Author: VD

Revenge for ’98

I expected an Atlanta-New England Super Bowl, and I expected the Patriots to win, but I did not expect them to do it like this. Atlanta’s defense ran out of energy, which is why the Patriots were able to come back, but it was a Denny Green-style coaching disaster that permitted them to do so. I was very, very happy to see the Falcons blow it late and lose.

The fumble on the missed blitz-pickup is just one of those things that happens. But as I was watching, I thought there were five crucial coaching mistakes made by Atlanta, and they made all the difference.

  1. Third-and-one on the 22. FFS, don’t get cute. Run the ball, screen, or even a QB sneak. It’s fine to pride yourself on being aggressive and all, but the field goal was the kill shot there; chasing the touchdown was going for style points. The one thing you can’t afford to do there is turn the ball over, but as the Falcons learned, a deep drop and a sack can be pretty costly too. This missed field goal opportunity was sweet for those of us who haven’t forgotten the 1998 championship game. The playcall was particularly inexcusable as New England had already shown they will blitz to try to knock you out of range like they did after the failing to recover the onside kick.
  2. Third-and-eleven on the 32. You’re still in field goal range. They’ve just demonstrated that they can get to your quarterback. This is the right time for a draw play, a screen, a quick hitter, or anything that doesn’t risk losing yards.
  3. Always save your timeouts. Even if you’re up by more than two touchdowns, you may need them for a late field goal. Tough lesson to learn in the Super Bowl. And who was managing the clock on that last drive, Andy Reid?
  4. The Patriots have the ball, they’ve got 3:30 to drive 91 yards, and your defense is gassed. You’ve got the league’s best offense and have moved the ball almost at will all game. On whom do you bet? After the incredible Edeleman catch on the final Patriots drive in regular time, they should have let the Patriots score, sold out to try stopping the two-point conversion, and bet on their offense having two minutes to get into field goal range.
  5. Challenging the Edelman catch. It wasn’t fourth down. It wasn’t worth their last timeout.

Belichick wouldn’t have made any of those mistakes. I thought he made a minor one by failing to burn 20 more seconds on the clock on the touchdown play at the end of the 4th quarter, but got away with it due to the fact that Atlanta was out of time outs and as I already mentioned, their clock management was atrocious. But Belichick’s rolling the dice early by calling the onside kick and going for it on 4th-and-3 on his own 46 in the third quarter demonstrate why he is the greatest coach of all time. He knows when to take the right risks.

And yes, Brady is officially the greatest quarterback of all time. This trumps the Joe Cool game.

On a side note, those were three amazing catches, two by Julius Jones and one by Edelman. Jones looks, and plays, like a scientist created a combination clone of Terrell Owens and Cris Carter.

But regardless, we should have known that the team on whom the God-Emperor smiled would come through in the end. There was a prescient moment on BBC, when the commentator read a tweet saying: “Better stay up this time, you guys said it was over and we could go to bed with Brexit and the US election too.”

Super Bowl open thread

Discuss the game amongst yourselves.

OUCH! Brutal pick-six by Alford with New England driving. 21-0. It might well be over already with 2:21 left in the 2nd quarter.

HALFTIME: 21-3, Atlanta. The silver lining is that if Tom Brady leads an all-time Super Bowl comeback, he’ll ice his reputation as the Greatest of All Time. But it is looking increasingly likely as if Joe Montana will retain that status.

Why conservatives always lose

John Wright pens a long and thoughtful piece on why conservatives always lose. He contemplates the perspective of a hypothetical Rip van Conservative, a conservative who fell asleep in 1945 and awoke 72 years later, in 2017, only to discover that all many of the victories he thought won had been lost in the meantime:

One main reason why a Last Crusade must be called is that Conservatism, while perfectly sound when facing Commies in a Cold War, Nazis in a World War, or Slavers in a Civil War, has no defense to offer when the fascistic cultural Marxism seeps peacefully into the ivory tower, the theater, the press, the halls of power…. Now, as a conservative, you point out that all these things are simply illogical, paradoxes even a schoolboy could see cannot possibly be true. A thing cannot be itself and be the opposite of itself at the same time. A sentence that contradicts the same idea it affirms is a self-refuting sentence. Reality cannot be unreal.

You are answered that modern progress has proven that truth is untrue, for all things are matters of mere opinion that each man decides for himself. To say truth is truth offends the liberty of each man to invent his own truth.

You are answered that modern progress has proven that logic is merely a social adaptation mechanism formed by evolution, and has no authority to compel men to obey it. To say that logic is logical offends the liberty of each man to enjoy whichever of the personal and invented truths he sees fit.

You are answered that modern progress has proven that morality consists of the single rule that all must toleration any abridgement of morality anyone sees fit, aside, of course, from hate speech and badthink. Avoiding badthink is an absolute moral prohibition applied to all rightwing angloamerican white male heterosexual Christians. To say that morals cannot be defined as immorality is badthink. It offends the liberty of men to be evil, condone evil, promote evil, and worship evil.

You are answered with a fullthroated defense of unreality so complete that even Buddha would be shamed. The Progressive thinks that all life is an illusion, but that the illusion can be peaceful and pleasing, or the opposite, depending on the discipline and disposition of the subjective observer. You make your own reality.

This reality is called “a Narrative.” It is not based on fact, nor meant to be. It is based on emotion, whim, psychological defense mechanism.

Unlike the Buddhist, the Progressive seeks not to escape the illusion. There is nothing outside the illusion, no reality, no nirvana, to which to escape. There is no red pill to take.

The Narrative is an all encompassing world of illusion. It is an empire of lies.

And the first lie in the empire of lies is the lie that the Narrative does not exist. Only truths, as told by conservatives and anyone else looking at reality, are called Narratives.

Now, at the end of these answers, Rip van Conservative realizes that debate is impossible with a creature who cannot and will not speak in a coherent sentence, cannot and will not think a logical thought, and whose sole verbal reply to any criticism, no matter how true and trenchant, is merely to accuse his accuser of the flaws he himself possesses.

The stupid calls his smarter critic stupid. The fool calls his wiser critic foolish. The bigot calls his open-minded critic bigoted. The fascist calls his freedom loving critic a fascist. And on and on ad nauseam.

And so the conservative loses every battle. Why?

When conservativism is not only obvious, but self-evident, why does it falter?

When conservatism is not only a self-evident position, but the sole position seen not to contradict itself, why does it lose the field?

If all positions other than the conservative one are not merely incorrect, but immoral, illogical and insane, how is it that conservatism is soundly swept from the field, and no one polite society dares utter a word in its defense?

Conservatism falters, fails, and finds itself utterly effaced because and only because it fights the wrong battle on the wrong battlefield.

Now, I do not disagree with John here in the slightest, except to observe that there are competing explanations for the reason why conservatives are always fighting the wrong battle on the wrong battlefield. My explanation is the Alt-Right one, which is that immigrants wielding identity politics against an unsuspecting America have misled conservatives into believing false history and defending imaginary philosophical ground rather than defending their national interests. Of course, I expect John, being dubious about identity politics, would tend to disagree. At no little length.

Which is fine. Because regardless of why conservativism fights the wrong battle on the wrong battlefield, this piece serves as an informative illustration explaining why conservativism has so reliably failed to provide a philosophical bulwark against the Left, and why it will continue to do so. The more conservatives understand that more conservatism is not the answer, the more the winning will continue.

The Iranian misstep

Banging the war drums against Iran appears to be the first major mistake of the God-Emperor’s administration:

The big problem right now is Iran. Well, not Iran itself, of course, but the stupid anti-Iranian rhetoric of the Trump campaign before the elections. My biggest fear is that while Trump and the people around him have apparently come to the (correct) conclusion that they cannot bully Russia into submission they have decided that they could do that with Iran. If that is really their plan, then they are headed for a major disaster.

For one thing, Iran has been living with the threat of a AngloZionst attack for 38 years, including 23 years of Neocon power in the USA. To think that right now they will be suddenly really be frightened and will meekly comply with Uncle Shmuel’s demands is very naïve. The Iranians have been preparing for a war against the US and Israel for almost a quarter of a century – they are fine ready, both militarily and psychologically. Oh sure, the US can most definitely strike at Iran with cruise missile and air-strikes, but at what cost and what would that exactly achieve? In terms of achievement, it would have a beneficial psychotherapeutic effect on those Americans who feel insecure about their military size and who want to feel big and powerful again. It will also kills plenty of Iranians and destroy some unknown amount of Iranian targets, including possibility missile technology or nuclear technology related ones. But it will not change Iranian policies by even a tiny amount, nor will it prevent Iran from further pursuing nuclear or missile technologies.

But this has never been about nuclear or missile technology, of course. That is all nonsense, “informational prolefeed” so to speak.

In reality this was always about only one thing: Israel wanted to be THE regional superpower in the Middle-East and Iran was to be prevented from threatening this monopoly status by any means. In other words, if an Islamic country is mismanaged and run by incompetent fanatics, this is great. But when an Islamic country is run by a wise and extremely capable leadership which cannot be overthrown due to the fact that it has popular support, then this Islamic country becomes an absolutely unacceptable precedent. And Iran, with its advanced technologies, powerful military, strong economy and generally successful political and social model is an immense affront to the racist delusions of the Zionist regime in Palestine. Add to this that Iran dares to openly defy the United States and you immediately will see the real reasons for all the sabre-rattling and constant threats. The problem for Trump is exactly the same as the problem for Obama, Dubya or Clinton: the US cannot win a war against Iran. Why?

Because a war has to have some political objective, a definition of what “victory” means. In the case of Iran, there is no possible victory. Even of the US launches 1000-2000 missile strikes against Iran, and all of them are successful, this will not be a “victory”…

Furthermore, I submit that Iran is powerful enough to prevent any policy being successful in the Middle-East unless Iran at least passively okays it. In a way, Iran’s position in the Middle-East is similar to the Russian position in the “near abroad” (the former Soviet Union): while Iran/Russia cannot impose anything against everybody, Iran/Russia can veto/prevent any policy or outcome it does not want.

The main consequence of this is that even if Iran decided to completely renounce any kind of retaliatory counter-attack against the US or Israel, Iran could painfully retaliate against such a strike by simply telling Trump “we will make darn sure that you fail everywhere, in Iraq, in Syria, in Pakistan, and Yemen and everywhere else in the Middle-East”. And that won’t be an empty threat: the Iranians absolutely can deliver on it.

I have to admit, I fail to see ANY point in the US engaging with Iran at this point in time. Nuclear proliferation is going to happen; I have no doubt at all that Iran already possesses nuclear weapons of one sort or another. Perhaps that is what is driving this unexpected foreign policy belligerence on the part of the administration, perhaps the Israelis have told Trump that they will deal with it if he doesn’t, I don’t know.

It’s also possible that this is Trump’s customary A/B testing; he’s shut down the neocons on Russia, so he’s giving them their head on Iran. So far, they’ve failed with their special ops mission in Yemen, and I have no doubt that if they manage to make matters worse in the Middle East with their anti-Iran rhetoric, he’ll send them packing just like he did with Chris Christie.

There would be something to be said for that if it weren’t for the fact that the neocons have gone from one failure to the next for nearly 16 straight years. However, the silver lining is that I trust the God-Emperor to pull the plug on them once things go south, as they almost certainly will.

In any event, no one is going to solve the Middle East. It’s not the West’s problem and it’s not within the West’s power to resolve the situation, so it would be much better to simply stay out of it and let the various parties there sort it out among themselves.

Nationalism intensifies

Geert Wilders and the Party for Freedom are rising to power in the Netherlands:

A shocking new poll has been released in the Netherlands. According to Kantar Public, PVV has opened a large lead over the second largest party in the polls, the VVD, which is currently part of the governing coalition. This makes Wilders the absolute favorite to succeed current Prime Minister Mark Rutte as the political leader of the country.

According to the Kantar Public poll, the PVV would get 35 seats in the 150-seat Dutch Parliament if elections were held today. By Dutch standards, that’s an impressive result. This is especially true because of the significant gap between PVV and the VVD. The party led by current Prime Minister Mark Rutte wold have to settle for a mere 22 seats, 19 fewer seats than they currently occupy.

Yes, they’ll face obstacles in the Dutch Parliament. But the more the other parties resist the will of the Dutch people to Make Holland Great Again, the more power PVV will have.

The globalist monstrosity known as the European Union will fall. The European nations will be restored and cleansed. The pendulum is swinging back, and it is going to swing back hard. And while there will be bloodshed, never forget that all the responsibility, and the moral culpability, falls on the evil people who took advantage of the positive socionomic mood to encourage multiculturalism, societal adulteration, and literal invasion.

One should never confuse the surgeon who excises a cancer with the assailant who stabs with the intent to kill. One is attempting to save, the other is attempting to slay.

The God-Emperor strikes back

It’s good to see that the Trump administration isn’t backing down one iota to the various challenges being presented to them:

You’re either with the Trump administration or you’re against it.

After Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s call with President Donald Trump on Thursday and decision to quit his business-advisory council, the sentiment within the White House, according to Mike Allen of Axios, is, “If you want to cut off your access to the White House, f— you.”

That quote came to Allen from “some in Trump’s inner circle,” he reported. (Allen is deeply sourced within the Trump administration.)

Kalanick told Uber staff in a memo Thursday that he wouldn’t attend Trump’s closed-door council meeting on Friday and had quit the council after pressure from employees, drivers, and the public.

Like Gideon, the God-Emperor needs only those who are ready and willing to fight. And my prediction is that he’s going to come back with a stronger, more comprehensive immigration ban, combined with large-scale repatriations, regardless of how quickly the federal judge’s ridiculous order overturning his executive order is overturned… or ignored.

When President Trump ordered a vast overhaul of immigration law enforcement during his first week in office, he stripped away most restrictions on who should be deported, opening the door for roundups and detentions on a scale not seen in nearly a decade.

Some 6 million to 8 million people in the country illegally could be considered priorities for deportation, according to calculations by the Los Angeles Times. They were based on interviews with experts who studied the order and two internal documents that signal immigration officials are taking an expansive view of Trump’s directive.

Far from targeting only “bad hombres,” as Trump has said repeatedly, his new order allows immigration agents to detain nearly anyone they come in contact with who has crossed the border illegally. People could be booked into custody for using food stamps or if their child receives free school lunches.

The deportation targets are a much larger group than those swept up in the travel bans that sowed chaos at airports and seized public attention over the past week. Fewer than 1 million people came to the U.S. over the past decade from the seven countries from which most visitors are temporarily blocked.

Eight million isn’t a bad start. It’s a solid first step towards the full 80 million required to restore the promised pre-1965 demographic balance. It doesn’t matter if you were born American in Portugal or Somalia or Russia. It doesn’t matter if you have the government paperwork. You’re still not American. You will never be American. Not even the adulterated American 2.0. And you have to go back.

I realize that the prospect of returning to one’s ancestral homeland is not necessarily nice for everyone. Most people rather like living in a wealthy white country their parents did not, and could not, build, that they and their children cannot even maintain. And yes, hundreds of thousands of very good people will, through no fault of their own, see disruption in their lives and a decline in their living standards. And yet, I don’t care, not even a little bit, because the alternative is war. The alternative is the collapse of the political entity called the United States of America into multiple ethnostates and violence on a scale that has not been seen on the continent since the American Indian was very nearly genocided and assimilated into nonexistence.

The fact that the white settlers didn’t intend it didn’t mean it didn’t happen, any more than the fact that the architects of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act didn’t intend for 85 million first- and second-generation immigrants to colonize the USA means that they didn’t do so. Intentions are irrelevant. Consequences are not derived from intentions, but from actions.

Having the former global superpower collapse into Yugoslavia with nukes is a nightmare scenario for everyone on the planet, even for the Chinese, the Iranians, and the Russians, who would be inclined to welcome the removal of the US military’s leash on their ambitions and strategic objectives. That is the alternative the propositionals and melting potheads and dual citizens and immigrants have chosen. They prefer political collapse and mass death to giving up their self-serving 20th-century historical myths.

I understand most people can’t imagine that this is even possible, let alone the most probable outcome. Do you think the Emperor Valens ever imagined for one second that providing refuge to eight hundred thousand desperate Visigoths would lead directly to his death, the destruction of his army, the siege of Constantinople, and the Sack of Rome? Did anyone who read my column in 2002 believe that a collapse of housing prices would lead to a financial crisis six years later?

Now, I will be very surprised if the Trump administration is successful in even halfway restoring the historical demographic balance, but then, both Trump and Bannon appear to have some understanding of what is actually at stake here. No one expected Ronald Reagan to win the Cold War either, so perhaps the God-Emperor has what it takes to win the Blood War.

UPDATE: the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reinstate the executive order. They must really want him to institute martial law. Of course, that would make a lot of things easier.
A federal appeals court early Sunday denied an initial bid by the Trump administration to restore its controversial immigration order that had barred refugees and people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States.

A judge in a lower federal court had put a temporary stop to the travel ban. Because the appeals court declined to intervene immediately, affected travelers can enter until at least until Monday. The appeals court set a schedule asking challengers to the ban to file a response by roughly 3 a.m. Eastern on Monday, and the Justice Department — representing the Trump administration — to reply to that by 6 p.m. A Justice Department spokesman said government lawyers would wait until then to make their next move. “With the fast briefing schedule the appeals court laid out, we do not plan to ask the Supreme Court for an immediate stay but instead let the appeals process play out,” Peter Carr said.

This may amuse only me

The Collected Columns, Vol. I
Innocence & Intellect, 2001–2005

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,678 Paid in Kindle Store
#1 in Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Philosophers
#2 in Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Political

Editorial Reviews

It screams, “this man is familiar with the works of 18th-century composer Al Jourgensen, and is indeed prepared to dinga ding dang his dangalong ling long.”

The winning spreads

Argentina follows the God-Emperor’s lead in restricting immigration and preparing for repatriations

Argentina is so used to celebrating immigration as a cornerstone of society that a 19th-century saying — to govern is to populate — remains in use to this day. But in an abrupt shift coinciding with the immigration restrictions put in place by the Trump administration, President Mauricio Macri has issued a decree curbing immigration to Argentina, with his government declaring that newcomers from poorer countries in Latin America bring crime.

The measures announced by Mr. Macri in recent days made it much easier to deport immigrants and restrict their entry, prompting irate comparisons to President Trump and igniting a fierce debate over immigration.

“A decree like this scares people,” said Arfang Diedhiou, 33, a Senegalese immigrant who runs his own clothing store here in the capital, Buenos Aires. “It came out just after what Trump did, a coincidence that seems very strange to me.”

Argentina’s president, the son of an immigrant, has echoed some of Mr. Trump’s “America First” theme, making it clear that his “first concern” should be “caring for Argentines, caring for ourselves. We cannot continue to allow criminals to keep choosing Argentina as a place to commit offenses,” Mr. Macri said during a news conference…. But opinion polls in Argentina showed widespread support for limiting immigration, and some say the new decree does not go far enough.

Meanwhile, wormtongue David Brooks mourns for the lost greatness of a nonexistent “nation” while declaring that the real America is Russian. Or German. Or Nazi. Whatever it is, he doesn’t like it.

That American myth was embraced and lived out by everybody from Washington to Lincoln to Roosevelt to Reagan. It was wrestled with by John Winthrop and Walt Whitman. It gave America a mission in the world — to spread democracy and freedom. It gave us an attitude of welcome and graciousness, to embrace the huddled masses yearning to breathe free and to give them the scope by which to realize their powers.

But now the myth has been battered. It’s been bruised by an educational system that doesn’t teach civilizational history or real American history but instead a shapeless multiculturalism. It’s been bruised by an intellectual culture that can’t imagine providence. It’s been bruised by people on the left who are uncomfortable with patriotism and people on the right who are uncomfortable with the federal government that is necessary to lead our project.

The myth has been bruised, too, by the humiliations of Iraq and the financial crisis. By a cultural elite that ignored the plight of the working class and thus broke faith with the basic solidarity that binds a nation.

And so along come men like Donald Trump and Stephen Bannon with a countermyth. Their myth is an alien myth, frankly a Russian myth. It holds, as Russian reactionaries hold, that deep in the heartland are the pure folk who embody the pure soul of the country — who endure the suffering and make the bread. But the pure peasant soul is threatened. It is threatened by the cosmopolitan elites and by the corruption of foreign influence.

The true American myth is dynamic and universal — embracing strangers and seizing possibilities. The Russian myth that Trump and Bannon have injected into the national bloodstream is static and insular. It is about building walls, staying put. Their country is bound by its nostalgia, not its common future.

The odd thing is that the Trump-Bannon myth is winning. The policies that emanate from it are surprisingly popular. The refugee ban has a lot of support. Closing off trade is popular. Building the wall is a winning issue.

There is nothing odd about it, because there is nothing mythical about it. David Brooks is, to put it mildly, a total fucking liar. A Russian myth? WTF? He sounds like a lunatic Jew who has read The Melting Pot too many times and is now terrified of Tsars and Cossacks and pogroms. Who listens to these morons? How did anyone ever take these wormtongues seriously?

As I said in my debate with Jack Murphy last night, the Proposition Nation is total bullshit. It’s utterly false. There is absolutely NOTHING truthful about it. And all you need to know that is to listen to its lunatic proponents try to defend it, usually by waxing lyrical with feeble rhetoric that wouldn’t convince a brain-damaged chimpanzee.

Brooks sounds as if he’s ready to fight with his Muslim brothers against Old America.

We are in the midst of a great war of national identity. We thought we were in an ideological battle against radical Islam, but we are really fighting the national myths spread by Trump, Bannon, Putin, Le Pen and Farage.

There is no “we”, David. You are not American. You are not Russian. You are not French. You are not British. You are not us.

The Left in denial

They don’t want to disavow their Black Bloc allies, but they certainly don’t want to admit to being allied with them.

“I was there for part of last night, and I know what I saw and those people were not Berkeley students,” Reich said. “Those people were outside agitators. I have never seen them before.”

“There’s rumors that they actually were right-wingers. They were a part of a kind of group that was organized and ready to create the kind of tumult and danger you saw that forced the police to cancel the event,” Reich insisted. “So Donald Trump, when he says Berkeley doesn’t respect free speech rights, that’s a complete distortion of the truth.”

“You think it’s a strategy by [Milo Yiannopoulos] or right-wingers?” asked host Don Lemon.

“I wouldn’t bet against it,” Reich said. “I saw these people. They all looked very– almost paramilitary. They were not from the campus. I don’t want to say factually, but I’ve heard there was some relationship here between these people and the right-wing movement that is affiliated with Breitbart News.”

Meanwhile, back in the non-delusional world, the alleged agitators are being unmasked for who we already knew they were: paid Left-wing agitators and university employees, such as this gentleman who works for UC-Berkeley since 2008. The indefatigable Chuck Johnson has already set up a mechanism for identifying Black Bloc. It’s focused on those arrested at the Inauguration riots, but it can, and will, be easily expanded.

While it doesn’t work to argue that Dems are the real racists, it’s going to be very easy to prove, conclusively, that SJWs and Black Bloc are the real violent fascists.