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dale blanker wrote:When did you begin to realize that their views no longer seemed right to you?

it was after my dad died in 1990. Until then, I had been what you might call a centrist democrat. Upon his passing, I inherited his 1911A1 sidearm from WW2, which had always been stored wrapped in a well oiled rag, inside a box, up in the attic. We knew he had it, but I probably only saw it 2 or 3 times in my life until after he died. He was a pacifist, and not much in favor of private gun ownership. To him, that 1911 was a war memento from his time in the Pacific, not a gun; and the .22 rifle that was squirreled away alongside it was a memory from his boyhood, not a rifle.

When I inherited the .45, I asked a couple of motorcycling buddies of mine, who were then currently serving NCOs in the CANG, if they would take me to a range and teach me how to shoot, field strip, and clean it safely. I wasn’t into guns, but I figured if I was going to have one in my house, I should know how to handle it safely, and if need be, how to shoot it.

They took me to a range, and I’ll never forget.....after the first shot, I kept the weapon pointed down range, but turned a bit and grinned at my buddies, and said, “ok, this is addicting.” So after that, they took me to a big gun show down at the Angels stadium in Anaheim, got me to join the NRA at their booth, and by the time I left, I had a bag full of literature and a Pelican case for my .45.

On the way home, they started telling me about the 2nd Amendment, what it means, why it was included, etc., etc. It all made a great deal of sense to me, especially the parts about individual liberty. Anyway, that was my introduction to gun rights and gun ownership. My friends handled it very well, and I became a convert. That got me interested in the rest of the Constitution, which I hadn’t read since high school. The more I read, the more I realized how out of line with its standards our gov’t had become. I was 38 years old.

Around the same time was the birth of my son in 1990. All of a sudden, abortion began to seem obscene to me, when before my wife got pregnant, it was something I supported. Becoming a dad made me appreciate how precious human life is, and how fragile it is sometimes. That got me directed into a more conservative outlook on life in general, at the same time as I was reexamining the precepts of liberty.

In late 1993, I reregistered as a Republican. I had been a democrat up to that point. The three primary reasons were (A) my realization that the Democrat Party had strayed FAR from a due regard for the Constitution, and (B) my philandering, lying president, who used a young woman as a cigar humidor right in the Oval Office, demeaning the role of a president, and (C) most importantly, his support of the looming AWB legislation.

Then on January 23rd, 1994, I had a spiritual conversion experience and became a follower of Christ. I was 42 by then, and up to that point had been the kind of person who would probably burst into flames if I set foot in a church. As I began to grow in my understanding of Biblical principles, and what life looks like through the lens of faith, it was another step away from how academia sees the world. The Lord was faithful to put the kinds of people in my life who mentored me with great patience, solid biblical teachers who taught me how to read and understand the Word, and right off the bat, a really great church where I learned how to live in community with other believers.....and in turn how to model that to the rest of world, a process I’m still working on.

As I continued to study all of this stuff, I became more libertarian-leaning as a conservative. I left the Republican Party in 2012, right after the election, and reregistered as an independent, and I have been one ever since. I may play a small role in local libertarian politics at my county level, but while I am definitely libertarian leaning, there are still a few things which can’t agree with the LP or LPoT platforms. One is that no nation in human history has ever lasted very long after it stopped defending its own borders, and I am not on board with the libertarian open borders policy. The other is that I am vocally pro-life, which neither the LP nor the LPoT is. But in other ways, I find much to be in agreement with in the libertarian platform. I’m just gun-shy about parties anymore.

And that’s my journey.

Scott B. wrote:There's a large problem (read, scandal) with peer reviewed papers and the inability to duplicate findings, particularly in the social 'sciences'. Their data set is one poll? Call me skeptical.

This “peer reviewed” paper is a perfect example. As you can see, after getting a ton of ridicule for publishing it, they’ve finally taken it down. In the original article - a massive spoof on this type of fake academic work - the authors used random word generating software to spit out large parts of the text, and then actually did submit it for peer review. It passed this review, and was given glowing remarks for its originality and the depth of its insights.......AND IT WAS ALL DELIBERATELY FAKED!!! The authors didn’t even TRY to make it look like real work, and it STILL got glowing reviews. It was one of the funniest things I’ve seen in, well, forever.

Here is the story, from the authors’ mouths, of why they did it, how they did it, and the hilarious results: Gender studies hoax. THIS is why it is difficult to take these people seriously. Their intellectual dishonesty and complete lack of curiosity about anything outside The Narrative is right up there with the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes.

The above authors were inspired by a famous hoax paper on a fake urological disease, based on an episode of Seinfeld that got “peer reviewed” and published: https://www.snopes.com/2017/04/13/scien ... d-episode/.

The paper was submitted under the name “Dr. Martin Van Nostrand”, an alter ego of the character Kramer, and conducted at the “Arthur Vandelay Urological Research Institute”, a play on a recurring George Costanza alter ego/front for unemployment benefits. Among the other Easter eggs present are its “references” section, which lists entirely made-up papers authored exclusively by supporting Seinfeld characters such as “J Peterman” (Elaine’s eccentric boss) and “T Watley” (a sleazy dentist). The paper also explains that uromycitisis was first described by “G Steinbrenner”, presumably referencing the late owner of the New York Yankees and one-time fictional boss of George Costanza.

To McCool’s surprise, and in spite of the fact that uromysitisis is not a real condition, this scientific journal with an alleged focus on urology accepted the paper after “minor revisions”:.........

Academia these days is so far removed from intellectual rigor or the expansion of human knowledge, and so wedded to being used as a political club, that it has very little legitimacy left. The Baylor “study” falls right into the middle of this nonsense.

b4aftr wrote:

Pawpaw wrote:

C-dub wrote:

Pawpaw wrote:

OneGun wrote:Stupid Liberal PhDs!

Why did you say the same thing 3 times?

That's pretty harsh. Painting all PhD's with a really broad brush there, huh?

It was a lot narrower then the brush they used to paint us.

I respect the work and dedication that goes into a PhD, but during that time some trade reality for their own altered reality. I know a few level headed PhDs but I know a lot more on the other side of the table.

My dad had two PhDs, and my mom’s doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude was published as a book. And she has published 16 other books since then during her career. My dad was also a WW2 combat vet and former Captain in the USMC Reserves post-war. He published two books, one of which is one of the most authoritative sources on the life and writings of Joseph Conrad, and the other he co-published with my mom - the definitive translation of the works of Aimé Césaire, a Haitian poet, from French into English. They were both professors at Caltech. My dad was a fairly common sense guy in a day to day sort of way, if you looked the other way over his liberal politics; but my mom sometimes says the dumbest things - PARTICULARLY when it comes to having absolutely no idea of what “normies” have to do to survive outside the coddled womb of tenured academia (AKA the indoctrination industry). And even my dad would sometimes say stuff that just made me shake my head......such as being very dismissive of people who are committed to their Christian faith. Both of them bright as heck, but no longer connected to the real world.

Statistics can be manipulated to mean almost anything the investigator wants them to mean. And where the numbers don’t match their bias, they use phrasing like “white males fear poverty and are gun nuts”. It’s the same kind of condescension that caused Obama to say that we “cling to our guns and our religion”. It’s such a simplistic interpretation of their conservative or libertarian opposition, that it is exactly like the propaganda posters of WW2 that always depicted Japanese soldiers as buck-toothed half-blind simpletons. There is no difference between the two attitudes. And make no mistake that they view people like us as “the enemy”, because we stand in the way of their march to a utopian future. It’s why they are obsessed with our guns, which give us the ultimate means of resisting that march.

The truth is, the lib/progs of academia (AKA the indoctrination industry) HAVE to place not-liberal white males into a mental box that they can condescend to, because (A) they don’t know what to do with or about us, and (B) they fear us.

I hope they continue to fear us, because once they stop fearing us, they’ll stop at nothing to gain their utopia.....meaning that they’ll be willing to commit to doing violence to get it. Most of us who have our heads screwed on straight don’t really want to have to start killing people over politics, so we won’t until we’re pushed into it and left with no alternative except to surrender to the utopian dream......which will fare no better than any other utopian dream in human history, and will end in millions of dead.

I was reading the comments in the thread, and the condescension expressed toward those who resent being typecast was just dripping. I had to stop reading them. Forum rules here prevent me from using the anatomical descriptives appropriate to a couple of them.