Author: VD

This is why you ID the enemy

The violent antifa ID’d by /pol/ is scared and on the run. Ivan Throne observes a desperate reddit post by his “really good friend”:

“False proof”. That’s a good one, by which he means “photo and video evidence of my really good friend, aka me, repeatedly striking people with a bike lock”.
Never hesitate to identify antifa and SJWs, and to publicize their activities. They greatly fear it because they rely upon being able to operate without their friends, families, and employers knowing what they are doing. And remember that even Facebook and Twitter posts often go unnoticed until attention is drawn to them.

It’s not just the French coming apart

A French intellectual observes the demise of the Left-Right political spectrum in France:

The laid-off, the less educated, the mistrained—all must rebuild their lives in what Guilluy calls (in the title of his second book) La France périphérique. This is the key term in Guilluy’s sociological vocabulary, and much misunderstood in France, so it is worth clarifying: it is neither a synonym for the boondocks nor a measure of distance from the city center. (Most of France’s small cities, in fact, are in la France périphérique.) Rather, the term measures distance from the functioning parts of the global economy. France’s best-performing urban nodes have arguably never been richer or better-stocked with cultural and retail amenities. But too few such places exist to carry a national economy. When France’s was a national economy, its median workers were well compensated and well protected from illness, age, and other vicissitudes. In a knowledge economy, these workers have largely been exiled from the places where the economy still functions. They have been replaced by immigrants.

While rich Parisians may not miss the presence of the middle class, they do need people to bus tables, trim shrubbery, watch babies, and change bedpans. Immigrants—not native French workers—do most of these jobs. Why this should be so is an economic controversy. Perhaps migrants will do certain tasks that French people will not—at least not at the prevailing wage. Perhaps employers don’t relish paying €10 an hour to a native Frenchman who, ten years earlier, was making €20 in his old position and has resentments to match. Perhaps the current situation is an example of the economic law named after the eighteenth-century French economist Jean-Baptiste Say: a huge supply of menial labor from the developing world has created its own demand.
“The young men living in the northern Paris suburbs feel a burning solidarity with their Muslim brethren in the Middle East.”

This is not Guilluy’s subject, though. He aims only to show that, even if French people were willing to do the work that gets offered in these prosperous urban centers, there’d be no way for them to do it, because there is no longer any place for them to live. As a new bourgeoisie has taken over the private housing stock, poor foreigners have taken over the public—which thus serves the metropolitan rich as a kind of taxpayer-subsidized servants’ quarters. Public-housing inhabitants are almost never ethnically French; the prevailing culture there nowadays is often heavily, intimidatingly Muslim.

One thing that is readily apparent about multiculturalism is how frighteningly fragile it is. It is completely dependent upon government funding being provided to the invading minorities. Which means, of course, it can be rapidly weakened by combining aggressive repatriation measures combined with a radical modification of the welfare system to provide only for those ethnically eligible.

Imagine how few foreigners would enter the United States if they were provided with no public services and no public dollars. There may not be sufficient support for that yet, but if the Alt-Right were to promise to take all of that money and provide two-thirds of it to pre-1965 Americans, I expect the measure would find majority support among those who would benefit greatly from it. And for the fiscally sane, it would represent about a forty percent cut in transfer payments.

Yes, it would certainly be better to altogether destroy the welfare system, but that’s not presently politically viable because female voters will never permit that. So, the winning strategy is to play the identity game, and play it to win.

Scott Adams on scientific consensus

And the limited value of facts and logic in changing people’s minds:

The author, Tim Requarth, correctly points out that facts and logic have limited value in changing anyone’s mind about climate science, or anything else. He speaks from experience because he teaches workshops on how to better communicate science. I like this guy. He’s on the right path.

But the thing that got my attention was this bit from the article:


“Kahan found that increased scientific literacy actually had a small negative effect: The conservative-leaning respondents who knew the most about science thought climate change posed the least risk. Scientific literacy, it seemed, increased polarization. In a later study, Kahan added a twist: He asked respondents what climate scientists believed. Respondents who knew more about science generally, regardless of political leaning, were better able to identify the scientific consensus—in other words, the polarization disappeared. Yet, when the same people were asked for their own opinions about climate change, the polarization returned. It showed that even when people understand the scientific consensus, they may not accept it.”

Notice how the author slips in his unsupported interpretation of the data: Greater knowledge about science causes more polarization.

Well, maybe. That’s a reasonable hypothesis, but it seems incomplete. Here’s another hypothesis that fits the same observed data: The people who know the most about science don’t think complex climate prediction models are credible science, and they are right.

Scientists, just like everyone else, are more easily persuaded by rhetoric than by dialectic. And the scientific consensus is not science, which is why those of us with a better grasp on the distinctions between scientody, scientistry, and scientage are much more likely to reject the scientific consensus than the average individual even though because we understand it better.

Scott nails it here: In my opinion, the conservatives who know the most about science are looking at it from an historical perspective, and they see a pattern here: Complicated prediction models rarely work.


Bingo. And the progressives, who have the collective memory of an amnesiac on LSD, can’t understand that historical perspective because they make a practice of ignoring absolutely everything that happened before yesterday.

When you’re right, you’re right

It’s a bit rich for the French establishment to complain that Marine Le Pen and the Front National are going to “capitalize” on the fact that they are the only party willing to address the Islamic invasion of France.

Le Pen capitalises on Paris attack: Far-right leader calls for all foreign terror suspects to be expelled immediately after ISIS attack as voters are now expected to flock to her in Sunday’s presidential election.

Why wait until foreigners are suspected? That’s just a first step and we all know where this is eventually going to end, which is in Reconquista 2.0.

That being said, the election of Le Pen would be a marvelous step towards sanity in French and European politics. I particularly liked that she refused to even be interviewed in front of an EU flag. If she is elected, Frexit is all but guaranteed.

A message to antifa

From Iron Mike, a US infantryman:

Alright fucksticks, this circus has gone on long enough and the audience has gotten tired of the clowns doing the same act for months on end. Your special snowflake brand of socialist revolution (black masks and tipped over trash cans) is sputtering out from underneath you. You’re not any more dedicated and disciplined at seeing this through than you were moving out of your parents’ guest bedroom after your “one semester off” 4 years ago. It’s time to take off the Doc Martins, wash your dreadlocks, remove the 9 facial piercings, and go get a job. You are not a revolutionary. You’re not changing the world. You WILL NOT win. All of your goals are stupid and you should do what you do best…quit. Until at least January 20th, 2020 Donald Trump is still going to be President; America is going to have a Capitalist, Market Economy; and working-class people are not going to fall in line with a bunch of spoiled middle-class college pussies LARP-ing as communist insurgents. 

And that’s just the beginning. It’s an impressive rant. Let’s just say that when the choice comes down to antifa or Alt-Right, America is going to side with the latter.

They should have sunk the ships

Not only would fewer people have drowned, but slavery would not have been reinstituted in northern Africa:

It is widely known that the U.S.-led NATO intervention to topple Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 resulted in a power vacuum that has allowed terror groups like ISIS to gain a foothold in the country.

Despite the destructive consequences of the 2011 invasion, the West is currently taking a similar trajectory with regard to Syria. Just as the Obama administration excoriated Gaddafi in 2011, highlighting his human rights abuses and insisting he must be removed from power to protect the Libyan people, the Trump administration is now pointing to the repressive policies of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and warning his regime will soon come to an end — all in the name of protecting Syrian civilians.

But as the U.S. and its allies fail to produce legal grounds for their recent air strike – let alone provide concrete evidence to back up their claims Assad was responsible for a deadly chemical attack last week – more hazards of invading foreign countries and removing their heads of state are emerging.

This week, new findings revealed another unintended consequence of “humanitarian intervention”: the growth of the human slave trade.

The Guardian reports that while “violence, extortion and slave labor” have been a reality for people trafficked through Libya in the past, the slave trade has recently expanded. Today, people are selling other human beings out in the open.


“The latest reports of ‘slave markets’ for migrants can be added to a long list of outrages [in Libya],” said Mohammed Abdiker, head of operation and emergencies for the International Office of Migration, an intergovernmental organization that promotes “humane and orderly migration for the benefit of all,” according to its website. “The situation is dire. The more IOM engages inside Libya, the more we learn that it is a vale of tears for all too many migrants.”

The Law of Unintended Consequences is always going to haunt the foolish and those unable to grasp that actions always have consequences. And the do-gooders and humanitarians need to be held accountable for the unintended consequences of their actions, particularly those that are predictable.

Those who proudly welcomed refugees are absolutely responsible for slavery now. They are not good and virtuous people, they are stupid and evil people and they need to be regarded as such. And it’s a bit ironic that it was America’s first black president who is chiefly responsible for spreading slavery around the world.

When the migrant flotilla began, I immediately said that the boats and ships carrying migrants should be sunk as soon as they enter international waters. For this, I was decried by more than a few, even on the Right, as a monster. Just remember, then, that all of you who took the “moral” position of not sinking the ships bear at least some responsibility for both the invasion of Europe and the reinstitution of slavery. Preventing the use of lethal violence in defense of national borders is akin to trying to stop doctors from cutting into human bodies with knives and lasers. Never mind that they’re only doing so to remove cancerous tumors that will kill the patient.

More terror in Paris

Fortunately, all this diversity is only making the surviving French stronger.

Paris attack: two police officers and suspect shot dead on Champs Elysees with ‘several assailants on the loose’

The real tragedy, of course, would be if the French people decide that they do not want to be murdered by Muslims anymore and launched Reconquista 2.0. Or, you know, made them feel less than entirely welcome.

Controversial teaching methods

Dark Triad Man helps get the word out about the bike-lock-wielding professor at the Second Battle of Berkeley:

At the Battle of Berkeley on April 15th, an masked Antifa slid forward from the confusion and swung a bike lock into the head of an unarmed man, immediately drawing blood, before slipping back into the crowd.

The act of violence, while predictable, was an unprovoked criminal assault with a deadly weapon intended to cause grievous bodily injury. It could easily have killed the victim.

The criminal attacker was originally identified by /pol/ as San Francisco State University professor Eric Clanton.

Jack Posobiec has since confirmed that Eric Clanton is at Diablo Valley College.

It should be interesting to learn just how amenable the educational authorities are.

The loyalty of Fake Americans

As is so often the case, the inexplicable unjustices of history turn out to be entirely explicable once more of the details behind it are known:

On December 7, 1941, Airman First Class Shigenori Nishikaichi (c. 1919/20 – c. 10:00 am, December 13, 1941) (age 21/22), who had just taken part in the second wave of the Pearl Harbor attack, crash-landed his bullet-damaged plane, an A6M2 Zero “B11-120” from the carrier Hiryu, in a Niʻihau field near where Hawila Kaleohano (1912-1986), a native Hawaiian resident, was standing.[2] Kaleohano was unaware of the attack at Pearl Harbor, but knew from newspapers that the relationship between the U.S. and Japan was poor due to Japanese expansionism and the U.S. oil embargo on Japan. Recognizing Nishikaichi and his plane as Japanese, Kaleohano thought it prudent to relieve the pilot of his pistol and papers before the dazed airman could react. He and the other Hawaiians who gathered about treated the pilot with courtesy and the traditional Hawaiian hospitality, even throwing a party for him later that Sunday afternoon. However, the Hawaiians could not understand Nishikaichi, who spoke only Japanese with a limited amount of English. They sent for Japanese-born Ishimatsu Shintani (an issei), who was married to a native Hawaiian, to translate.

Having been briefed on the situation beforehand and approaching the task with evident distaste, Shintani exchanged just a few words with the pilot. He paled; the pilot froze. Shintani left. The puzzled Hawaiians then sent for Yoshio Harada. Harada, born in Hawaiʻi of Japanese ancestry, and his wife Irene (both nisei), constituted the remainder of the Niʻihau population of Japanese ancestry.

Nishikaichi informed Harada of the attack on Pearl Harbor, a revelation Harada thought prudent not to share with the non-Japanese natives. Nishikaichi desperately wanted his papers returned, which he had been told should by no means fall into American hands, but Kaleohano refused to return them. For unknown reasons, the Haradas decided to assist Nishikaichi to retrieve his papers and escape.

In other words, those second-generation United States citizens proved to be considerably more loyal to their people than to their paperwork citizenship. They weren’t “every bit as American” as the descendants of the Mayflower and the Founding Fathers, they were Fake Americans and precursors to the post-1965 crowd.

Yes, nisei ultimately proved loyal and others didn’t. But the salient point is that no one could possibly know. Then, as now, the genuine loyalties of citizens of foreign descent and dual citizens simply cannot be assumed.

That doesn’t mean that the internment of all the Japanese citizens on the mainland was necessary; it was not because there was never any risk of an invasion of the West Coast. But the Niihau Incident does make it considerably easier to understand why internment was considered, and why few Americans had any problem with it at the time.