Attack on Machester: Reacting completely incorrectly.

I haven't commented on terrorist attacks for some time here. This doesn't mean that they aren't occurring so much as it may mean that I haven't had much to say about them that I haven't already.  Now, however, I find myself making a comment. But not so much on the terrorist attacks themselves as on a reaction to them.

This is frankly related in a way to a post I have on a different topic entirely, in a way, so my mind was on it, even though when I get to that one I doubt it'll be evident that the posts are in any way related.  Anyhow, I find myself making a comment.

And, moreover, I find myself making a comment to something I saw on Facebook.

I'll be frank that a lot of Facebook pat answers to things in the form of "click if you agree" or memes is absolute junk.  I was, in fact, getting ready to make another post on the absolute irony of people posting something that turns out to be directed back at them, and they don't know it.  You see that a fair amount.  But that 's not the topic here.

No, the topic has to do with not really thinking out what we're saying in reaction.  

More specifically, the post is in regard to this item that appeared on Facebook:

 

 Facebook Meme, put up here not because I approve it, I very much do not, but so that I can comment on it, and hence posted with "fair use".

This is a completely inappropriate reaction to the terrorist attack in Manchester in every conceivable sense.

First of all, let me state that I'm not a fan of Ariana Grande in any sense.  But what's this supposed to mean?  It comes very close to the "my country right or wrong" view that isn't really very American.  And it ignores the nature of the conflict, indeed, the war, we are now in. 

Indeed, I'm so little approving of Grande that one of my prior posts here in regards to her, the only prior post I have here in regards to her, was singularly harsh.  I'll still stand behind everything I stated there, including:

Hmmmm

Ariana Grande has a Problem with our culture's reductive view of women, and she's not going to be silent about it anymore.

Or so a news story on the net reported.

Later the net was reporting that she was reacting to pushback she was receiving from her comments.

Well, I'm sorry, but people like Ariana Grande are part of the Problem.  I agree that our culture has a reductive view of women. Pop Tarts who appear in videos displaying their butts in spandex and singing about sex contribute to that reductive view.  Indeed, Ariana usually has her wares on display so she's effectively prostituting her image for her career, which also contributes to that.  And if she's pushing back, she needs to wake up on that.  She's pushed herself in everyone's face already and she's pushing a view of the relationship between men and women, musically, that's deeply flawed.

So I'm not exactly a Grande fan.  And I absolutely  hate the pornographic trash of her most recent hit (in so far as I'm aware of what hits she may have), Side By Side.  Indeed, I'll stand stand behidn my comment that:

However, Grande, who has a decent voice, has made a career in part out of dressing like a tramp.  That objectified herself.

And I'll even concede something that is missed in comments like that above, and which is a very important aspect of the conflict that we are in.  Part, but only part, of the reason that ISIL is able to raise forces to contest us is that it is easily able to claim that the West is morally decadent and therefore ISIL's war on the West is a war on moral depravity.  In reality the vision of Islam that ISIL advocates is morally perverted, licensing the severe servitude of women, slavery, and extreme violence, but the degree to which the West has surrendered to the libertine allows ISIL to claim to be the only game in town in the moral arena in many areas.  Areas of moral conduct which at one time would have brought censure from advocates of the Natural Law or from the pulpit often tend not to much anymore, with this being all the more case in Europe than the United States, but there everywhere in the Western World nonetheless.

Which doesn't mean that the item above even comes close to any legitimate point.

I have no idea of Ariana Grande is a backer of the "Woman's March" or "hates Trump". Indeed, I hardly care.  I generally regard the entertainment industry as completely vapid and assume that most people in it are for whatever seems trendy at the time.  Generally, if a lot of people in the entertainment industry are protesting any one thing I figure it's probably reached the point where its really safe to protest it.

And I also assume that in the current moral atmosphere, and for decades for that matter, any broadly popular entertainer is probably going to advocate to some degree moral license.  It's always been a feature of that line of work for some reason and even in areas where that supposedly doesn't occur if you look hard enough, you'll tend to find it, and find it excused.  In female pop music male written music (which it mostly is) for female singers aims towards teenage male fantasy at that, with the singers acting quite often to prostitute themselves to the same through their singing.

So, claiming that Grande is somehow deserving of this disaster, or that her fans are, is really far beyond the pale.  We'd have to take her seriously in order to get that far.

But nowhere, I'm quite certain, did she ever do anything which somehow would be regarded as giving aid and comfort to the enemy.  She's not Tokyo Rose or Lord Ha Ha.  If she has political views that argue against the current administrations she's entitled to them, and that doesn't invite attack any more than to claim that the isolationist Republican Part of the 1930s invited Pearl Harbor.  We are fighting ISIL in part because we believe people are entitled to say what they want safely.  To claim that once an attack comes that this somehow means everyone who doubts a current path should just shut up is really totally in opposition to what we claim we believe in.

Moreover, while I have huge problems with the left and "progressiveness" and its goals, indeed I think many of its social goals are fundamentally deluded at the deepest possible levels, to argue that support for some of these things means ipso fact that she "hates" the United States or should abandon them due this is flat out wrong.

None of which is to say that Western social views have no role in the fight that's occurring. They do.  But Western political views do as well. And the hardcore Islamic views that are circulating in the Middle East also have a great deal to do with them and must be taken absolutely seriously in terms of ISIL's motivation. 

So, if we're going to cite moral issues in regards to the Manchester attack.  This isn't the meme to post.  No, maybe this image would be:

 

With some discussion about what an image like this meant.

Indeed, while I haven't spent much time here speaking of things like that which occurred on May 13, 1917, the messages attributed to such things is never of the type posted above but much more introspective.

25% of the States' Employed.

From today's Casper Star Tribune:

Wyoming has the largest percentage of state, federal and local government employees than anywhere else in the country, despite a slight drop from last year.

From jobs in education to city and state offices, government careers account for about 25 percent of the Wyoming workforce, according to a report by 24/7 Wall Street, released Tuesday and based the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Other low-population, energy-rich states made the top five, including Alaska, Oklahoma and New Mexico.

I'm a bit, but not hugely, surprised, that we top the list.

There's a bit of irony here, and I've pointed this out in prior posts, that while the state tends to view government with a degree of animosity, it's actually a major economic force in the state.  That doesn't argue for something like socialism, but it does mean that state employment tends to be one of the things propping up Wyoming's economy in slack times, or even in regular times.

Some politicians this past year took a run at trying to acquire the Federal lands from the US with the concept being that Wyoming would somehow administer these better. What many in that camp really meant is administer less, with the odd idea being that somehow this would increase production of oil, gas and coal; whose prices are in fact controlled by the market, with regulation playing a fairly small role, in real terms, in those prices.  That's something to think about.  That likely would have done nearly nothing for production, but as the state can't afford to pay for the administration, it'd have just not done it and therefore not employed many who are in that field for the Federal government now.

If that sounds dire, the University of Wyoming has been busy laying people off for weeks.  Not a week has gone by in the last several in which we haven't seen a headline   The State government has a hiring freeze going on right now throughout itself.  Even at that government employment of all types is making up 25% of the workforce here.  If those who really feel that there's too much government of all types had their way, therefore, there'd be flat out less employment in the state.

I'm not saying that's good or bad, but I am thinking that the state's relationship with its own workforce, philosophically, tends not to really consider this.

The Millheisler Group

The Millheisler Group, published May 23, 1917