Days of Change

Day 1200 – It’s His Laptop

I think the shift in the moral compass can be seen by this YouTube video and the reaction to it. In it, a father reacts to his daughter’s Facebook post about her parents by shooting her laptop on the ground.

My thought is that it’s his laptop. I suppose he could have withheld it from her, erased the hard drive, sold it on eBay or something else to not destroy a piece of technology. It’s an object lesson. Her behavior on Facebook was so wrong then he would rather she not have a computer. Even more than the absolute requirement that kids be online these days, I read some stupid reactions from (generally liberal) people about the father and his decision.

According to other people online, the father has anger issues, he has a violent streak, he’s wasteful with property. He embarrassed his daughter. He also may have violated ordinances with firearms and he was criticized for using hollow-point bullets which were less effective in that shooting situation. On top of that, some considered it unacceptable for him to parent the way he did. They wanted to find a law that fit their opinion so he could get in some kind of trouble.

At the same time, many of these people would have no problem with the daughter going on the pill or getting an abortion without the father’s knowledge. The object to forcing a girl to not have a computer, but they love forcing a church to violate its beliefs to further their interests. There’s a certain logic to it. If the state controls so many things, why not control the family dynamic as well?

Today, Pat Buchanan was fired from his many years at MSNBC. It was ostensibly for the content of a new book, which has no new content over books he’s written since working for the network. He left due to pressure from Color of Change on MSNBC. They may want you to believe it was because he held unpopular opinions. It was really because he held popular ones.

In 1992, Buchanan spoke of a culture war. 20 years later, he appears to have a point. Bill Clinton was a draft dodger, a drug abuser and a cheat. That’s what we knew about before the election. He also had at least one mistress during his administration. He lied about it and the American public seemed to turn on the people prosecuting him. George Bush was a former drunk who mostly abused his conservative mantle. He passed an expensive Medicare drug plan and encouraged illegal immigration.

The topic of the month is now sexual morality. This is a touchy subject. Human beings have sex because they want to have sex. They want to have sex as a biological imperative to procreate. This is a feature, not a bug, as the kids say. Indulging the urge can be done without having kids, but it has unexpected results. Look at a movie called Idocracy. The premise is that the lower economic classes of every ethnic group is more likely to reproduce, regardless of the ability to pay for extended families. At the same time, YUPpies and DINKs wait until long after peak years of fertility to try for kids and often fail. In the open marketplace, if you treat something like childbirth as a liability, you will wind up with an inferior product.