09:25 – Barbara left about 0755 to drive to Winston for a doctor appointment and to run errands. It’ll be wild women and parties for Colin and me until she returns this afternoon.
Yesterday, I noticed belatedly that September is officially National Prepping Month. Even Obama, that asshole, got involved, issuing a statement that encouraged all US citizens to stockpile a year’s supply of food and an AR-15 with 1,000 rounds. Or something like that. Apparently, we’re going to need those AR-15s to combat Climate Change, which is the biggest threat to our way of life.
Barbara and I have one episode left to watch in Heartland season six. Just in time, Netflix streaming added Heartland season seven yesterday. Last night, I also started re-reading Pat Frank’s 1959 PA novel Alas, Babylon, which I last read probably 40 years ago. I got only about 10% into the book, but so far it holds up pretty well. Historical novels that actually date from the period in which they’re set are always better than efforts by contemporary authors to write something set in a period that they never actually lived in. That’s why Conan Doyle’s Victorian novels are better than Anne Perry’s, for example. Well, that and Conan Doyle is a better writer.
There’s been a lot of discussion in the comments on the alt-right movement. My impression is that alt-right is a bunch of racist, anti-Jewish, neo-Nazi, skinhead thugs, and I doubt that impression will change anytime soon.
I don’t believe that groups are important, particularly groups defined by trivialities like skin color. Individuals are what counts, and individual rights are the only rights that matter or indeed even exist. There is not and never has been any such thing as group rights.
The whole idea of groups being important seems to be part of the human DNA, although I’m apparently missing that gene. We see it constantly as groups form in opposition to other groups. Sometimes it’s relatively harmless, such as when an arbitrarily-defined group of football fans opposes another arbitrarily-defined group of other football fans. They’re all passive participants. It’s not like they’re running patterns down on the field or sacking the opposing quarterback themselves. They’re just watching, but the important part is that they’re accepted members of a group. It becomes less harmless when it’s armies instead of football teams. Instead of a football score of “Germany 17/France 14”, it ends up “Germany 600,000 dead/France 750,000 dead”. And it’s all because for some reason most humans want desperately to belong to a group. I blame it on evolution. In the distant past, a lone human was a soon-to-be-dead human, so humans gathered in family groups and clans and tribes and eventually nations for mutual protection.
The important thing–and what differentiates us Normals from progs–is to focus on individual character. If someone is friendly, honest, and a hard worker, no decent human cares what color that person’s skin is, whether that person’s chromosomes are XX or XY, and so on. If someone is not friendly, honest, and a hard worker, no decent human cares what group that person identifies with. We Normals judge people on their merits; progs judge people according to their group membership, which is simply evil.