— OzGayPatriot 🇦🇺 (@AusAntiLeft) November 7, 2020
Archive for 2020
November 7, 2020
FACEBOOK WON’T ALLOW THIS LINK TO BE POSTED: Joe Biden’s votes violate Benford’s Law. It didn’t work when I tried.
They won’t let the shortened bit.ly version be posted either. Maybe the story’s wrong, maybe it isn’t, but this is bullshit.
OPEN THREAD: Thread away.
TIM KOWAL: Trump May Have Lost, But Trumpism Won.
And you can see a Trump realignment, bigly, in the fact that Trump markedly increased support among blacks, Hispanics, and Asians (not to mention the Holy Grail of Intersectionality, “Other”). And in the fact that Trump doubled his support against LGBT voters. And in the fact that Trump only seemed to lose ground among… Whites.
Trump may lose the election. The smears on Trump may have worked well enough. The media bias against him may have worked well enough. The journalistic nonfeasance to protect Biden — and to keep America from knowing anything probative about his past, present, or future — all of it may have worked just well enough.
Trump may still win — the fight is not gone out of him or his supporters. But yes, Trump may well lose this election. But that does not mean that Biden won. Because no matter what happens, the only clear winner of this election is Trumpism. Biden may beat Trump. But Biden could not beat Trumpism. Trumpism grew. Trumpism expanded.
A lot of people in this country feel disempowered and especially feel disrespected. I don’t think a Biden/Harris administration will reduce their numbers.
TRUMP WENT FOUR YEARS WITHOUT STARTING A WAR. NO OTHER PRESIDENT HAS DONE THAT IN MY ADULT LIFETIME: As Trump’s foreign policy comes to a close, beware the return of old-school intervention.
What’s your over/under on a Biden/Harris administration?
HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Asteroid Apophis is speeding up from sunlight as scientists recalculate odds of 2068 impact.
WELL, YES: Progressives Refuse to Hear What Voters Had to Say.
Some testy exchanges are taking place in public. Claire McCaskill, the former senator from Missouri, said on MSNBC that cultural issues such as abortion and guns had helped Republicans. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist congresswoman from Queens, shot back on Twitter that McCaskill had lost her election in 2018 and so nobody should listen to her.
McCaskill managed to hold a Senate seat for 12 years for the Democrats in a state that has been turning more and more Republican. Her audacious intervention in the Republican primary in 2012 helped her hold a seat she had been expected to lose. Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, represents a district where 77% of the voters went for Hillary Clinton in 2016. If you had to pick one of them for advice on how to expand the Democrats’ appeal in parts of the country where it’s struggling, of course it ought to be McCaskill.
Ocasio-Cortez’s misreading of her record is of a piece, though, with a larger tendency among progressives to misunderstand the last few years. They thought Senator Bernie Sanders did as well as he did against Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primaries because socialism was on the march. It has gotten ever clearer that what fueled his campaign was not being her. Ocasio-Cortez and her squad of self-proclaimed socialists got the headlines in 2018, but moderate Democrats won the elections that got the Democrats their House majority.
Indeed.
GWOT SOON TO GET HOT? A Biden Presidency Would Mean Your Tax Dollars Going to the Palestinian Jihad.
SHAIDLE AT THE CINEMA: Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low.
HOW EXTREMOPHILE BACTERIA SURVIVE IN SPACE.
FASTER, PLEASE: New strategies for restoring myelin on damaged nerve cells.
AT AMAZON, AeroGarden Bounty Basic, Black.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Importance of Seeing Your Front Sights.
PUTIN MIGHT NOT MIND THIS, BUT I SUSPECT THAT SOMEBODY’S ABOUT TO HEAR FROM MCDONALD’S ATTORNEYS:
Flashback: ‘McSleep’ Loses to Big Mc.
IS THE NEW YORK TIMES A LIBERAL NEWSPAPER? Of course it is: Lauren Boebert, Hard-Right Gun Activist, Wins in Colorado House District.
(Classical reference in headline.)
PAUL JOHNSON ON WHY WE SHOULD BEWARE OF ‘INTELLECTUALS.’
I think I detect today a certain public skepticism when intellectuals stand up to preach to us, a growing tendency among ordinary people to dispute the right of academics, writers and philosophers, eminent though they may be, to tell us how to behave and conduct our affairs. The belief seems to be spreading that intellectuals are no wiser as mentors, or worthier as exemplars, than the witch doctors or priests of old. I share that skepticism. A dozen people picked at random on the street are at least as likely to offer sensible views on moral and political matters as a cross-section of the intelligentsia. But I would go further. One of the principal lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is—beware intellectuals. Not merely should they be kept away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.
Indeed. Related:
Part of the problem is that the American distrust of intellectualism is itself not the irrational thing that those sympathetic to intellectuals would like to think. Intellectuals killed by the millions in the 20th century, and it actually takes the sophisticated training of “education” to work yourself up into a state where you refuse to count that in the books. Intellectuals routinely declared things that aren’t true; catastrophically wrong predictions about the economy, catastrophically wrong pronouncements about foreign policy, and just generally numerous times where they’ve been wrong. Again, it takes a lot of training to ignore this fact. “Scientists” collectively were witnessed by the public flipflopping at a relatively high frequency on numerous topics; how many times did eggs go back and forth between being deadly and beneficial? Sure the media gets some blame here but the scientists played into it, each time confidently pronouncing that this time they had it for sure and it is imperative that everyone live the way they are saying (until tomorrow). Scientists have failed to resist politicization across the board, and the standards of what constitutes science continues to shift from a living, vibrant, thoughtful understanding of the purposes and ways of science to a scelerotic hide-bound form-over-substance version of science where papers are too often written to either explicitly attract grants or to confirm someone’s political beliefs… and regardless of whether this is 2% or 80% of the papers written today it’s nearly 100% of the papers that people hear about.
I simplify for rhetorical effect; my point is not that this is a literal description of the current state of the world but that it is far more true than it should be. Any accounting of “anti-intellectualism” that fails to take this into account and lays all the blame on “Americans” is too incomplete to formulate an action plan that will have any chance of success. It’s not a one-sided problem.
If you want to fix anti-intellectualism, you first need to fix intellectualism and return it to its roots of dispassionate exploration, commitment to truth over all else and bending processes to find truth rather than bending truth to fit (politicized) processes.
Plus:
But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
Indeed. Their pronouncements should be viewed with deep suspicion, especially when — as is almost always the case — they have no skin in the game.
PJM’S BRYAN PRESTON WILL BE ON NEWSMAX TV AT 2:44 PM Central Time today, discussing the election and the media’s premature (and late) calls. Tune in on cable, the Newsmax Website, PlutoTV, SlingTV and other apps.
STOPPED CLOCK: AOC slams Lincoln Project: ‘Def in scam territory.’
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Out-of-Breath Biden Prematurely Predicts Victory, Claims ‘Mandate’ on Far-Left Agenda.
