Author: VD

Every single time

Seriously, what is it with Gammas? They can’t follow the rules, they get snarky and disrespectful when they’re warned, then they bitch and cry and hurl angry accusations and threats when you follow through and ban them.

And they do this every single time, even though they’ve seen it happen to dozens of other Gammas. Are they totally incapable of learning from either their own experience or others? It’s like they have no ability to recognize that what happened to others is going to happen to them if they do the same thing.

Anyhow, Ray is banned and spammed, so nuke him, moderators, when he pops up crying and flailing about. Everyone else, just ignore the wounded Gamma antics.

Viva Catalunya

The Catalan Republic votes to secede from Spain

In the aftermath of last month’s Brexit vote, there was an outpouring of concern in Europe that the British decision would embolden similar separatist movements across the continent. Earlier Wednesday, this is precisely what happened when Catalan nationalists voted to approve a plan to secede from Spain, defying the nation’s Constitutional Court and challenging acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who is currently in political limbo as he struggles to form a government.

The decision was approved by 72 regional MPs out of 135. Ten MPs from the CSP group linked to Podemos, Partido Popular and Ciudadanos walked out of the assembly and the Socialists did not vote. A recent poll shows that 48% of the Catalan population currently supports independence compared with 43% against it.

The vote, symbolic as it may be, was one of defiance toward Madrid as Spain’s Constitutional Court had in recent days prohibited the regional parliament in Barcelona from voting on it. As Ansa reports, the resolution was presented by the pro-secessionist groups Junts Pel Si and CUP. The anti-secessionist parties – PP, Ciudadanos and PSC – have spoken out against the ”illegality” of the decision. PP parliamentary chief Xavier Garcia Albiol has said that the act is tantamount to a ”coup” against the government in Madrid and warned that there will be a price to pay for it. The head of the Socialist party, Pedro Sanchez, said there can be no democracy without common rules, while Albert Rivera, the Catalan-born leader of liberals Ciudadanos, described it as a attack on Spanish democracy. They both have rejected supporting Rajoy’s candidacy to become premier again.

Catalan regional president and pro-secessionist Carles Puidgemont instead says that the position taken by the regional MPs is ”legitimate” and has in recent months confirmed that the goal is to achieve an independent ”Catalan Republic” by the end of 2017.

Isn’t the double-talk from the anti-secessionists all too predictable? Democracy is about the will of the people, not “common rules”. And to call a representative vote that clearly has the support of the majority is not “an attack on Spanish democracy”, it is, rather, a democratic attack on Spanish imperialism.

One hopes that the conquered States of America who are only part of the USA due to military invasion and occupation will one day be permitted their own self-determination too. After all, they’ve been occupied by the USA for considerably less time than Catalonia has been occupied by Spain.

About those state polls

As I demonstrated yesterday, it’s too soon to talk about the state polls. But it’s NOT too early to talk about the trends in state polls. Here are the two battleground states in which polls have been released this week:

NV: Trump vs. Clinton KTNV Trump +5
OH: Trump vs. Clinton PPP (D) TIE (Trump +3 all four candidates)

Now, there aren’t enough previous Nevada polls for there to be a trend. But given that the earliest Ohio polls were as high as +7 for Hillary, it is apparent that there is a trend towards Trump, as that is 10 points of Trumpward movement. I will review the other battleground states as they come in, but for reference, their early high water marks are as follows:

PA: Clinton +15
VA: Clinton +17
FL: Trump +8, Clinton +13 (Florida was Trump, then heavy Clinton, nothing new since 7/11)
NC: Trump +6, Clinton +10 (same as Florida)
CO: Clinton +13

So, if my prediction of a Trumpslide is correct, we should see significant movement Trumpward in all five states. Virginia is particularly important; if Clinton can’t maintain a strong lead there despite selecting Virginia senator Tim Kaine, she is even more vulnerable than anyone imagines.

Blogfodder

Two things:


1) If you’re the t-shirt guy, get in touch please. I don’t have your email on this computer.

2) If you’re a good keyboardist with your own studio capable of recording and mixing a pro quality song, including percussion, please get in touch ASAP. I have a election-year project in mind. I already have the singer and it is not me.

The self-serving revisionists

It’s more than a little amusing to see these Republican immigrants, who are US citizens but are not Americans, attempting to present their self-serving revisionist histories as not only genuine, but deterministic:

Avik Roy is a Republican’s Republican. A health care wonk and editor at Forbes, he has worked for three Republican presidential hopefuls — Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Marco Rubio. Much of his adult life has been dedicated to advancing the Republican Party and conservative ideals.

But when I caught up with Roy at a bar just outside the Republican convention, he said something I’ve never heard from an establishment conservative before: The Grand Old Party is going to die.

“I don’t think the Republican Party and the conservative movement are capable of reforming themselves in an incremental and gradual way,” he said. “There’s going to be a disruption.”

Roy isn’t happy about this: He believes it means the Democrats will dominate national American politics for some time. But he also believes the Republican Party has lost its right to govern, because it is driven by white nationalism rather than a true commitment to equality for all Americans.

“Until the conservative movement can stand up and live by that principle, it will not have the moral authority to lead the country,” he told me.

This is a standard assessment among liberals, but it is frankly shocking to hear from a prominent conservative thinker. Our conversation had the air of a confessional: of Roy admitting that he and his intellectual comrades had gone wrong, had failed, had sinned.

His history of conservatism was a Greek tragedy. It begins with a fatal error in 1964, survived on the willful self-delusion of people like Roy himself, and ended with Donald Trump.

“I think the conservative movement is fundamentally broken,” Roy tells me. “Trump is not a random act. This election is not a random act.”

The conservative movement has something of a founding myth — Roy calls it an “origin story.”

In 1955, William F. Buckley created the intellectual architecture of modern conservatism by founding National Review, focusing on a free market, social conservatism, and a muscular foreign policy. Buckley’s ideals found purchase in the Republican Party in 1964, with the nomination of Barry Goldwater. While Goldwater lost the 1964 general election, his ideas eventually won out in the GOP, culminating in the Reagan Revolution of 1980.

Normally, Goldwater’s defeat is spun as a story of triumph: how the conservative movement eventually righted the ship of an unprincipled GOP. But according to Roy, it’s the first act of a tragedy.

“Goldwater’s nomination in 1964 was a historical disaster for the conservative movement,” Roy tells me, “because for the ensuing decades, it identified Democrats as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party opposed to civil rights.”

Of course, white nationalism is, quite literally, the raison d’etre for the U.S. Constitution and was signed into law by George Washington in the Naturalization Act of 1790. This factual history offends Arik Roy, because he is not white and he is not an American national, therefore he has to revise history and transform it into something that allows him to redefine the definitions of “conservative”, “Republican”, and even “America”.

I’ve yet to see any liberal or left-winger make a statement more unequivocally equalitarian than Roy: “Until the conservative movement can stand up and live by the principle of equality, it will not have the moral authority to lead the country.”


Once more, we see that if you scratch a “conservative intellectual”, you find an anti-American. It is equivalent to stating that there is no moral authority outside of a mindless devotion to equality.

This sort of revisionist nonsense is where intellectual defenses of the proposition nation concept inevitably lead. There is no alternative, because it has no basis in history, fact, or logic. The propositional equality of “Americans” is every bit as conceptual and delusional and nonexistent as the economic equality of socialists, the herd equality of unicorns, and the animal equality of Animal Farm.

Some pigs always somehow end up more equal than others.

That being said, both the conservative movement and the Republican Party in its previous form are going to die. They will be replaced by the American nationalist movement and the American Party, which will claim the moral authority to govern the nation on the basis of actually representing the nation.

Tor doubles down

This is fantastic news for Castalia House and all readers of Blue SF. PNH has been anointed Tom Doherty’s heir and will be running Tor Books in the future.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden has been named Associate Publisher of Tor Books, effective immediately. This award-winning 28-year veteran of Tor has brought numerous prestigious and bestselling authors to the list, including John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow and Charlie Jane Anders, to name a few. His vision has been instrumental in the development of Tor.

Devi Pillai, who led the US division of Orbit to its position as Tor’s fastest-growing competitor, will be joining Tor, also as Associate Publisher. “I’ve watched Devi’s work with admiration for a long time now; her qualifications are outstanding, and she’ll be a great addition to our team,” said Tor Books publisher Tom Doherty. “As we continue our 35-year commitment to adult SF and fantasy, Devi and Patrick will work alongside each other to oversee our numerous editors who work primarily in these twin genres,” he continued.

It’s as if Lincoln promoted Custer to replace McClellan instead of Grant. In 28 years, PNH has brought a mediocrity, a tedious didact, and a no-talent transvestite to Tor. That’s the best he could do? Castalia House will be announcing two better, and better-selling, authors than any of those three in the next six weeks alone.

Tom Doherty should have fired PNH and Irene Gallo last year, but he was too old and infirm to find the courage to do it. Instead, he merely muzzled them while he could. With this promotion, however, PNH will have the opportunity to return to what is literally a bully pulpit.

This promises to be entertaining. When the Tor ship goes down, it should be PNH at the helm.

What he doesn’t understand is magic

Jonah Goldberg is defeated and depressed, but he’s still not willing to admit that he chose the wrong side:

Personally, I thought Trump’s stentorian address was awful, albeit with a few effective bits, particularly at the end. There was no poetry, no arc, no uplift or modulation. It was like he spent 75 out of 76 minutes shouting the final conclusions on one PowerPoint slide after another. Over time, the sentences seemed to be getting shorter and more blunt. It looked like he might even devolve into just barking random vowels and glottal stops. His delivery reminded me of that old SNL newsroom skit when Garrett Morris’s head pops up in an oval and he just re-shouts everything Chevy Chase says for the hard of hearing.

Thematically, it was an anvil chorus minus the melody. There was plenty of conservative boilerplate, some of which I agree with. But the message last night had nothing to do with conservative litmus tests or checklists. No, the desired takeaway was, “Behold this Man of Strength! Cast your gaze Trumpwards, plebes, for our new Caesar is here to bring a New Rome (or restore the old one) through force of will.”

Nowhere in his speech did Trump give any sense that he knew — or cared — how he would get things done through his “sheer force of will.” That’s the thing about magical thinking, you don’t need to explain it. The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For get it, and everyone else never will.

All Goldberg manages to demonstrate here is that he will see what he’s determined to see. Trump’s speech was too long, but it was otherwise extremely effective. Poetry, arc, uplift, and modulation are merely tools of the orator, the objective of a political speech is to give the voters a reason to vote for you. Trump’s speech did that, and the polls have responded accordingly.

As has long been the case, Goldberg, the good conservative, is focused on HOW a politician does things rather than WHAT he is doing. These conservative tone police are happy to vote for collective suicide so long as the politician promising to kill everyone does so in well-modulated, gracefully-composed tones while dressed nicely. Goldberg’s reference to “magical thinking” is pure cuckservative projection given that he is one of the many conservative fools who thinks 61 million post-1965 immigrants were transformed into Real Americans through the application of Magic Dirt, and believes a 19th century poem is the Zeroth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Goldberg’s complete lack of business experience also shows glaringly here. The CEO doesn’t tell you HOW something is going to be done. That’s not his role. Steve Jobs didn’t introduce the iPhone by explaining how it was going to be manufactured in China, who would be writing the operating system, and how much RAM it would take up. If he had, it would have failed. The CEO’s job is to establish the vision and inspire others to embrace it. That Trump has done, extremely well, with his Make America Great Again, which is the best campaign vision since Reagain’s Morning in America.

In fact, Goldberg even admits that he is babbling and denying the evidence of his own eyes and ears, as this passage shows: By the normal rules the speech should have been a disaster. But as we all know the normal rules do not apply. I am fairly certain Trump will get his post-convention bump. I am less confident Trump is a guaranteed loser come November. In other words, it was not awful, it was effective.


But the deeper theme of Goldberg’s piece is his shock and despair that so many people are refusing to buy into the Noble Conservative Who Knows What is Good For You schtick anymore.

I hate everything about this year, politically and (not counting some great TV) culturally. It’s clear many of my friends on the pro-Trump right are giddy with resentment-justifying glee at the alleged comeuppance of Trump opponents. One need only listen to quite literally anything Laura Ingraham or Sean Hannity say about Trump critics to see how large a role spite plays in the now-unbreachable divide between the new nationalists and the old conservatives….

But the truth is conservatism has become shot-through with a kind of vindictiveness that reflects poorly on everyone, friend and foe alike. I hate that after 20 years of fighting what I believe to be the good fight, so many can’t muster the will or generosity to consider that I’m doing what I think is right.

I hate that after 20 years of fighting what I believe to be the good fight, so many can’t muster the will or generosity to consider that I’m doing what I think is right. I’m entirely open to the argument that my analysis and judgment is wrong. But I am resentful, furious and, most of all, contemptuous of the lazy and self-justifying assumption that my motives are malign.

That’s just it, Jonah. You didn’t fight the good fight. You fought the wrong fight. As a conservative opinion leader, you didn’t manage to conserve one single damn thing, and even more damning, many of your opinions changed over time with the progressive tide. Now you’re choosing to side with the globalists and the progressives because you were never on the side of Americans at all. You fought the wrong fight and now you’ve chosen the wrong side.

Through your open opposition to America’s nationalists, you have revealed that your motives and your objectives are, at the very least, opposed to the interests of Americans and the United States of America.

We don’t care that you think what you’re doing is right. We care that you have declared yourself to be an enemy of those who are trying to make America great again. We care that you have openly declared yourself to be an enemy of the American identity.

Frankly, I’m very disappointed in Jonah. I genuinely thought he was smarter than this. I defended him many times from those who regarded him with suspicion on the basis of his (((heritage))) and who considered him nothing more than a typical neocon. Unfortunately, when the time came to choose between America and his imaginary proposition nation, he chose the latter.

The failed case against the Trump-Putin conspiracy

The #NeverTrump crowd is increasingly panicked by Trump’s rise in the polls, and now they’re attempting increasingly unlikely disqualification attempts. Jeffrey Carr fact-checks Josh Marshall’s claims about Putin funding the Trump campaign:

A fact is defined as a “true piece of information”. How many of Josh’s facts were true?

  1. Trump’s debt load was a Bloomberg estimate, not a fact.
  2. Trump is highly reliant upon money from Russia. Open to interpretation, not a fact.
  3. Trump Soho took investment money from Russian criminals. Fact.
  4. Trump’s campaign manager used to work for Viktor Yanukovych when he was running for Prime Minister of Ukraine. Fact.
  5. Putin could put Carter Page, Trump’s foreign policy advisor, out of business at any time. Not only not a fact, but untrue and ridiculous on its face.
  6. Putin has aligned all state-controlled media behind Trump. False.
  7. The Trump Camp only cared about softening the platform on arming Ukraine. False.

For the record, I despise Donald Trump. I can’t imagine a worse candidate for President and I’m shocked and appalled that he is the Republican nominee. However, there’s no need to invent Russian conspiracies to make the Trump boogeyman appear worse than he is.

Two for seven. Not exactly a closed book. The irony, of course, is that we KNOW Putin is funding the Clinton Foundation. As usual, the very worst case against Trump that can be conceived is to claim he might do something Hillary Clinton is already doing.

I assume the claims are false simply due to the unreliability and irresponsible nature of the people making the charge. They’re desperate, and their claims are going to get increasingly weirder. But even if they were true, so what?

We already have 60 million foreigners interfering with the US elections. That’s why we have so many Democrats still in office. What is one more?

Conservatism in ruins

Andrew Klavan’s first thoughts on rebuilding conservatism:

The conservative movement has collapsed and is in ruins. Its vehicle for political expression, the Republican Party, is now in the hands of an authoritarian nationalist who has never read the Constitution and does not believe in free expression, free trade or the separation of powers. Its central vehicle for expression in the news media is in disarray as Fox News becomes embroiled in scandal. Even its defenders on talk radio and in the blogosphere are severely at odds as they are forced to choose whether to defend Trump as the lesser of two evils or to stand fast with the founding fathers against both terrible sides.

The conservative movement has collapsed and lies in ruins. And it has done so due to the deceit and dishonesty of conservative commentators like Andrew Klavan, who apparently feel the need to make provably false statements about everyone from Donald Trump to the Founding Fathers.

Let’s look at the three false statements in this one diagnostic paragraph alone:

  1. Donald Trump is not an authoritarian.
  2. Fox News has never been a central vehicle for expressing conservative views. It has, rather, pushed neoconnery as nominal conservatism while serving as a politically moderate alternative to the hard progressivism of the ABCNNBCBS cabal.
  3. The Founding Fathers believed in trade protectionism and a white America. Whether he gives a damn about the US Constitution or not, Donald Trump has as much or more in common with the Founding Fathers as the conservative movement does. The Constitution exists only to safeguard the unalienable rights of white Americans who are the posterity of the Founding Fathers, that is its sole purpose.
Now let’s look at Klavan’s proposal for rebuilding conservatism, which strangely enough, he provides without ever considering just why the movement is in ruins.

1. There is no substitute for victory. A political philosophy should be an outgrowth of moral values but it is not a moral value in itself. Its purpose is not to be good; its purpose is to be as good as it can be and still win power. A Christian may count it a victory when he is devoured by lions for his faith, but a conservative who is repeatedly devoured by the opposition in elections is just a self-satisfied schmuck. I am completely opposed to those — like Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam — who essentially argue  that conservatives must win by becoming watered-down liberals. But clearly, the methods by which we have been selling our philosophy to the voters have not just failed but failed utterly, and we should rethink them.

True enough, and yet Klavan observably knows so little about the history of conservatism in America that he doesn’t understand that conservatives have never had a philosophy proper. He obviously hasn’t read Russell Kirk, anyhow. That’s why they can’t sell conservatism to anyone anymore; it doesn’t even exist as a coherent self-contained philosophy. Conservatives have never been much more than philosophical parasites on the Left. Klavan should read Cuckservative; if nothing else it would bring him up to speed on the intellectual inadequacies of conservatism.

2. Win what minority types we can with the truth. The opposition likes to point out that too many conservatives are white men. They’re right — but only because blacks and women have been successfully sold a destructive bill of goods in leftist racialism and feminism. The facts are: black people are not oppressed by the police, women are not underpaid for the same work, white privilege is a destructive and racist myth, and true freedom means people you don’t like are going to say things you disagree with in ways you find offensive. These are hard sayings but they need to be said, and they don’t need to be said by conservatives to other conservatives, they need to be said by conservatives to blacks, women and sexual off-beats of all stripes. The Democrats have co-opted these people with destructive lies that make their lives worse. We can’t win them back by jumping on that bandwagon. We need to proudly, unapologetically (and politely) tell it like it is — to them, in their neighborhoods and organizations. We won’t win a lot of them. Not at first. But facts have a way of getting through over time — if you speak them courageously without being a jackass about it.

This is remarkable. And it’s a tactic doomed to failure; conservatives like Klavan can’t win anyone with the truth for the obvious reason that they don’t know the truth. They religiously subscribe to the idiotic lie of the Proposition Nation and they attempt to win over minorities that will never, ever, be won over in significant percentages by the alien ideals of 18th century whites. Klavan can’t explain historical anomalies that puncture his precious Ellis Island myth like the 1790 Naturalization Act, which means he can’t tell it like it is because he doesn’t actually know what it is.

The alternative is that he does know what it is and he is knowingly deceiving his fellow conservatives. But I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he is merely ignorant.

3. Fight the culture wars in the culture. The culture wars are problematical because too often conservatives come across as anti-freedom or bigoted. That makes victory tough. I feel passionately about some cultural issues and indifferent to others, but I believe all of them should be fought on a cultural and informational level rather than a political one. For instance, I believe that abortion is the taking of a human life and that government therefore has a right to forbid it. But just speaking bluntly and honestly, I don’t think I can win that fight in the political arena right now. Happily, the truth may do what politics cannot. The truth is on my side and the more the truth gets out about what abortion looks like, how it’s done, and who the people who support it are, the more the public will know that it is unacceptable. Then we can win politically. As for sex issues, I confess I care not at all about other people’s sexuality (I’m so deeply immersed in my own), but I do care very deeply about religious liberty and the freedom not to participate in what you abhor. That’s a fight we can win and we should argue it everywhere as a freedom issue.

Correct concept, inept execution. Winning the culture war is NOT getting the truth out. It is rhetorically convincing others what the truth is. This is why the arts are the most vitally important battleground in the cultural war.

4. Some class occasionally would be nice. Conservatives have been all but banned from universities, the news media and show business. In response, we formed our own media in blogs, talk radio and Fox. Those are great venues for informing our own, but we could use some outreach to open-minded Democrats. I’ve wasted too much breath trying to convince conservatives that art is good and can change the world over time. They just won’t believe me. But could we maybe agree that screaming at people and calling them evil and talking like a belligerent loudmouth know-it-all is not always the best way to bring them over to your side? No, huh. Well, it was just a thought.

For fuck’s sake. He’s another hapless tone policeman. This is why the Alt Right is going to win; because we don’t give a quantum of a damn about “class”. Someone once told me the important thing was “to win with grace and style”. No, the important thing is to win, even if you have to get bloody and dirty in the process. Klavan, like a good conservative, is far more interested in going down to noble defeat and surrendering while wearing a nice clean uniform than he is with winning.

It very much looks to me right now as if Trump is going to lose this election on pure incompetence and mean spirit. That might actually make it easier for conservatives to regroup in the ruins of the Republican Party. If he wins, we may need a new party of our own. But whichever way things go, I think we need to open a discussion about how conservatives can not only remain conservative but also win elections in modern America.

Is he even watching the political conventions? This sort of wishful thinking is why no one should bother paying any attention to a cuckservative like Klavan now or in the future. Conservatism is dying. Its diseased remnants are flocking to the progressives, as we always knew they would. And we watch them go with dry eyes and a grim smile, because we don’t need a bunch of useless cucks and moderates who were always happier shooting at their own side than the enemy.

I have never been a conservative. I will never be a conservative. I am delighted to see the conservative movement crumbling into dust. Conservatives conserve nothing, accomplish nothing, and stand for nothing. They will not defend the Church, they will not defend America, and they will not defend the West.

The Alt Right will. Join us, if you have the steel.