CHANGE: Evolution of Defensive Tactics.
Archive for 2020
November 11, 2020
TODAY AT 3:30PM EASTERN: VIP Gold Live Chat with VodkaPundit, Kruiser, and Preston.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Voting for Joe Biden Won’t Save You From the Mob.
ROGER SIMON: Libertarian Ideas Are Great, Voting Libertarian Self-Defeating.
As of this writing, the votes separating Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are less than the numbers gained by Libertarian Party candidate Jo Jorgensen who garnered close to 1.7 percent of the popular vote.
As Joel Pollak wrote on breitbart.com, “If Jorgensen’s votes went to Trump, instead of allowing Biden to win these states, the president would win re-election, with 289 Electoral College votes.”
Whether this is absolutely true is, of course, unknowable, but given the current leftward-lurching Democratic Party that seems about as libertarian as Chairman Mao, if push came to the proverbial shove, the majority of Ms. Jorgensen’s voters likely would have gone to Trump.
She seems like a decent person but Jorgensen—interviewed here by Jan Jekielek for his compelling American Thought Leaders series—is a textbook example of what I termed a “moral narcissist” in my 2016 book “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already. “
What the moral narcissist claims she believes (in this case Jorgensen, but there are many similar self-described liberals and progressives as well)—not the actual results of those beliefs—is what defines her as a person and makes her good.
Joel Pollak made those results in Jorgensen’s case painfully clear in the link above, but they are arguably even worse in the long run.
The more libertarian ideas are debated within the Republican Party, the more that party’s candidates will have to respond to them and, potentially, espouse them. They will have real world implications.
When you waste them on something as inconsequential as a fringe and almost entirely ignored Libertarian Party candidacy, particularly in something so hotly contested as a presidential election, you vitiate them and are ultimately self-defeating, not to mention, as we have seen, sabotaging the only viable candidate who best carries your ideas.
Trump is far from a pure, or even relatively pure, libertarian, but compared to Joe Biden—especially given what surrounds him from Bernie Sanders to Kamala Harris to AOC—he’s a veritable Ron Raul.
Moreover, the “deplorables” who are, oddly, more libertarian than Trump on the street level—they wish more than anything to be left alone by government—could push or could have pushed Trump more in their direction during a second term, especially after the pandemic.
Exit question from Roger: “Which leads to the ultimately more important question of the efficacy of ideological purity. Is it self-defeating in and of itself?”
Not to mention 2009: “A crowd in grandstands in front of the White House taunted the outgoing president by chanting the chorus of a song, ‘Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye),’ often used by fans of a winning sports team to taunt the losers. Some spectators waved ‘Arrest Bush’ signs along the motorcade route and chanted ‘No more Bush’ shortly before the swearing-in ceremony began.”
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Researchers 3-D print biomedical parts with supersonic speed.
IT’S NOT THE PEOPLE WHO VOTE THAT COUNT, IT’S THE PEOPLE WHO COUNT THE VOTES: Democrats Know Mail-In Voting Means Mass Fraud, And Pushed It Anyway.
IMPRESSIVE: MOST FOSSIL SPECIES CAN’T EVEN WRITE HISTORY: New fossil seal species rewrites history.
UH, PHRASING? Climate crisis could kill off great tits, scientists warn.
Or perhaps not. It is the London Independent after all, home of the classic 2000 headline, “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.”
IT’S ALL PART OF THE PROCESS: “What is the argument that Trump ought to be doing what he can to calm us? I hear Biden and his people telling us they want to bring calm to the country, but they’re declining the opportunity to just be calm themselves until the state officials certify the results of the election. Personally, I feel calm about waiting for that. Why isn’t that okay? It seems to me that as long as they choose to pressure Trump to concede before the vote certification, they’re forfeiting the high ground of calmness above all.”
WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT EXPERTS? ‘Unusually high call volume’? You’re being lied to, say experts.
When you get the same recording every time you call, there’s nothing “unusual” about it.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE – LEGAL EDITION UPDATE: “Following the [Obama-era] Gainful Employment regulations, Gillen divides law schools into three categories: pass (where the typical graduate’s debt payments are no higher than 8.6 percent of earnings), probation (between 8.6 percent and 12.8 percent) and fail (more than 12.8 percent of earnings)… 73 percent of the schools for which Gillen was able to get data (168 schools) fail.” Yeesh.
BILL WHITTLE: The Stolen Election, Part One — AMERICAN PRAVDA.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Philosopher Revealed as Serial Plagiarist.
CORPORATIST TOOL: BuzzFeed wants to become an authority of sexual wellness for millennials with a new branded sex toy. “BuzzFeed’s name and signature bright red color will be used to sell a new vibrator this fall in the publisher’s latest effort to become the internet’s authority on sex and wellness.”
(Classical allusion in headline.)
HAVE WE FINALLY TURNED THE CORNER ON 2020? ‘Murder hornet’ nest with nearly 200 queens destroyed ‘in the nick of time.’
ONE OF OUR FRIENDS WHO RECENTLY STARTED DATING AGAIN COMPLAINED ABOUT MEN WHO CAN’T FIND THE CLITORIS, BUT THOSE MEN CAN POINT TO THIS IN THEIR DEFENSE: Millions of women don’t know where their own vagina is located.
WHAT TOOK SO LONG? Trump Wins Alaska.