how is this new ceasefire between Israel and Hamas different from the previous ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that Trump got them to sign?

Are we stuck in an endless loop of ceasefires that are not ceasefires? I hope this one sticks, of course, like we all do.

FGM

Why do you say “parents”, though? Has anybody ever heard of a father doing this kind of thing? It’s always the mother’s initiative. And it’s the same motivation. The mother is repelled by the idea of her daughter growing into a woman and enjoying her own body like the mother never did. So she prevents that by mutilating the daughter.

Have you heard of FGM? It’s always pursued by mothers and in very aggressive ways. The justification is, “this was done to me, and now I’m doing it to her.” They say it completely openly, and the look on their faces tells you everything. These women know they were robbed and they can’t stand the idea of their daughters having what they never could.

Of course, what I’m describing is a completely different phenomenon from when a middle-aged man in a very masculine profession suddenly puts a wig on his balding head and insists that everybody call him Rachel. That’s autogynephilia, and it’s an entirely separate thing. This has nothing at all to do with his childhood. That these very different phenomena get grouped together is unfortunate and confuses everybody.

Symbionese Owens

I got to the chapters in Days of Rage that talk about the Symbionese Liberation Army, and it occurred to me that the word Symbionese is precisely the kind of moronic neologism that Candace Owens would come up with. I keep getting distracted from the reading by images of Candace gravely explaining why it’s a genius term.

She didn’t actually come up with it, of course. She’s too young. But it’s totally her kind of dumbness.

Watching Movies

Somebody asked if I watched “One Battle Too Many.” I almost never watch movies. All I ever watch is Matt Walsh and an occasional true crime documentary on Netflix. And then, I don’t really watch them. I listen and almost never look at the screen.

With movies, I just can’t process visual images the way I process words. Most actors look the same to me. I get viciously bored having to stare at a screen. N is responsible for Klara’s movie education, and together they have watched every American children’s classic. But I’m useless movie-wise, and I freely admit this.

I love old Soviet movies but my father was there when I watched them and he explained them to me. By myself, I’m impotent.

Is it a good movie? Has anybody on here watched it?

With Conservatives Like These

Strangely, it never occurs to anybody to argue that half of the Aztec or Inca emperors or African chieftains and kings were white. The only culture that has to be insistently and counterfactually presented as being the today’s embodiment of diverse is the European culture.

More Days of Rage

When in the mid-1970s radicalized Puerto Ricans graduated from small-scale terror attacks to the deadliest bombings of the radical era, NYPD couldn’t investigate their crimes. A few years previously, civil rights groups had forced NYPD to destroy all the information it had gathered about these terrorists. Police officers weren’t allowed to track their movements, infiltrate their terror cells, or attend their meetings undercover. When Puerto Ricans switched from limited-range to large-scale bombings, NYPD was caught flat-footed, not because it didn’t want to do the work but because it wasn’t allowed to do it.

Does this remind you of anything?

Everybody who immigrates into the US should have to read Days of Rage and get tested on the contents. The reading and the test should also be a pre-condition on receiving a student visa into the country.