HISTORY: U.S. PRESIDENTS AND THEIR WARS.
Weird how the “peace movement” never came out in support of President Trump, huh?
Archive for 2021
January 19, 2021
VOTERS SEEM TO HAVE A GOOD SENSE OF WHAT THE BIDEN ERA IS LIKELY TO BE LIKE: Consumer Spending Update: Economic Confidence Continues Post-Election Decline.
JOHN EASTMAN: Setting The Record Straight on What POTUS Asked Pence For. “Vice President Pence was not asked to reject electoral votes.”
CAN’T HARDLY WAIT: Are Pelosi and Hillary Clinton Laying the Groundwork for a New War on Terror?
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): You spelled “war on Republicans” wrong.
PAULA BOLYARD: Help Us Take on Joe Biden and His Crew of Radical Leftists.
REVOLUTIONARY TECH: How the AR-15 Changed the Firearms World.
STEVEN MALANGA: Crime and Diminishment. If crime keeps rising and the social order distintegrates, New York City’s 30-year economic miracle will likely go with it.
SILICON VALLEY 1.0 HAS BECOME A DISAPPOINTMENT: Creating Silicon Valley 2.0.
GOOD THAT IT HAPPENED TODAY, BECAUSE THE NEXT ADMINISTRATION CERTAINLY WOULDN’T WANT TO OFFEND ITS CHINESE SUPPORTERS. United States Becomes First Country in World to Declare China’s Uighur Treatment Genocide.
Plus, support from Mitt Romney: “Reports indicate that the Chinese government is sponsoring forced labor camps for its Uyghur people in support of nearly 100 global brands, including Nike, Apple, Samsung, Volkswagen, and Huawei. This is absolutely horrifying. Protecting human rights is far more important than protecting profit. The world—including business leaders—cannot turn a blind eye toward the Chinese Communist Party’s treatment of Uyghurs.”
AS LONG AS THEY AREN’T SAYING “REDRUM” I’M OKAY. Scientists Are Figuring Out Why Some People Can ‘Hear’ The Voices of The Dead.
SO THE PRESS AND THE DEMOCRATS — BUT I REPEAT MYSELF — ARE HYPING THE CAPITOL INVASION AS A POLITICAL GAME-CHANGER. But then we see that Biden is only one point more popular than Trump in the latest NBC poll. And then there’s this: Trump Set To Leave Office With A Higher Approval Rating Than George W. Bush.
And it’s not even close: “President Donald Trump is leaving office with a higher approval rating and the Republican Party on better footing than after President George W. Bush exited the office in 2009, when the younger Bush saw historically low ratings. According to RealClearPolitics’ aggregate of polls, Trump is moving out of the White House with a nearly 40 percent approval rating overall. Bush enjoyed just under 30 percent of Americans on his side at this same point in his presidency.”
It’s time to see this media bulldozing operation for what it is, and to push back hard on the lie that everything is somehow different now.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
—Daniel Greenfield, FrontPage Magazine, today.
● Chaser: “Multiracial whiteness promises Latino Trump supporters freedom from the politics of diversity and recognition. For voters who see the very act of acknowledging one’s racial identity as itself racist, the politics of multiracial whiteness reinforces their desired approach to color-blind individualism.”
—“To Understand Trump’s support, we must think in terms of multiracial Whiteness,” Cristina Beltrán in the Washington Post, Friday.
NOW IF PEOPLE WILL JUST START FLYING: Europe, Canada move to put Boeing 737 Max back in air.
ARBEIT MACHT GESUND: Germany To Hold Quarantine Breakers In Refugee Camps And ‘Detention Centers.’
ROD DREHER: Reality Vs. Pseudo-Realities.
This is what so many of us on the normie Right failed to grasp about QAnon’s pervasiveness among our side. This is also what the Left is failing to perceive about Wokeness. [James] Lindsay goes on:
[T]he pseudo-reality is always constructed such that it structurally advantages those who accept it over those who do not, frequently by overt double standards and through moral-linguistic traps. Double standards in this regard will always favor those who accept pseudo-reality as reality and will always disfavor those who seek the truth. … [M]any normal people will fail to realize the pseudo-reality is false because they cannot see outside of the frame of normality that they charitably extend to all people, whether normal or not.
You can see that play out in a crude way in the exchange between [ESPN/The Atlantic’s Jemele] Hill and her interlocutor.
Lindsay says that liberalism — by which he means classical liberalism — has a bias against pseudo-reality because it contains within it the means to test propositions and reject them. Ideologies based on pseudo-reality — QAnon, Wokeness — depend on capturing powerful, intelligent people, who use their power and intelligence to compel the masses to believe pseudo-real claims. Lindsay:
The trend toward puritan-style pietism, authoritarianism, and eventually totalitarianism in application of this paramorality is a virtual certainty of acceptance of an ideological pseudo-reality, and these abuses will be visited not only on every participant in the constructed fictional reality but also to everyone who can be found or placed within its shadow (which can come to include entire nations or peoples or, in fact, everyone, even those who reject it). Again, this is the true alchemy of the pseudo-realist program; it transforms normal, moral people into immoral agents who must perpetrate evil to feel good and perceive as evil those who do good.
Lindsay explains that fellow travelers in cult ideologies end up thinking that the non-cultists are the crazy ones who have to be suppressed. “This represents a complete reversal of sanity, and the conversion of normal to ideologically psychopathic is, by that point, complete,” writes Lindsay. “These people, as many have learned the hard way throughout history, are the otherwise good people who are capable of perpetrating genocides.”
Read the whole thing, and then check out Jim Geraghty: Why QAnon Conspiracy Theories Can’t Be Ignored.
Exit quote from Geraghty: “Sooner or later, Congress is going to contemplate passing some sort of legislation that will be deeply divisive and controversial. Will the next group of angry extremists decide that the best way to stop Congress from passing legislation they oppose it to gather thousands and attack the Capitol building?”
READER BOOK PLUG: From Brad Lena, What Almost Dying Taught Me About Really Living.
WEIRD, IT’S LIKE GENDER ROLES ARE SOMETHING REAL: During lockdowns, women took on most of burden of childcare. Note that caring for one’s own children is always characterized as a “burden” in news stories.
THE COST OF SUBSIDIES: Iran’s Rolling Blackouts & Thick Smog Blamed On ‘Illegal’ Bitcoin Mining. “Amid crippling US-led sanctions on Iran and a continually weakened currency, enterprising young Iranians are taking advantage of the country’s cheap electricity to mine Bitcoin, however, it’s coming at a huge cost to fellow citizens as the immense power-sucking process of mining the cryptocurrency has contributed to a national electricity shortage and rolling blackouts.”
NOT THEIR PILLOW ANYMORE: “My Pillow CEO says Bed, Bath & Beyond, Kohl’s to stop selling his products.”