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Archive for 2019
August 6, 2019
#JOURNALISM: New York Times To Run All Facts By Angry, Pitchfork-Wielding Mob Before Going To Print.
It’s supposed to be satire, but I’m going to fact-check this one as true.
SOME EAST TENNESSEE TAKES:
OPEN THREAD: Make it one of your best.
IF YOU CAN HEAR THE WHISTLE, YOU’RE THE DOG: “On Monday, Frank Figliuzzi, the former Assistant Director for Counterintelligence at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, appeared on MSNBC and compared President Trump to a ‘Muslim cleric that’s playing the beheading videos and radicalizing you,'” and adding that to commemorate El Paso and Dayton, Trump ordered the American flag to be flown at half-staff until the eighth of August:
Now I’m not going to imply that he did this deliberately, but I am using this as an example of the ignorance of the adversary that’s being demonstrated by the White House: the numbers 8/8 are very significant in white supremacy and neo-Nazi movement. Why? Because the letter H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, and to them, the numbers 8/8 stand together for Heil Hitler. So we’re going to be raising the flag back up at dusk on 8/8. No one’s thinking about this; no one’s giving him the advice, or he’s rejecting the advice.
88? As one wag joked on Twitter, “It’s also Michael Irvin. The truth is out there, people.”
In any case, thanks to earlier news passed on by MSNBC, we know it’s almost as racist as using the words “Chicago” and “golf.”
CONSPIRACY TO DEPRIVE DONORS OF CIVIL RIGHTS THROUGH MOB ACTION: Joaquin Castro Condemned For Tweet Targeting Trump Donors: ‘Disgusting,’ ‘Inciting Violence,’ ‘Holy Sh*t.’
COME AND SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Roger Kimball on The Escalating Madness of Leftist Crowds.
WE DON’T CALL ‘EM DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES FOR NOTHING — AOC IS JUST TELLING THEM TO STICK TO THEIR JOBS: AOC and the Democratic Party Declare Ownership of The New York Times: The actions of The New York Times can only lead to one question: Is This How A Free Press Acts?
“WITHOUT EVIDENCE:” WHEN REPORTERS ARE TOO LAZY TO CHECK, BUT WANT TO CALL TRUMP A LIAR ANYWAY.
DONALD TRUMP IS THE BEST PRIME MINISTER BRITAIN NEVER HAD, Dominic Green writes at the London Spectator.
All over the world, Trump is doing for Britain almost overnight what Britain’s leaders have failed to do for decades. He’s finally clearing up the shameful mess that Britain left when it welched on its imperial responsibilities, and he’s doing it for free. Instead of snobbishly deriding him, the British should thank the orange man for freeing them from their destructive relationships with the Orangemen in Northern Ireland, and the police-state Islamists of Pakistan and the Palestinian Authority.
The obvious way to thank Trump won’t cost Britain much either. The City of London is already full of crass monuments to greed. One more won’t hurt. Let him build a nice golden Trump Tower in central London, and a Trump Hotel too. If Brexit works out, the government should consider putting a statue of Trump onto the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square, so that the heroes of empire will be joined by the man who cleared up after them. It’s the least Britain can do to thank the best prime minister the British have never had.
Earlier: Mark Steyn on Boris Johnson, “Bertie Wooster with Jeeves’ brain.”
OUT: COPYCAT SUICIDES. In: Copycat Murders.
Very few of these attackers received material support from ISIS, and in fact for many of them, the only sense in which they were ISIS attacks is that the attacker pledged allegiance to the group. So functionally, this graph could largely be titled “Loners who rent a truck or get a gun or make a bomb, shout something about ISIS, and then kill people: 2014-2019.” People are no less able to do that in 2019 than they were in 2015, or 2005 or 1995 for that matter. In most cases, ISIS’s contribution was just the awareness that this is a thing that one can do. And there’s no reason that would have changed from 2014 to 2019. The internet still exists, people still post pretty much whatever they want, and information spreads anarchically.
Actually, though, I glossed over an important nuance: “ISIS’s contribution was just the awareness that this is a thing that one can do.” I think that may be a lot more powerful than we think. The declaration that hey, this is a thing. If you are part of this, you are part of something.
Contrary to popular belief, the people who commit mass murder aren’t necessarily mentally ill, at least not in the sense of having a diagnosable condition. Some do, but most don’t. So that’s not the common thread.
What is a common thread is that they are almost all frustrated losers. . . .
This mental model does a lot better at explaining the decline in ISIS-inspired attacks. Roughly nothing has changed in terms of people’s ability to carry out such attacks. So what must have changed is their desire. Now that ISIS isn’t on the upswing, nobody wants to join a losing team.
“Joining” them no longer gives people “See, I’m not a loser” validation. Because now, to join them is by definition to be a loser.
There’s a fascinating history around how the KKK was embarrassed nearly out of existence in the mid 20th century. A PR campaign, via Superman comics, cast the KKK’s secrets and rituals as pathetic jokes, which helped turn membership in the group from “I’m part of a thing” to “I’m a loser that people will make fun of”.
Dean Ing wrote on this decades ago.
UPDATE: Anya Pechko: “We have risen a generation of men who clearly do not know how to be in the world, we have armed them with violent games, ultra feminist mothers, we have made it impossible for a boy to now pay a simple compliment to a fellow student or a colleague at work. . . . We continuously blame the kids for this, but the kids are not to blame, this is what we have fed them, these are the seeds we have sown.”
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Here’s Why Liberals Fear The Babylon Bee. They understand the power of satire, and as humorless prigs they know they’re vulnerable. . . .
NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: AOC Accuses New York Times of Abetting ‘White Supremacy.’
And while McConnell’s social media team is having fun, note that Twitter HQ allowed the hashtag “#MassacreMoscowMitch” to trend last night, Chrissy Clark writes at the Federalist. “Wajahat Ali, a CNN contributor and New York Times contributing writer tweeted, ‘#MassacreMoscowMitch is trending. I still have faith in America.'”
While Twitter itself is a cesspool, it does have one benefit: it allows the biases of those who contribute to old media to become very apparent.
Earlier: Anti-Gun Agitators Harass Sen. McConnell at His Home: ‘Just Stab the Motherf*cker in the Heart!’
DEMOCRATS GOTTA DOXX: Joaquin Castro Posts Names, Employers Of Trump Donors.
Democratic Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro on Monday tweeted the names and employers of 44 San Antonio residents who donated the federal maximum to President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign.
Castro, whose district includes much of San Antonio, claimed the donors “are fueling a campaign of hate that labels Hispanic immigrants as ‘invaders.’” Castro is the twin brother of Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro and chairs his presidential campaign.
Fortunately, The Hill displays their vaunted objectivity by focusing on the real victim in the story: The Hill: Republicans pounce on Joaquin Castro for doxxing Trump donors on Twitter.
UPDATE (from Steve): A Liz Warren supporter goes on a killing spree, and the next day Castro thinks this is appropriate?
CHUTZPAH: Disgraced Former FBI Agent Peter Strzok Sues to Get His Job Back. “Because we live in an age without shame, disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok has filed suit to get his job back — including back pay for the time he wasn’t hard at work protecting America from a free and fair election.”
SHARK WEEK PRESENTS MY FRIEND AND FORMER DIVE INSTRUCTOR, Liz Parkinson.
LITTLE STALINISTS: The Rise of the comrade babies — No one owns the Democratic Socialists of America as hard as they own themselves.
Manners are not frivolous. They tell you much of what you need to know about a person, and about a group. The DSA are a portent, not a political party. Not much has been made of the convention voting to endorse open borders, which must be a first for a national labor party. While we laugh at their jazz hands, the DSA threatens to pull the Democrats towards a policy that will prevent them from winning a national election for the foreseeable future.
For much of the 20th century, socialism offered its followers a powerful, moving vision of a radiant future. It was Leon Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution (1924) who offered up the most memorable rendition of this utopia:
‘Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.’
Trotksy’s words are hard to type now, and even harder to take seriously. They are grand, certain and immodest. The failure to perfect man in the 20th century hollows them out and mocks them. Average human types did not reach the heights of Aristotle; they slumped to the lows of Beria, Blokhin, Dzherzhinsky and all the rest.
To be fair, Trotsky’s utopian drivel neatly fits into Sir Thomas More’s original definition of the word “utopia” as “no place,” something that Trotsky himself would discover the hard way when he found himself at the business end of an ice axe dispatched by Stalin in 1940. A few years before Trotsky’s demise, George Orwell, while still a socialist himself, had the number of his fellow leftists in his book, The Road to Wigan Pier:
The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. This last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it has perhaps been taken over en bloc from the old Liberal Party. In addition to this there is the horrible —- the really disquieting —- prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured ‘Socialists’, as who should say, ‘Red Indians’. He was probably right-—the I.L.P. [Independent Labor Party] were holding their summer school at Letchworth. But the point is that to him, as an ordinary man, a crank meant a Socialist and a Socialist meant a crank. Any Socialist, he probably felt, could be counted on to have something eccentric about him. And some such notion seems to exist even among Socialists themselves. For instance, I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say ‘whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian’. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people. And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.
Old and busted: You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.* The new hotness? Not only is the omelet not vegan, the noise of the eggs cracking is too loud for the quiet room.
* Though as Orwell asked, where’s the omelet?
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Sarah Palin’s Defamation Suit Against the NYT Will Proceed After All. “No matter what happens next, it’s nice to know that the truth still counts for something. The rules still apply to both tribes. Maybe we can’t make the NYT and the rest of the left stop lying about us, but we can punish them for doing so. We can make it hurt. Metaphorically speaking, of course.”
Heh, indeed.™
