That’s the advice of Tommy Jordan, a fed-up father who read the profane rant his teenage daughter Hannah posted about him and his wife on Facebook … and who emptied his .45 into her laptop. Here’s the 8-minute video he posted to her Facebook page of the laptop’s execution, so her FB friends who were privy to her foul-mouthed denunciation of her parents could see what happened to her laptop as a result. The first seven minutes involve him reading her FB post, then responding to it. The shooting starts at around the 7-minute mark. Warning: there’s some mild profanity in this:

The video has gone massively viral. What do you think? I fully support Tommy Jordan. Had I been in his position, I wouldn’t have done anything as dramatic as executed the laptop with a gun, but I would have considered smashing the computer all the same, to make a point to my ingrate brat of a daughter.

Some liberals are freaking out, calling this, believe it or not, an act of domestic violence. What they’re really ticked about is that Tommy Jordan is a Southern male who used a gun to destroy her laptop. [UPDATE: I’m not entirely serious here; I recognize that there are very good reasons to object to Jordan’s action. — RD] If he had run over the thing with his Prius, and then delivered the dead computer to a recycling center, I bet they wouldn’t have complained at all.

Go Tommy Jordan!

UPDATE: From Tommy Jordan’s Facebook page:

Apparently both the local police and the department of social services are OK with it. Yes they came. Of course they came. They received enough “Oh my god he’s going to kill his daughter” comments that they had to. I knew that the moment it went viral.. it was too late and it was inevitable. I’m only surprised it took as long as it did to be honest.

The police by the way said “Kudos, Sir” and most of them made their kids watch it. I actually had a “thank you” from an entire detectives squad. And another police officer is using it in a positive manner in his presentation for the school system. How’s about those apples? Didn’t expect THAT when you called the cops did you?

The kind lady from Child Protective Services looked all through the house, the yard, and found ours to be a healthy home. She saw the unloaded guns in their rack with the magazines removed and stored separately and safely. Funny thing: The case officer asked to see “the gun”…. “Umm, sir, may I see the actual..umm.. weapon used for the video?” She wasn’t at all scared of me but I could tell she doesn’t like guns as a general rule. To each their own though. She was comfortable that I was adhering to NC gun safety regulations for the protection of minors, and that’s all she needed. But of course if you want to continue, I’m just going to leave a pot of coffee on for the next officers who come by. (Digress: Maybe I can get Krispy Kreme to sponsor me with lifetime donuts? Oh God that would be heaven. Dunkin? Crap… KK all the way….)

She asked if I minded if she interviewed my daughter privately but that I didn’t have to agree. I let her meet in private and then she and I met for about an hour and a half. At the end of the day, no I’m not losing my kids, no one’s in danger of being ripped from our home that I know of, and I actually got to spend some time with the nice lady and learn some cool parenting tips that I didn’t know.. I use them on my 8 year old son, but not on my fifteen year old daughter.. but now I will! There were a few things I thought she was “too old” for, but after talking to the case worker, I feel like it’s worth a shot to try them. Maybe I’ll sell those secrets in my next book! (Seriously? You just got mad didn’t you? I’m kidding. Besides, that would still only give me two pages of material- one parent tip page and one page on handgun selection techniques appropriate for different electronic destructive purposes.)

David Frum says Grover Norquist’s speech at CPAC was the most important one, because it showed that Conservatism, Inc., thinks President Romney will be a reliable lapdog for the GOP Congressional leadership. I suspect Norquist is right. But so is Frum:

This is not a very complimentary assessment of Romney’s leadership. It’s also not a very realistic political program: congressional Republicans have a disapproval rating of about 75%. If Americans get the idea that a vote for Romney is a vote for the Ryan plan, Romney is more or less doomed.

To date, sad to say, Romney has worked hard to confirm this image of weakness.

Nobody wants a president who acts as the passive instrument of even generallypopular groups like labor unions. (Did you know that—despite decades of declining popularity—unions still have an approval rating of 52%? I didn’t until I looked it up.)

But a candidate who appeases the most disliked people in national politics? That guy will command neither public affection nor respect.

(H/T: Sullivan).

I am comforted, I guess, by the fact that the reaction to the rapper Nicki Minaj’s hysterically blasphemous, expressly anti-Catholic performance on the Grammys last night has been largely negative. One would hope that her portrayal of a demoniac who vanquishes priests, one that used explicitly Catholic imagery, and that incorporated a sinister chorus of “O Come All Ye Faithful,” would not exactly be cheered by people. But it strikes me that the most telling thing about this disgusting spectacle is that none of this was spontaneous. This was a highly stage-designed, heavily choreographed performance. The Grammy producers signed off on this, and it was shown on national network television. I’m not freaking out over it — Nicki Minaj is, on evidence of her performing and her songwriting, a complete nitwit — but surely this is a sign of the times. It’s not Nicki Minaj that concerns me; it’s the producers for whom this sort of thing was deemed acceptable. It’s the Culture of Death, again.

It’s tiresome when Christians respond to things like this by saying, “They would never consider doing something like using Islamic imagery.” But you know, it’s true. It’s always true. Let those with eyes to see…

Conor Williams, a liberal blogger, issues a challenge to his fellows on the left:

The Left, broadly understood, consists of all of the following: 1) liberals who aim at a restoration of broad tolerance for lifestyle choices ranging from drugs to sex to art and more, 2) progressives who believe that it is our duty to build a fairer and better political community than the one we currently have, 3) a crowd of others who are defined by nothing so much as their inchoate frustration with the country’s general direction. There’s certainly some overlap between these groups’ various objectives, but it’s difficult to see it as anything more than incidental.

I’ve asked before. I’ll ask again: If you’re a leftist (of any type), why do you believe what you do? What are your justifications for being a liberal, or a progressive, or a social democrat, or whatever such thing?

It’s not enough to say, for example, “I’m a progressive because I want to make sure that all women have access to contraception.” That’s a lateral move—stating a policy preference isn’t a compelling way to convince anyone to share your preference, let alone become a leftist. It’s akin to saying, “I’m a vegetarian because I want to stop the eating of animals!” It begs the questions we’re really asking: Why should all women have access to contraception? Why should we stop eating animals? Why should I, or anyone, share your mind or join your cause? Do you have a reason?

Williams says that the Right has had this for a long time, and can make a compelling case for why people should be conservative — and that this accounts for the Right’s success. I think that was once true, but I don’t know how true it remains. It seems to me that conservatism is coasting on the narrative that made sense, and made sense powerfully, in 1981, but that has been increasingly detached from actual conditions in recent years.

This blog has an eclectic readership. Williams’s post is an invitation to us all to state why, on a philosophical level, we identify as conservatives, or liberals, or what have you. I’ll take a shot at it here. Let me exhort you to avoid the rhetorical pitfall Williams identifies above. What we’re trying to get at here is why the political camp with which you identify is the one that others should “share your mind or join your cause.” As you answer, try hard not to be gripey, tendentious, or nasty about the Other Side. I mean, it’s find to complain about the other side if it’s relevant to your broader point — sometimes I find that I’m a conservative more because I’m Not Liberal than a positive identification with conservatism — but I’m asking you to moderate your tone such that you invite discussion, not the drawing of battle lines.

OK, below the jump, here’s why I’m a conservative.I am a conservative because I believe that the conservative political and cultural tradition offers the most accurate way of understanding how the world works, and helping people organize their affairs, personally and in community, in a morally sound and rational way. I am a conservative because I am convinced of the reality of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, and believe that conservatism, broadly understood, proceeds from the understanding that humankind is imperfectible and tragic. I am a conservative because I am skeptical of utopia, and the ability of human reason to comprehend the deepest nature of things. Tradition — however flawed — is the surest guide to the affairs of men, because it has been tested. I am a conservative because I am a Christian, and find that in this time, and in this place, my religious convictions place me, however uneasily, on the side of those who call themselves conservative. I am a conservative because I believe Russell Kirk was right when he said that “the institution that it’s most important to conserve is the family” — and because I believe conservatism offers the best means of resistance against the cultural forces tearing the family apart. I believe that society is better understood as an organic entity, not as a collection of rights-bearing individuals who relate to each other contractually.

I am a conservative in spite of what contemporary American conservatism stands for in some cases. I am more skeptical of the free market than many (most?) of my fellow conservatives, because I believe the market, the most powerful anti-conservative force that ever was, is a good, but a conditional good. I am more in favor of environmental regulations than many (most?) conservatives because I believe that we have a moral and religious responsibility to treat Creation with respect, and to be good stewards of the land, not clever exploiters. I have become far, far more skeptical of the foreign policy views of leading conservatives, because I recognize the Right has given itself over to the crusading abstractions of Nationalism and American Exceptionalism — this, in contradiction to what conservative philosophy and conservative instincts tell us about human nature.

Yet I remain a conservative not only because my philosophical and moral views are conservative, but because I cannot find a home among liberals. I am generalizing here, but I do not share the liberal view that the world can be remade as we desire. I do not have the liberal faith in the inherent goodness of mankind, and in big-r Reason. I believe liberals (and many conservatives) place far too much confidence in science and technology, and in a technological “solution” to our problems. Most fundamentally, I am not a liberal — and I am a dissenter from mainstream American conservatism — for the reason Ross Douthat identified a few years back in a TAC symposium:

The picture is further complicated by the fact that because conservatism only really exists to say “no” to whatever liberalism asks for next, it fights nearly all its battles on its enemy’s terrain and rarely comes close to articulating a coherent set of values of its own. Liberalism has science and progress to pursue—and ultimately immortality, the real goal but also the one that rarely dares to speak its name—whereas conservatives have … well, a host of goals, most of them in tension with one another. … Liberals, on the other hand, dream the same dream and envision the same destination, even if they disagree on exactly how to get there. It’s the dream of Thomas Friedman as well as Karl Marx, as old as Babel and as young as the South Korean cloners. It whispered to us in Eden, and it whispers to us now: ye shall be as gods. And no conservative dream, in the 400 years from Francis Bacon until now, has proven strong enough to stand in its way.

I am a conservative because I do not believe in Progress — or rather, I believe progress is possible, but is always fragile, and usually brings with it a new set of problems. I am a conservative because I believe the only people who question Progress these days are those who call themselves conservatives (and even then they are a minority within conservatism; as Douthat wrote:

[T]he reason for a great deal of recent conservative confusion: the Right actually won a victory in the latter half of the 20th century, after centuries of defeat, and turned modernity away from a particularly pernicious path. This unexpected triumph has meant that many people who became accustomed to calling themselves “conservatives” when the conquest of nature seemed to require socialism or Communism are back on board the Baconian train, racing happily down a different track into the brave new future. These are the people who insist that conservatism ought to mean “freedom from government interference” and nothing more—the Grover Norquists of the world, for instance, or the Arnold Schwarzeneggers. In fact, they are ex-conservatives, because they are no longer sufficiently uncomfortable with the trajectory of modernity to be counted among its critics. They were unwilling to give up freedom for the sake of progress, but they’re happy to give up virtue.

I would say, then, that an open-minded person should consider conservatism because it is realistic, and likelier to come closer to the truth of things than its rivals. Conservatism recognizes the existence of limits, and it alone is informed by the tragic sense of life. This sense causes conservatives to at times be insensitive to wrongs that can be righted, or ought to be more forcefully addressed — segregation is the prime example here — but this is a more reliable instinct than the liberal one that led to the Great Society. It all goes back to how one views human nature, and the nature of truth. I would say to this person to think about history, and what history tells us humankind is, and what Progressive, Modernist ideas about the malleability of human nature and the nature of reality led us to in the 20th century. To reckon with this fairly, I think, is to make one a conservative.

It may not make one a Republican. I would say also to this person that he should not expect that the so-called conservative party in this country is conservative in a real philosophical sense; in most ways, the GOP is the party of conservative liberals. I would say, though, that you can find a home on the Right, however far to the margins you will have to pitch your tent, while among the Left, people who hold the religious views and philosophical convictions that I do will always be in hostile territory.

Finally, I think conservatism, as I’ve described it here, runs counter to the American mind and the American spirit, which is classically liberal (in both its right-wing and left-wing iterations), individualistic, optimistic, and crusading. Liberalism in power gave us Vietnam. Conservatism in power gave us Iraq. Americanism gave us both. The only philosophical ground I can find to make a stand against that sort of thing is on the Right, however alien this kind of conservatism is in this land.

OK, so that’s my story. What is yours? Again, keep the content philosophical, your tone detached. People who write abusively (which is not the same thing as writing critically) of opposing traditions won’t find their entries posted. I’m trying to get a discussion going here, not open another front on the culture war.

E.J. Dionne, a liberal Catholic who broke with the Obama administration over the HHS rule, analyzes the fallout from this dispute. This is an especially interesting passage, I thought:

Liberal Catholics were proud to stand with conservatives in defending the church’s religious liberty rights in carrying out its social and charitable mission. Now, we’d ask conservatives to consider that what makes the Gospel so compelling — especially for the young, many of whom are leaving the church — is the central role it assigns to our responsibilities to act on behalf of the needy, the left-out and the abandoned.

And we’d ask our non-Catholic liberal friends to think about this, too. Many of us agreed that broad contraception coverage was, as a general matter, a good thing, and we shared their concern for women’s rights. But we were troubled that some with whom we usually agree seemed to relish a fight with the church and defined any effort to accommodate its anxieties as “selling out.”

As a young politician put it in 2006, “There are some liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word ‘Christian’ describes one’s political opponents, not people of faith.”

Barack Obama, who spoke those words, finally figured out that a sensible compromise on contraception was far better than a running cultural and religious war. The administration would do well not to lose track of that guy again.

From Charles Murray’s piece “Five myths about white people”:

1. Working-class whites are more religious than upper-class whites.

This is a pervasive misconception encouraged by liberals who conflate the religious right with the working class, and by conservative evangelicals who inveigh against the godless ruling class.

Certainly, white intellectual elites have become extremely secular. However, as a whole, the white upper middle class has long displayed higher attendance at worship services and stronger allegiance to their religious faith than the white working class — going all the way back to the first data collected in the 1920s and continuing today.

Since the early 1970s, white America has become more secular overall, but the drop has been much greater in the working classes.As of the 2000s, the General Social Survey indicates, nearly 32 percent of upper-middle-class whites ages 30 to 49 attended church regularly, compared with 17 percent of the white working class in the same age group.

What’s interesting to think about is that these working-class non-churchgoers are probably not secular in the same way white intellectual elites are secular. I bet if you polled them, 999 out of 1,000 would say they believed in God and considered themselves to be Christians. It’s just that they don’t go to church. Where I live, during deer hunting season, to be a white male is to be seasonally “secular” in this way.

Are white working-class seculars the “spiritual but not religious” sort? I don’t know. That designation seems so SWPL-y.

(H/T: Steve Sailer.)

UPDATE: Just to be clear, I don’t consider it properly “Christian” in any meaningful sense to identify culturally as a Christian, but never to turn up in church, or to participate in any of the rites that are part of normative Christian behavior. I’m not praising what Murray identifies as working-class “secularism” here, but only saying that it’s likely that the educated, professional-class secular is significantly different in his relationship to religion than the working-class guy. I grew up around plenty of men who would have affirmed that they were Christians had you asked them, but who rarely if ever went to church, and who couldn’t have told you much of anything about what Jesus taught, or what any of it really meant beyond “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

UPDATE.2: An insightful comment from the thread below, from reader Mark B., who pastors in a largely working-class area:

You start a conversation with someone and steer it to faith matters. When you get past the kitschy Jesus and emo faith stuff which is more about saying “I’m not a bad person”, then you get to the church conversation.

Q: So if you believe in this Jesus, what church are you part of?
A: Oh, the place would fall down and burn if I walked in the doors.
Q: Why do you say that?
A: Well you have to have your @#$!% together to go to church.

I’ve had that conversation dozens of times. The invitation is usually something along the lines of “well, this Jesus you believe in, said his church is the place for sinners. He didn’t come for the righteous, but sinners.”

Now there are a whole bunch of other lines that can come up (I’m hunting, they just want money, all the good old lines), but that conversation marks the difference between the working class secular and the elite. The elite considers the church as the center of sin and the cause of wickedness. They make a moral argument against the church. The working class still nod at Jesus and even the church. They are much more like the crowds in the gospels. They can be swayed. They recognize the authority in the words and work of Jesus. The elite are more like the scribes and pharisees – very sure in their own righteousness.

My friend John Grogan, an active Catholic and liberal Democrat who practices law in Philadelphia, writes this afternoon about the HHS rule, and the despair this situation has put him in. (By way of background, John has long been active in the social justice wing of the Church, and comes from a traditional working-class Catholic Democratic family that strongly holds to the Church’s social teachings, as well as being staunchly pro-life. This e-mail, which I post with his permission, is in response to this moronic New York Times editorial, which denies that there was ever a religious liberty question at issue here. John writes:

AND the mainstream media and civil rights left saw no problem.  It is truly astounding and scary.

It is scary that Obama, whom I thought to be a subtle thinker and a civil libertarian, tried this tack in the first instance, when it had NO political logic, even on the most crass political analysis in support of it, and where apparently the defaults of his approach were well explained by his Vice President and others. It is more scary that the Left appears to be so results-oriented that it cannot see the danger of Obama’s approach, i.e., it does not understand how awful it would be if a President Gingrich adopted the same approach to implement his vision of what American health requires, nor the rather pristine Constitutional issue. I have long expected the Right to run roughshod over civil liberties to get to a desired result; I did not expect the Left to do so, and now its colors are clear.

Obama, The Times, Gail Collins and the whole batch have to be smarter than their arguments. It is not conceivable to me that they could come by the sloppiness of their thinking honestly. Which leaves the bigger question: What gives? Absolute contempt for the Church? An absolute embrace of a certain kind of cultural/scientific consensus that “all reasonable people hold” and that those who do not thereby forfeit their rights to conscience? This smells to high heaven of the Oxbridge-Brussels, latte-drinking elitism that was my only worry about Obama, who never met a supposedly meritocratic BoBo hoop he couldn’t jump through backwards with ease. This smells like contempt for the silly people clutching their rosaries.

What to do?  I suspect that had the “compromise” now offered been the deal from the start, none of this would have happened. As we see, the Church has learned to deal with various kinds of regulations in various contexts; a flexibility that is called “compromise” when Obama does it but is called “hypocrisy” when the Church does it. But it wasn’t offered, and Obama tried an egregiously unconstitutional and frighteningly coercive tack instead — despite, apparently, repeated public and private assurances that he would not do so. I do not see how anyone serious trusts him now. What can be done by executive fiat can be undone by executive fiat. The safest course for the Church and for civil liberties generally is to seek legislative protection (I do not know the merits of the Republican bill, but something legislative needs to be done) or go to court, although the compromise offer may scotch the pristine constitutional violation.  I do not see how the Church can congratulate him and say thank you. What he tried to do was indefensible.

Whither universal health care? Nowhere does the Times mention that the bishops (yes the Republican-leaning, sex-obsessed, kid-bothering bishops) have been the leading and at times only voice for universal health care in this country for years. The idea that this whole to-do was hatched by the bishops to kill Obamacare is absurd. The bishops desperately want to be champions of universal healthcare but have been ignored and or actively antagonized by this administration. Once again, as it did in 1980 and in 1992, the Democratic Party has made a fateful choice: we do not want or need Catholics of conscience in our party. And for what – to advance a pro-abortion agenda in the short term and an Oxbridge view of who should run the world in the long. It is sick-making.

Look upon it, ye mighties, and despair:

The Soviets retreated in 1989, leaving Afghanistan to a civil war that swept up the Soviet-constructed edifices in the conflagration. However improbably, a few of these are still inhabited, like an engineering school, the Auto Mechanic Institute, where a second-year student in a green T-shirt picked his way one recent afternoon from the ghostly wreckage of bombed-out classrooms.

Others are simply wrecks, prowled only by the homeless, drug addicts and dogs — sobering artifacts that confront the United States and its allies as they begin pondering what their own legacy might be.

“The Soviets came in believing they could re-engineer other people’s societies, releasing Afghans from their medieval backwardness,” said Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a former British ambassador to Moscow whose book “Afgantsy” is about the Soviet occupation. “They didn’t transform Afghan society any more than we are going to.”

More:

Watching them, another Afghan taking in the air, Harun Merzad, 34, who was jobless and wearing a black hat and a G-Star Raw jacket, spoke of the Americans’ impending departure, and of the Soviets’ before it, with indifference — as if it was inevitable that once again Afghanistan would revert to what it always had been.

“I don’t have anything bad to say,” he said of the Russians with a shrug. “Except they were infidels.”

George W. Bush, in his second inaugural address:

Some, I know, have questioned the global appeal of liberty – though this time in history, four decades defined by the swiftest advance of freedom ever seen, is an odd time for doubt. Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals. Eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul. We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery. Liberty will come to those who love it.

It turns out we, like the Soviets, are surprised by the enduring power of Afghanistan’s traditional ideals. We Americans always seem to be surprised by things like that, don’t we? I’m just so glad that the Republican candidates for president are addressing the lessons learned from our failed attempts to turn the Iraqis and the Afghanis into liberal democrats. Oh, wait…

Listen to this. It’s the most striking testimony to the tragedy of Whitney Houston’s decline and fall from drug addiction: the unaided voice track from her monster hit “How Will I Know?”, recorded in her prime.

Gawker reports that Tony Bennett said Houston’s death shows that we ought to legalize drugs. Huh? Would Houston not have drugged herself to death if her substance of choice had been legally obtainable? By this logic, legalizing alcohol has led to fewer alcoholics. And as Gawker points out, Amy Winehouse drank herself to death, and Michael Jackson died from drugs he had legally been prescribed. Maybe Tony was drunk when he reached this dim conclusion.