Weekend Reading #43

Longer and more involved reading:

• First up, as always, is the Weekend Knowledge Dump from Active Response Training. Some of the topics that were more notable to me:
• Gun Nuts media asks if we are in a golden age of handgun optics with a plethora of inexpensive but dependable optics. Quick takeaway: "So there’s the buying advice. Stay above $100 bucks, and get the dot from the company that you like most."
• The lesson from the Alex Pretti incident: "When you carry a firearm, you do not get to fight anymore unless you truly believe the situation has reached the threshold of life or death."
• Defense against "social engineering" (psychological or emotional manipulation) attacks.
• Paul Martin warns us to prepare for the responses of the unprepared when SHTF, while offering some suggestions on how to be better prepared.
• Federal has finally started producing a 20-gauge buckshot load using the Flite-Control wad that might very well be a viable self-defense load. 
• A couple real world examples of why you should always carry a concealed carry handgun.
• A discussion about cross-draw carry. Although the article mentions the people that might benefit from a cross-draw style of carry (in which the author also lumps shoulder holsters and chest holsters) most of the article is about the downsides. And most of the downsides have to do with flagging yourself or others (although I don't see where appendix carry is much better) or retention issues from the front (there doesn't seem to be any consideration that the disadvantages to retention from the front turn into strengths in retaining the firearm from someone standing behind you, like in the check-out lane of a supermarket).  
• "You Can’t Share a Country With People Who Hate You"--Celina's Substack. The article addresses the inherent problems with a multicultural society, using South Africa as an example. An excerpt:

    The story of South Africa demonstrates that the removal of one system (apartheid) does not guarantee the arrival of a better one. The empirical evidence suggests that for the average citizen, regardless of race, the safety, economic security, and public services provided by the state have deteriorated since 1994.

    The “Broad View” of history tells us that European colonisation brought with it the engines of modernity: medicine, infrastructure, and the rule of law. When those engines are neglected or dismantled in the name of decolonisation, the result is regression.

    Furthermore, the South African experience challenges the liberal dogma of multiculturalism and multiracialism. The friction between the various nations of South Africa, Zulu, Xhosa, Boer, English, did not vanish with the vote. It merely changed form. The violence of the Bantu expansion, the segregation of apartheid, and the reverse-racism of the BEE era are all symptoms of the same underlying truth: that diverse peoples with distinct histories, genes and competing interests struggle to coexist within a single political unit without one group dominating the others. 

•  "Fables For Young Wolves"--Postcards from Barsoom. A review of the book of the same title, which includes fairy tales intended to teach lessons like those from Aesop and the historical fairy tales. The author begins:

    Children’s literature has gotten soft. Disney turned every woodland creature into a cute little forest friend, and tacked a happy ending onto every dark fairy tale. The bloodstains were scrubbed out, death was swept under the rug, and the moral lessons became saccharine platitudes about being kind and sharing ... a helpful aid to management of kindergarten classrooms, perhaps, but worse than useless for the moral instruction of the young, who will one day need to navigate a world where the shadows of the human soul conceal sharpened knives, and the truth is not always what well-meaning young women with associates degrees in early childhood education might wish. Children go along with it, but deep down they know that they’re being lied to, that the adult are keeping something from them when they pretend that every story has a happy ending, that everyone can be friends and get along if they’re just sufficiently nice to one another.

    Contemporary children’s literature has gotten even worse under the pressure of politics, with bookshelves filling with stories about antiracist babies who grow up to become boys who become girls, and girls who save themselves from dragons and therefore don’t need help from the boys who foolishly refused to become girls. This is less moral instruction than moral inversion, literature meant to turn children against their own natures, stories that deliberately deceive developing minds in order to neuter them, soften them, make them malleable and unthreatening for a managerial culture in which the socially acceptable lie is always preferable to the uncomfortable truth.

    Fables For Young Wolves is not that sort of book. 

•  "Confronting the Unspeakable Truth"--Aaron Renn. This piece springboards off Jacob Savage's piece “The Lost Generation,” describing how white men have been frozen out of many jobs because of discrimination due to DEI policies, providing more context and exploring issues not addressed in Savage's essay. Some of his strongest words are reserved for religious leaders:

    I’ve talked before about how roughly 70% of divorces are initiated by women. While the exact percentage varies by study, this is one of the best attested statistics in social science. But I’ve never seen this statistic mentioned in sermon or book on marriage by a major evangelical pastor.

    Similarly, have you ever heard one of them talk about discrimination against white men today? I haven’t seen it.

    My observation from over a decade ago, from before I even started this newsletter, is that the average evangelical pastor is terrified of offending women. You can almost smell the fear on them.

    Similarly, when it comes to things like what Savage discussed in his article, we see a lot of what looks like the fear of man.

    Everybody has to pick their battles. I don’t think we are obligated to go around giving our take on every single subject, or even every nuance of every subject.

    But when you talk frequently, and often loudly, about topics like marriage and racial justice, and never mention much less address very core and relevant facts, you are not being honest.

    You also forfeit the moral standing to critique the people who are mentioning them. ...