THEREBY CLAIMING THERE’S A WAR ON? SHINY: Decriminalizing gang bangers, Soros prosecutor Kim Foxx declines to charge five arrested in fatal gang shootout, citing ‘mutual combatants’.
Archive for 2021
October 6, 2021
I APPRECIATE THE POINT, BUT IT IS ACTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE: Those $4.5 trillion ‘infrastructure’ and ‘reconciliation’ bills are far more radical and dangerous than you think.
Because I think they’re death knells for the republic.
OH, PLEASE. THEY’RE TARGETING ALL AMERICANS: Senator Josh Hawley Confronts Deputy AG Lisa Monaco About DOJ and FBI Attempt to Target American Parents Attending School Board Meetings.
THIS IS THE SYSTEM THROUGH WHICH WE GET OUR HEALTH CARE:
And then people wonder why we’re moving.
“Get the jab, or you don’t get your life-saving transplant, you dirty deplorable!”
When the hurly burly is done, there needs to be the equivalent of trials for war crimes.
…. well, I was going to say there needs to be heads on pikes, but I never get what I want.
FALL IN LINE, PEASANTS: Today’s blacklisted American: Football scout fired for refusing to get vaccinated.
IF THE PROCESS IS TOTALITARIANISM, THAT’S CORRECT: Invading Privacy Just “Part Of The Process”.
October 5, 2021
THE KIDS ON TIKTOK ARE MOCKING FAUCI:
@youfavoritebannedrussian Happy Hump Day😂🤣 #funnymeme #usa_tiktok #silenceofthelambs #BillboardNXT #senseofhumor #laughalittle😂 #snowflakes #fypage
OPEN THREAD: I was dreaming when I blogged this, so sue me if I blogged it wrong.
FACEBOOK “WHISTLEBLOWER” CENSORED NY POST HUNTER BIDEN EXPOSÉ LAST FALL:
Human Events has learned that according to her personal advocacy website, Frances Haugen states that in 2020 she was a member of Facebook’s internal Civic Integrity team. That means in all likelihood she was part of the team that made the controversial decision to ban the bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story by the New York Post from Facebook in October 2020, a crucial point of the election. This was one of the most significant October Surprises in U.S. political history, and Facebook and Twitter made the decision to ban it without evidence amid rumors that the laptop was tied to Russian intelligence. Those rumors ended up being disinformation, and were all proved false.
For now, Haugen continues to be represented by Jen Psaki’s PR firm and Eric Ciaramella’s legal team.
As Glenn Greenwald writes, “Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer its Power to Censor:”
When Facebook, Google, Twitter and other Silicon Valley social media companies were created, they did not set out to become the nation’s discourse police. Indeed, they affirmatively wanted not to do that. Their desire to avoid that role was due in part to the prevailing libertarian ideology of a free internet in that sub-culture. But it was also due to self-interest: the last thing social media companies wanted to be doing is looking for ways to remove and block people from using their product and, worse, inserting themselves into the middle of inflammatory political controversies. Corporations seek to avoid angering potential customers and users over political stances, not courting that anger.
This censorship role was not one they so much sought as one that was foisted on them. It was not really until the 2016 election, when Democrats were obsessed with blaming social media giants (and pretty much everyone else except themselves) for their humiliating defeat, that pressure began escalating on these executives to start deleting content liberals deemed dangerous or false and banning their adversaries from using the platforms at all. As it always does, the censorship began by targeting widely disliked figures — Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones and others deemed “dangerous” — so that few complained (and those who did could be vilified as sympathizers of the early offenders). Once entrenched, the censorship net then predictably and rapidly spread inward (as it invariably does) to encompass all sorts of anti-establishment dissidents on the right, the left, and everything in between. And no matter how much it widens, the complaints that it is not enough intensify. For those with the mentality of a censor, there can never be enough repression of dissent. And this plot to escalate censorship pressures found the perfect vessel in this stunningly brave and noble Facebook heretic who emerged this week from the shadows into the glaring spotlight. She became a cudgel that Washington politicians and their media allies could use to beat Facebook into submission to their censorship demands.
In this dynamic we find what the tech and culture writer Curtis Yarvin calls “power leak.” This is a crucial concept for understanding how power is exercised in American oligarchy, and Yarvin’s brilliant essay illuminates this reality as well as it can be described. Hyperbolically arguing that “Mark Zuckerberg has no power at all,” Yarvin points out that it may appear that the billionaire Facebook CEO is powerful because he can decide what will and will not be heard on the largest information distribution platform in the world. But in reality, Zuckerberg is no more powerful than the low-paid content moderators whom Facebook employs to hit the “delete” or “ban” button, since it is neither the Facebook moderators nor Zuckerberg himself who is truly making these decisions. They are just censoring as they are told, in obedience to rules handed down from on high. It is the corporate press and powerful Washington elites who are coercing Facebook and Google to censor in accordance with their wishes and ideology upon pain of punishment in the form of shame, stigma and even official legal and regulatory retaliation.
The DNC wants Facebook banning conservatives; the DNC-MSM wants them to no longer be an end-around to their propaganda, Stephen Miller writes: Blame legacy media for spreading disinformation, not Facebook. Lurid tales of border patrol agents whipping migrants show how badly they get it wrong:
Journalists who target Facebook for elevating voices like Ben Shapiro’s or Breitbart‘s spare little introspection for their own roles in the prevalence of misinformation. Now, the audience is moving on, and they will continue to do so for as long as outlets like the Washington Post behave in this way.
A better solution for Margaret Sullivan and her exclusive band of media gatekeepers would be not regulation of Facebook but self-regulation of themselves. That would mean taking a hard look in the mirror and asking why exactly trust in their institutions is at an all-time low.
When traditional news outlets start caring about truth again, perhaps the audience will as well. Until then, Facebook will continue to dictate what information is valuable, and Margaret Sullivan and company will be left holding the imaginary whip.
But traditional news outlets are too in-bed with the Democratic Party to change. At the end of every presidential election, there are a few “we must do better next time” articles. But they’re invariably preceded by moments such as these:
UPDATE: Heh, indeed:
DIRTY TRICKS: Democrats’ Sneaky Sabotage.
A group tied to prominent Democratic strategists is posing as a conservative outfit to try to drive a wedge between the Republican candidate for Virginia governor and his core voters, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: The state’s gubernatorial race is expected to be tight and could be a national bellwether. As Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin’s campaign hypes improving poll numbers, Democrats are trying to chip away at his support in GOP strongholds.
What’s happening: During the past week, Virginians have been targeted with ads on Facebook, Instagram, Google and Snapchat questioning Youngkin’s commitment to the Second Amendment.
They’re scared. You shoul be supporting Youngkin if you can. McAuliffe is a sleaze who deserves to lose.
SOHRAB AHMARI: The Political Economy of Dystopia. “What if dystopia is already here? What if our territory already conforms to maps drawn long ago by science-fiction authors? Could it be that we have crossed the invisible frontier that divides an ordinary place, an ordinary topos, from a dystopian realm?”
To tie all this together: It seems to me that we are living in a kind of Eden-Olympia writ large. Or rather, we are in a stage of transition—a shift between, on one hand, a vestigial world of still-embodied communities inhabited by political animals with historical memories and, on the other, the nightmarish utopia of Eden-Olympia (note that the name is both biblical and classical, suggesting a religious-mythic utopia, or non-place, which, when established in the real world is, of course, a dystopia). The paroxysms that so worry us—woke-ism, cancel culture, gender ideology, etc.—are symptoms of this historical passage.
The neoliberal class, the globalist class, the managerial class—whatever you wish to call it—is subjecting us to a kind of ratissage, raking us over to create a world that will serve its material interests even better than the semi-normality that prevailed just a few years ago.
Hence, for example, the bodily obsession and social distancing: the dream of a world without grime, without the scent and sweat and germs of other human beings—an aspiration as much for Eden-Olympia’s executives [from novelist J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes] as for our ruling class.
The laptop class generates value by manipulating information on screens, and it looks with bewilderment and contempt at two classes it sees as vestigial: small property holders and what I have called tangible workers. What to do with them? Ideally, all that kind of labor and value generation would be automated, relegated to drones, online retailers, and so on. But the intangibles class, or the laptop class, still needs tangible labor: Silicon Valley, as the author Michael Lind has pointed out, can’t do all it does without massive storage and power-generation facilities spread across the heartland of the United States and maintained by the working class, by tangible labor.
Eden-Olympia needs farmers and restaurants and high-end escorts and private security. Now enter Covid-19: a real crisis, but also what a tremendous opportunity to squeeze the tangibles class, to discipline it, to transfer as much of its livelihood as possible to virtual realms controlled by the laptop class—an incredible opportunity for an upward transfer of wealth. And, of course, the added benefit of social distancing: literally enacting distance between people and classes, a separation symbolized by the medical hijab and the Plexiglas barrier. Why won’t they let the virus go? Why won’t they let us move on? Because class war is carried out in many ways.
Hence, too, the war against historical memory. The bringing about of Eden-Olympia demands ahistoricity. People who have historical memory have heroes, they have romantic ideals, they have authorities that guide their individual consciences, they have national pride. Family and community form the warp and weft of their characters. People who don’t have such things make the perfect corporate subjects, be they the ones who occupy the commanding heights or the ones who toil on the peripheries.
Related: “Cheer Up, Liberals. You Have the America You Wanted,” Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times.
REVIEW: The Many Saints of Newark.
In The Many Saints of Newark, we see the mob boss on whom Tony modeled himself—his uncle, Dickie Moltisanti (“many saints”)—behave in much the same fashion. But for some odd reason, the movie’s creative team—Chase, his cowriter Lawrence Konner, and director Alan Taylor—seem to want us to excuse Dickie’s behavior. Dickie stumbles into his evil and is torn up about it, as though that makes a difference. What’s more, they cast Alessandro Nivola in the part, and while Nivola is a fine actor, he comes across as a matinee idol who wandered in from another kind of picture entirely.
Everything that’s good about The Many Saints of Newark has little to do with the story, plot, or themes. It looks like a million bucks. The set design, costumes, and rendering of late-1960s/early-1970s New Jersey are all sumptuous and seductive. Many Saints is a beautiful thing to look at, which is something The Sopranos never was—it was far too exact about the sociological details of the dull suburban lives Tony and his confrères were living to glamorize or beautify them. The Many Saints of Newark makes you wish you could live in Newark for a while, which, trust me, you didn’t even then.
One of John Lindsay’s reelection commercials in 1969 was basically, “Sure, I really screwed up, but vote for me anyhow — at least I didn’t transform Fun City into Newark!”
NEWS NANCY CAN USE: Hey Nancy Pelosi, Here Are 4 Easy Things to Cut From the $3.5 Trillion Spending Plan.
DISPATCHES FROM PRIME MINISTER ZOOLANDER: Justin Trudeau is now up to using 11 characters in the never-ending alphabet gender game. “People across the country are lighting candles to honour Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people who are missing or have been murdered. We must continue to work together, raise awareness, and advocate to end this ongoing national tragedy. #SistersInSpirit.”
For those keeping score at home, “2SLGBTQQIA+” is apparently “Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual,” according to a press release from Trudeaupia.
What’s “Two-Spirit,” you might ask:
“Two-spirit” refers to a person who identifies as having both a masculine and a feminine spirit, and is used by some Indigenous people to describe their sexual, gender and/or spiritual identity. As an umbrella term it may encompass same-sex attraction and a wide variety of gender variance, including people who might be described in Western culture as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, gender queer, cross-dressers or who have multiple gender identities. Two-spirit can also include relationships that could be considered poly. The creation of the term “two-spirit” is attributed to Elder Myra Laramee, who proposed its use during the Third Annual Inter-tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference, held in Winnipeg in 1990. The term is a translation of the Anishinaabemowin term niizh manidoowag, two spirits.
Update Newspeak Dictionaries accordingly.
HMM: China Folds, Unloads Australian Coal Despite Import Ban Amid Power Crunch. “China appears to have folded and unloaded Australian coal shipments despite an unofficial import ban, according to FT, citing multiple commodity analysts. The move emphasizes China’s dire need for coal supplies amid a power crunch with more than half of the country’s provinces rationing power.”
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON TELLS TUCKER CARLSON: Why I Left National Review. Video and transcript at link.
THE GAMMA RAY BURSTS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE: This ‘Extraordinary Gamma-Ray Burst’ Likely Came From Something Much Closer to Earth.
NONSENSE, THE FBI AND THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY ARE ON THE JOB: 20 Years After the Anthrax Attacks, We’re Still Unprepared.
MICHAEL WALSH: With America Splitting, One Side Sees Treason as Highest Form of Patriotism.
Since the early 1970s, when the Baby Boomer acolytes of George McGovern took control of the Democrat Party, the Left has been telling us that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”
That is to say, the more strongly you oppose the policies and moral values of your country, the more you love it. Like a devoted parent disciplining a wayward child, you are only showing it tough love in order to correct its ways, “fundamentally transforming” it (as Barack Obama might say) in order to improve it.
For those of you who did not come of age during the 1960s, this is a sloganized version of Herbert Marcuse’s infamous notion of “Repressive Tolerance”: you must tolerate us when we are powerless but we most certainly will not tolerate you once we have seized power.
Read the whole thing.
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! John Kerry Says Joe Biden ‘Literally Had Not Been Aware of What Had Transpired’ in Irking France Over Submarine Deal with Australia.
Curiously, the meta title (which Google and other search engine bots pick up on for searches) reads: “John Kerry: Biden Didn’t Realize He Upset France Over AUKUS.” That’s much milder sounding than the headline, and contains a potentially confusing acronym. Why is Mediaite burying its own stories?
Evergreen:
