Author: VD

#Trump2016 vs #NeverTrump

A short debate on Donald Trump’s victorious campaign for the Republican nomination and the nature of conservatism between me and Louise Mensch of Heat Street:

LM: This is obviously a sad day for me and a terrific day for you as Donald Trump is crowned the presumptive nominee by the GOP establishment. Last night, while we were talking with each other, we were discussing the nature of conservatism.

To me, my duty as a conservative is to oppose Donald Trump because he’s not a conservative. I said that, to me, conservatism stands for equality of opportunity. You said in your view, it never had done. How do you define conservatism?

VD: I define conservatism as an attitude more than a coherent ideology. If you look at the history of conservatism, which you as a British individual will be aware, it really is something different to the ideas that underlie the British Conservative Party or the Tory Party. Russell Kirk attempted to turn that inherited tradition into a more coherent ideology, and he came up with the 10 foundational points of what he terms conservatism. So it’s less an ideology than an attitude – and a relative posture.

 Equality of opportunity is merely something that fits that attitude more than it is a founding point of the ideology, in the way that the “labor theory of value” is something that underlies the ideology of socialism.

LM You think that leftism is ideological, but conservatism is only an attitude?

VD: To a certain extent. Socialism is clearly a distinctive set of ideologies. There are of course different socialisms, from Fabianism to Marxism. Progressivism – today’s liberalism – is also a coherent ideology. Conservatism is intrinsically a reaction to other ideologies rather than an ideology of its own.

LM: You don’t think Conservatism stands for anything apart from opposing Liberalism, to use that umbrella term for the left?

VD: Exactly correct. There’s a common saying that today’s conservative is yesterday’s liberal. Conservatism, if we look at the positions that it holds, is usually 20-25 years behind what yesterday’s liberals were. Today, John F. Kennedy would be regarded not only as a Republican – but one who was a little bit to the right.

LM: To me, that seems defeatist for a guy that I see, though I may differ with you on many things, at the very least as an alpha male go-getter. You’re not behind any particular set of principles. You just want to oppose somebody else! Doesn’t that put all the power in their hands?

VD: It does, but it’s not defeatist for me because, as I have repeatedly told people for well over a decade, I am not a conservative. I am an extremist and I’m a radical. That’s why I don’t identify with this conservatism that never conserves anything, that goes from one noble defeat to the next, and has completely failed to conserve anything, even the United States of America.

Read the whole thing there. It was an oral debate, not a written one, but I think I managed to avoid tripping over my convoluted sentence structures for the most part. The bet was funny; I don’t think she was quite expecting THAT!

The best argument for Trump

From a comment at Althouse:

Once you’ve allowed the barbarians through the gates, any swashbuckling
ruffian who is willing to pick up a sword and push them back out again
is an ally. We can worry about what the city should look like
once we’ve put out the fires and have stopped the barbarians from
actively setting more of them.

And, ideally, sent the barbarians back to their homelands. It’s not about “illegal aliens”. It’s not about documentation. It’s not about legality. It’s about the largest invasion in human history. It’s about the biggest mass migration in the recorded history of Man.

Mass repatriation or war. Those are the choices left to both America and the European nations now.

Choose wisely.

Speaker for the butthurt

Matt Walsh rage-quits the Republican Party because Donald Trump has won the nomination:

Goodbye, Republican Party.

I mean that in more ways than one. I’m leaving. You’re dying. I could stick around while you gasp your last pitiful breaths, but what would be the point? I’m certainly more pro-life than you ever were, but when it comes to political parties that have been overtaken by some kind of unintelligible, socially liberal populism, I say pull the plug.

Good riddance. Your wounds are self-inflicted anyway. Clearly you have no desire to live. So goodbye. I am abandoning you on your deathbed, and I feel no shame in it….

The Republican Party is host to many millions of people who fell prostrate before a flamboyant charlatan, despite, or perhaps even because of, his compulsive dishonesty, his moral cowardice, his cruelty and pettiness, his blatant and unapologetic ignorance and disinterest in the most important issues facing our country, his liberalism and so on. As Trump said himself, he could shoot someone in the middle of the street and these people would still follow him.

That’s why I’m leaving. It’s also why you’re dying. It’s not my fault, and it’s not even Trump’s fault. Trump is just a parasite who took advantage of a weakened immune system. He’s the violent case of dysentery that finally kills the frail man who was already sick with a thousand other exotic diseases. The untrained eye may say the man died because he was vomiting blood, but in truth he was vomiting blood because he was dying.

The Republican Party, we should remember, is made up of Republicans. And most of the Republicans are voters, not politicians. So even if nobody else will say it, I must make it clear that I’m leaving because of these voters. Whatever else can be said of citizens who want a man like Trump to run the country, it cannot be said that they’re anything resembling conservative. Nor can it be said that we have anything much in common.

Yesterday, a Republican in Indiana told the media she’s voting for Trump because he’s a “different kind of liar.” The day before, Cruz attempted to have a reasoned dialogue with a couple of Trump supporters who responded to all of the senator’s arguments by shouting slogans and pumping their fists. Trump fans perform even less admirably in cyberspace, where an impassioned collection of anti-Semites and white nationalists work tirelessly to confirm every negative and cartoonish stereotype liberals have ever concocted about Republicans.

I’m not saying they’re all like this, but I’m done answering for the antics and inanities of the Trump squad. They’re not in my party. Or, I suppose they’d respond, I’m not in theirs. And they’re right.

Remind Matt of this every single time he claims to be a Republican in the future. Rub it in Matt’s face every single time he claims to speak for Republicans. Remind Matt that he quit, that he very publicly left the party, when he claims to be its true voice.

Because, if there is one thing we have learned about gammas like Matt, it is that they always try to come back and pretend nothing happened.

The only thing that is more pathetic than Matt’s gamma rage is the losers in his comments encouraging him to self-immolate.

Will there be war?

In which Stefan Molyneux and I discuss what appears to be looming on the not-so-distant horizon.

We were having some serious Skype issues, so I was forced to use a laptop with a camera, hence the poor video quality. On the plus side, the audio is better this time. Hopefully everything will come together by the third try.

If you wish to download the MP3 instead, you can do so here.

Sexism at the Locus Awards

The SF SJWS are up in arms about sexism at the Locus Awards:

Renay, The Cabal ‎@renay
Surprise, welcome to Systemic Sexism, Locus Awards edition!!

Stephanie A. Allen ‏@stephandrea_
I guess I didn’t get the memo that female YA writers don’t write SFF

Martha Brockenbrough ‎@mbrockenbrough
Hey, if you read LOCUS, don’t worry: women do actually write fantasy and science fiction, even if they didn’t make any awards lists.

Martha Brockenbrough ‏@mbrockenbrough
To clarify my earlier tweet about LOCUS’s finalists. No books by women made the list in the YA category. This defies belief.

 No wonder they’re upset:

FANTASY NOVEL

    Karen Memory, Elizabeth Bear (Tor)
    The House of Shattered Wings, Aliette de Bodard (Roc; Gollancz)
    Wylding Hall, Elizabeth Hand (PS; Open Road)
    The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
    Uprooted, Naomi Novik (Del Rey)

Wait, what? Oh, sorry, apparently this is the problem.

YOUNG ADULT BOOK

    Half a War, Joe Abercrombie (Del Rey; Harper Voyager UK)
    Half the World, Joe Abercrombie (Del Rey)
    Harrison Squared, Daryl Gregory (Tor)
    Shadowshaper, Daniel José Older (Levine)
    The Shepherd’s Crown, Terry Pratchett (Harper; Doubleday UK)

For feminists, “sexism” means that somewhere, somehow, a man still has something that a woman thinks she should have.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
 You’re obviously forgetting that Joe Abercrombie identifies as a woman now. So much hate! You should be ashamed!

Martha Brockenbrough ‏@mbrockenbrough
Is this a joke? Because I am not getting it.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
I just think you’re being very insensitive and hateful to Ms Abercrombie. Not all women have vaginas, you know.

Martha Brockenbrough ‏@mbrockenbrough
First I have heard that Joe Abercrombie identifies as a woman. If she does, that changes things. 

And to think they say SJWs are no fun!

The refusal to learn

The New York Times is aghast at Donald Trump’s challenge to the bifactional ruling party:

This is a moment of reckoning for the Republican Party. It’s incumbent on its leadership to account for the failures and betrayals that led to this, and find a better way to address them than the demagogy on offer.

Republicans haven’t yet begun to grapple with this. Instead they’re falling into line.

Republican leaders have for years failed to think about much of anything beyond winning the next election. Year after year, the party’s candidates promised help for middle-class people who lost their homes, jobs and savings to recession, who lost limbs and well-being to war, and then did next to nothing. That Mr. Trump was able to enthrall voters by promising simply to “Make America Great Again” — but offering only xenophobic, isolationist or fantastical ideas — is testimony to how thoroughly they reject the politicians who betrayed them.

Now, myopic as ever, Republican leaders are talking themselves into supporting Mr. Trump. At a party retreat in Florida last month, Mr. Trump’s adviser Paul Manafort, brought in to make the candidate seem safer to the old guard, assured them that Mr. Trump will better prepare himself for the presidency. “That was all most of these guys needed to hear,” said an operative in the room. “Maybe he’s trainable.” But within a day, Mr. Trump was back to making vile comments at his rallies. In his confused foreign policy address, he demonstrated nothing but a willful refusal to learn.

Xenophobia and isolationism are to be vastly preferred to the treasonous fantasies of the Republican and Democratic politicians alike. There is nothing confusing about Trump’s foreign policy: what is hard to understand about America First for anyone who doesn’t have other objectives in mind?

If the Republican Party doesn’t fall in line behind Donald Trump, it might as well cease to exist and its members can go where they belong, to the ironically-named, anti-democratic Democratic Party.

And to all those conservatives and Republicans crying about how Trump is certain to lose to Clinton, ask yourself this: why doesn’t the great left-liberal standard sound a whole lot happier about Trump being the Republican nominee? Do they sound like people who are confident of victory?

Let’s hope Donald Trump continues to refuse to learn from the USA’s failed, anti-American political class.

The Indiana KO

The Indiana primary should be enough to put an end to Cruz’s campaign, but we’ll have to wait and see if he comes to his senses yet. The shrieking, crying, and dire predictions from the conservative media bodes well for Trump.

UPDATE: “TRUMP WINS INDIANA IN LANDSLIDE…”

54% Trump
34% Cruz
09% Kasich

That will do it. Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee.

UPDATE 2: Note the name of the post. Cruz is out. The GOP establishment has been officially, and conclusively, Trumped.

Ted Cruz is quitting the presidential race, according to campaign manager Jeff Roe, ending one of the best-organized campaigns of 2016 after a series of stinging defeats left Donald Trump as the only candidate capable of clinching the nomination outright.

Cruz had appeared likely to go all the way to the Republican convention, but a string of massive losses in the Northeast, and his subsequent defeat in Indiana, appear to have convinced him there’s no way forward.

Vegetable totalitarians

Don’t feel bad about cutting a vegan out of your life if he ceases to mind his own business and starts preaching. They’re an SJW cult, they’re not just people who happen to prefer to different food.

L.A.’s vegan vortex has angrily turned on the most prominent vegan restaurant group in town this week as word has spread that its owners are not just eating meat but raising and slaughtering animals at the working farm where they live in Northern California.

Matthew and Terces Engelhart, the husband-and-wife proprietors of favored entertainment industry haunt Cafe Gratitude, tell The Hollywood Reporter they’ve been receiving death threats as part of a quickly growing, internet-bred campaign against them. It has also spawned a deluge of one-star reviews on their local outposts’ respective Yelp pages, a boycott group on Facebook that tallies 571 members at press time and plans now underway for a protest at the Larchmont Village location on Friday at 7 p.m.

“People have taken up the mob mentality,” says Matthew. “It saddens me that the choices we made in the privacy of our home would lead people to feel so betrayed that it’s elevated to threats on our lives. I’m very discouraged.”

The trouble began last week when animal rights activists discovered and then widely circulated a 14-month-old blog post written by Terces on the Engelharts’ Be Love Farm website, which mixed an announcement of their transition back into a meat diet again after nearly 40 years of vegetarianism (they had been vegan since 2003) with posted pictures of strained beef broth and a freezer full of pastured beef from their own dairy cows. Matthew tells THR they have kept chickens on the farm for seven years “for eggs only,” along with the cows for five years for milk, cheese and butter that’s for sale. (He claims they’ve “harvested,” or slaughtered, several cows in total and never sold the meat, only shared it with “our friends, neighbors and community.”)

The news has come as a shock to many vegans, who have been regular customers of the restaurants and claim the Engelharts have built their brand on not just serving vegan food but clearly wrapping themselves in the righteousness of the vegan cause — which they argue has now been undermined. “The reason we’re so upset is that veganism is a belief system,” says Carrie Christianson, who started the Facebook boycott group. “You are patronizing a restaurant that you think has that philosophy, and it turns out it doesn’t. Vegans should know that this restaurant has a farm that slaughters animals.”

“Veganism is a belief system.” That’s really all you need to know. It’s a secular religion. Since you are what to eat, my belief system says vegans are vegetables and should be treated accordingly.

Grow or Die paperback

We are pleased to be able to announce that the bestselling survival gardening book, GROW OR DIE: The Good Guide to Survival Gardening, is now available in paperback for $11.99. While we are massive proponents of ebooks, this is arguably the one book that you will definitely want to own in a physical format.

While I can’t be certain that Kindles will not function properly in the post-Apocalypse, it’s probably not the safe bet.

For some reason, Amazon has elected to confer upon David the title of Assistant Professor Psychology and Applied Therapies, so I’m sure you will all join me in congratulating him upon this unexpected academic achievement.