Archive for 2019
July 21, 2019
LIES ARE THEIR CHIEF RESOURCE: LGBT-Leading Dem. Admits Lying About Pulling ’77 Bullets’ From Pulse Shooting Victims.
I mean, it’s not like they’re going to win with the truth.
SO I SPENT MOST OF YESTERDAY AT THE LAKE. Here’s a picture of my 6-year-old nephew Harrison and my 20-year-old nephew Christopher kayaking into the sunset.
SALENA ZITO: “One month before before she is set to give birth to her second child, Lara Trump came here to kick off the 2020 Women for Trump coalition.” “Lara Trump says her biggest challenge isn’t retaining the women who voted for her father-in-law in 2016, but instead winning the votes of women who didn’t vote Trump, but who now find they like his policies while disliking his comportment.”
MICHAEL YON IS REPORTING FROM HONG KONG, and reports that he expects violence.
WHY POSTCOLONIAL THEORY IS NOT HELPING HONG KONG:
Over recent weeks, political turmoil raged in the form of mass demonstrations that saw 1 in 7 Hong Kong residents take to the streets to protest an extradition bill that would have allowed alleged suspects to be deported to stand trial in Mainland China, where the legal system is subject to the arbitrariness and discretion of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The fear that any dissident could be targeted isn’t unfounded as stories about billionaires and booksellers being kidnapped by Beijing operatives, only to be prosecuted in show trials on the Mainland and in some cases even tortured in jail, are well known. The extradition bill left almost no room for doubt about China’s ambitions to further override the civil rights guaranteed to the people of Hong Kong by the Sino-British Joint Declaration and renege on the agreed-upon “One Country, Two Systems” framework.
Elsewhere, Union Jack flags were handed out and flown in the streets. As photographs of these flag-bearing protesters, many of whom cut across demographic lines, began making the rounds on social media, two things became apparent: a) the uneasy reluctance of mainstream Western media to conduct any sort of meaningful analysis of these scenes and b) the ready willingness of some quarters of Twitter to engage in vitriolic attacks of the Hong Kong protesters, accusing them of being complicit in colonialism.
For those who embrace the ideological frameworks of various forms of “Social Justice” Theory including postcolonialism, decolonialism, critical race theory and intersectional feminism, seeing the Asian inhabitants of a former colony raise its colonial flag simply does not compute. Within this ideological conception of the world there is a very simple understanding of power dynamics in which oppression must always come from people seen as having dominant identities – white, male, western, heterosexual, cisgender, ablebodied and thin – and be inflicted upon those seen as having marginalized identities – people of color, colonized or indigenous people, women, LGBT, disabled and fat people. When all of these elements are considered together, we get the framework of ‘intersectionality’ and it is through the language and activism of intersectional scholars and activists that most people encounter these ideas.
Eastern people who complicate the narrative of Western oppressor and Eastern Oppressed are understood to be speaking into and perpetuating oppressive discourses of colonial power which apply much more broadly than their own situation. From this perspective, by aligning themselves symbolically with the flag or philosophically with the ideas wrought by colonial legacy, the protesters were understood to completely invalidate the legitimacy of their liberation movement. Other criticisms reserved for the protesters include rebukes for lacking sensitivity and solidarity toward other countries with victims of colonialism. The journalist Ben Norton went so far as to say that the British flag was a symbol of “genocide, murder, racism, oppression and robbery,” and that the “pro-democracy” activists in Hong Kong were in effect, pro-colonialist groups, funded and backed by the “Western NGO-Industrial Complex.”
This argument perfectly exemplifies how one’s basic reasoning and moral calculus can get muddled when steeped too heavily in this kind of postcolonial theory.
Read the whole thing.
AT AMAZON, save on Cookware.
OPEN THREAD: Make your mark upon the world.
DECOUPLING: Chinese Money in the U.S. Dries Up as Trade War Drags On. I don’t know about the rest, but it’s not clear to me that less money pouring into Silicon Valley and Manhattan real estate is a bad thing.
21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Woman plans to marry 91-year-old chandelier.
A British woman says she has several love interests, but none of them can hold a candle to Lumiere — a 91-year-old chandelier she plans to marry, according to a report.
Amanda Liberty, 35, who changed her last name from Whittaker during a prior long-distance relationship with the Statue of Liberty, is ready to finally settle down with the light of her life, the Mirror reports.
Liberty, of Leeds, who identifies as an objectum sexual, is putting the spotlight on the little-known attraction to inanimate objects, according to the outlet.
The bride-to-be said she has been in an open relationship with multiple light fixtures, but decided to get hitched to Lumiere, which she regards as female.
She acknowledges that she can’t marry her suspended sweetie in the traditional sense, but insists that her love is valid.
Clearly, there’s only person in America, perhaps the world, who can officiate this wedding.
WHO’S HAVING MORE FUN? Trump crashes MAGA-themed wedding, prompting ‘USA’ chants.
REMEMBER, TRUMP IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE ANGRY, IRRATIONAL ONE: Video Goes Viral of Rep. Tlaib Losing It at 2016 Trump Event: ‘You Guys Are Crazy!’ “Overnight, this video has gone viral on Twitter. The reason, of course, is that it proves once and for all that Tlaib truly is nothing more or less than a radical left-wing activist, fueled by hatred and anger for those who dare disagree with her. . . . That’s bad enough as it is, considering that she’s a congresswoman, but what makes this even worse is that she truly is the face of the modern Democratic Party: angry, obsessed, bullying and out of control.” And in need of some restraint.
JOEL KOTKIN: The Tech Oligarchs Are Going to Destroy Democracy — Unless We Stop Them: Once, the big tech firms embodied American exceptionalism and aspiration. Today, they are strangling these ideals. Government: do something. “Whom do the oligarchs’ wish to destroy? Of course, Donald Trump, whom they find understandably offensive, but who also owes little or nothing to them.”
Plus:
John D. Rockefeller tried to control energy distribution through his Standard Oil. Later, the Big Three ran the automobile businesses. These were powerful firms, but they could not, like Google, create algorithms that determined what people see, tilted not only toward their own commercial interest but their political predilections as well. In this way, what the techies are doing is oddly reminiscent of China’s efforts to control and monitor thoughts, sometimes assisted by these same U.S. tech firms.
Indeed. Also:
Our past generation of old industrialists may have been far more openly racist and sexist, created pollution and pockets of poverty, but they also built middle- and working-class opportunity; the oligarchs do neither. The Valley was once an exemplar of the American dreamscape but is now an increasingly narrow plutocracy dependent on non-citizen foreign labor, which constitutes upwards of 40 percent of their workforce as well as a cadre of young, largely temporary workers.
In its earlier iteration, Silicon Valley was a uniquely egalitarian place where outsiders made success and working people had decent incomes. Today, Wired magazine’s Antonio Garcia Martinez has labeled Silicon Valley as ‘feudalism with better marketing.” Despite enormous wealth, tech-driven cities like San Francisco and increasingly Seattle have become dysfunctional places, with massive homeless populations and a shrinking middle class.
Bad enough in place, worse if it spreads. “Once, the tech moguls legitimately could be sold as exemplars of American exceptionalism. But now, if unrestrained, the moguls are likely to be its assassins.”
WEIRD, THEY JUST SIGNED A BIG DEAL WITH BARACK AND MICHELLE OBAMA: Netflix Stock Implodes, Subscriber Exodus Ignites 12% Plunge.
DAMAGE DONE: John McWhorter: The Origins of the ‘Acting White’ Charge: School integration yielded a disturbing by-product: a psychological association between scholastic achievement and whiteness. “Certainly, the underfunded one-room schoolhouses in the old South had to go. Something else that has to go too, though: the idea that any black student is only being properly served if white kids are studying next to him. That misimpression, fostered by the school-integration movement, has yielded a disturbing by-product: a harmful psychological association between scholastic achievement and whiteness.”
IT’S DEJA ‘BAM ALL OVER AGAIN! Biden won’t promise Americans they’ll keep their doctor under his healthcare plan.
Curiously, Joe has forgotten what even Democrat house organ Politifact dubbed “the lie of the year” in 2013, after Obama uttered these words at least 36 times on the way to what Biden dubbed “a big f**king deal:”
As Reason notes: Biden’s New Health Care Plan Is an Admission that Obamacare Doesn’t Work.
But as another Obama staffer would say in an exasperated tone, really, at this point, what difference does it make? Perhaps Joe is taking the words of the new socialist “It Girl” to heart: AOC: Nobody is ‘heartbroken’ at the prospect of losing their private health insurance.
#FIGHTFOR15: Bernie Sanders Is Finally Guaranteeing His Workers $15/Hr Minimum Wage…By Cutting Hours.
Buried lede: socialist discovers how economics works. Or as Karol Markowicz tweets, “Bernie raising his staff’s pay but cutting their hours sums up life under socialism much better than I ever could.”
I’M EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: The .450 SMC: A Potent & Practical Defensive Cartridge.
DAVID BROOKS THEN: You know, this Trump fellow isn’t really quite the thing, what with his flashy patriotism and crass insults.
ONCE HE WAS THE MESSIAH. NOW HE’S JUST A VERY NAUGHTY BOY. 2020 Democrats Are Starting to Turn Obama’s Legacy Against Biden.
IN THE WASHINGTON BLADE, A GAY MAGAZINE: Trump supporters are gay, trans, urban — and tired of being insulted. “Many LGBT Republicans had serious misgivings about Trump in 2016, and some still do. What I can tell you for sure is that many more gays in the DMV support him today because of the relentlessly hostile and unfair treatment he’s received in the media from day one.”
HOW A VEHICLE BECOMES A “THING.”
GUESS WHO’S NOT AT THE TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN AFER ALL: Scientists Capture Spectacularly Rare Footage of a Deep-Sea Fish Eating a Whole Shark.
QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: “What is masculinity? How can we challenge it?”