I just found your comment in the spam folder and liberated it. You can see it in this thread now. I have no idea why it was blocked. The spam filter seems a bit overactive lately; I’m not sure why. Let me know if it happens again.

I pointed out that Pinochet had a better record on reducing Infant Mortality than Castro did. That message didn’t go over very well. “But Pinochet had help,” came the reply. As if the Soviet Union never “helped” Cuba!

Later on, when I began to speak, the “poet” informed me that if I said anything further, he would beat me up. As he was definitely bigger and younger than me, I took him at his word, and said no more. Even if I had super powers, his fellow lefties would probably have lied on a police report.

The practice of seemingly “gratuitous” insults and implied threast, is, one learns, just part of the standard operating procedures of the left which they use to establish social dominance through intimidation. Throw you off balance and all that.

So rewind thirty years. I have this class, and I can’t even remember what it was. Maybe “Labor History” or some other major fulfillment shit-class like that. It was taught by a youngish, tall, thin and tousled secular professor with one of those offices right out of a movie: … cluttered with stacks of leaning-tower papers, call to action posters on the walls, and perpetually populated an earlier generation of proto-social justice warrior sycophants gathered around His Hipness, their living font of wisdom.

So, one day the prof has this Jesuit punk from Malta in to tell us all about the crimes and oppression perpetrated by Anglo-America. When I arrive the Jesuit (a dark haired Mediterranean type probably in his young forties), is already seated by a perpetually scowling near middle aged blond; who, as I recall it now, looked like an emaciated Kara Unger with a hangover and lank scarecrow dry straw hair.

As they are parked in what is usually my seating area in the back row, I find the only relatively empty row a couple up. Whereupon as I take a seat I hear, from this woman I have never spoken to or even made eye contact: “Oh great … the biggest gorilla in the class has to sit right in front of us”.

Now, if I was a gorilla, I was not much of one since on my tallest day in life I was not over 6’2 in boots, and not over 190 at the time, despite the lifting I did a couple times a week.

So I turn around to look, offering to get up and move if I am blocking their view of the coming attractions or something like that. The jebbie smirks, “You don’t seem to have made any friends!” Thus this life irrelevancy of the second part, is defending the comments of his companion irrelevancy of the second part, by implying I deserved to be attacked. This, is the mindset of the left. You don’t have to do anything, you just have to be there as a target of their bile.

Later as I have said here before, the priest got up and blamed the western democracies for their cultural imperialism. In response I pointedly suggested that we make amends by refraining from all contact and even withdraw all those awful tainting technologies which had been polluting their Elysian existences … including the scourge of antibiotics and modern medicine. “How’s that sound?” All went quiet.

Of course he said nothing. Neither did anyone else. He just stared at me for a bit and then turned to someone else.

One of the few times in college I basically said “f88k you” to a speaker. The professor didn’t even respond.

I guess I got away with it because … gorilla …

Huh … even the comment itself is gone. Casual profanity maybe. Neo has permission to clen-up/edit if that’s the case

Cuba took 14 years to go from 41.7 to 20.8 (1963 to 1977)
Chile took 6 years to go from 41.1 to 20.7 (1977 to 1983)

The conversation ended when he accused me of thinking I was the smartest person in the room, and said that it would be different one he got his hands on me.
And so our debate ended with a physical threat.

As lefties often lack the facts and knowledge to back up their arguments, a physical threat is about all they have left.

Back in the day, I attended a meeting at a restaurant that the local rag had billed as a meeting of concerned people about the loss of the Sandinistas in the 1990 election in Nicaragua. A “poet” recited a “poem” replete with blood. More people talked.

I pointed out that Pinochet had a better record on reducing Infant Mortality than Castro did. That message didn’t go over very well. “But Pinochet had help,” came the reply. As if the Soviet Union never “helped” Cuba!

Later on, when I began to speak, the “poet” informed me that if I said anything further, he would beat me up. As he was definitely bigger and younger than me, I took him at his word, and said no more. Even if I had super powers, his fellow lefties would probably have lied on a police report.

Cuba: Mortality rate, infant (per 1,000 live births)
1963 41.7
1977 20.8
1978 18.7

Chile : Mortality rate, infant (per 1,000 live births)
1973 63
1983 20.8
1984 19.4
1988 18

World Bank Development Indicators: Mortality rate, infant (per 1,000 live births)

The World Bank doesn’t have any Infant Mortality data for Cuba before 1963. CEPAL- Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean- does.

The Atlantic was even worse, as once you had a so-called spam comment, all subsequent comments were spammed out. I wasn’t surprised when The Atlantic stopped all comments.

Thanks for letting me know.

You can see it above your comment in this thread now. I liberated it from the spam folder. I also found some other commenters’ comments in there. Sometimes the spam filter is overzealous; I have no idea why. The spam filter never explains itself.