Author: VD

Hillary’s stalking horse?

If so, Donald Trump is doing a very, very poor job of it:

The Fox News-sponsored controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a
private email server will become another anti-Clinton national tragedy
if Donald Trump wins, the Republican front-runner told Fox News’ Sean
Hannity at a town hall Monday night.

Hannity
asked if Trump would order his attorney general to investigate Clinton
if he wins the White House in November, and Trump said he would “have no
choice,” because “in fairness, you have to look into that — she seems
guilty.”

He momentarily tried to walk his comment back, saying,
“but you know what, I wouldn’t even say that,” before saying what he
just said he wouldn’t say again. “But certainly, it has to be looked
at,” he said. Trump later added that “she’s being protected, but if I
win, certainly it’s something we’re going to look at.”

Wheels within wheels, my friends. Wheels within wheels.This post also serves as an open thread to discuss the Nevada Republican caucus and its results.

In a state where only 33,000 of the state’s 400,000 GOP voters turned out to caucus in 2012—a mere 7%—the campaigns of Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and one-time candidate Jeb Bush got organized early, snapping up talented operatives and key endorsements, while beginning caucus trainings last fall in the hopes that a strong organization could overcome Trump’s momentum.

But Trump appears to have steamrolled through all of that, dominating not just Nevada’s unreliable polls, but capturing the excitement and buzz in the race with his visits here. In interviews with dozens of Republican voters across the state over the last week, many said without hesitation that they were standing firmly with Trump and had given little thought to the other Republican candidates.

It’s going to be interesting to hear the convoluted explanations of how winning three states in a row is the certain death knell of the Trump campaign.

Cruz vs Trump on Immigration

Let’s let the two men speak for themselves:

SEN. TED CRUZ

My views on immigration are straightforward. I think there is considerable bipartisan agreement outside of Washington on immigration. There is overwhelming bipartisan agreement that we’ve got to get serious about securing the borders and stopping illegal immigration. There is considerable bipartisan agreement outside of Washington that we need to improve and streamline legal immigration so that we can remain a nation that welcomes and celebrates legal immigrants.

 I think it is a mistake for any politician to on the one hand embrace amnesty — embrace a pathway to citizenship for those who are here illegally — and on the other hand seek to restrict or punish legal immigrants. Amnesty is wrong. When I campaigned for the US senate I campaigned unambiguously against amnesty and was proud to receive 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in the state of Texas at the same time Mitt Romney was getting clobbered with 27 percent of the Hispanic vote nationwide.

But I am the son of an immigrant who came legally from Cuba. Reagan referred to legal immigrants as Americans by choice and there is no stronger advocate of legal immigration in the U.S. Senate than I am. I think the right approach is to secure the border, follow the rule of law, and embrace and improve legal immigration.



DONALD TRUMP 

Real immigration reform puts the needs of working people first – not
wealthy globetrotting donors. We are the only country in the world whose
immigration system puts the needs of other nations ahead of our own.
That must change. Here are the three core principles of real immigration
reform:

1. A nation without borders is not a nation. There must be a wall across the southern border.

2. A nation without laws is not a nation. Laws passed in accordance with our Constitutional system of government must be enforced.

3. A nation that does not serve its own citizens is not a nation. Any immigration plan must improve jobs, wages and security for all Americans.

Make Mexico Pay For The Wall

Defend The Laws And Constitution Of The United States

America will only be great as long as America remains a nation of laws that lives according to the Constitution. No one is above the law. The following steps will return to the American people the safety of their laws, which politicians have stolen from them:

  • Triple the number of ICE officers.
  • Nationwide e-verify.
  • Mandatory return of all criminal aliens.
  • Detention—not catch-and-release.
  • Defund sanctuary cities.
  • Enhanced penalties for overstaying a visa.
  • Cooperate with local gang task forces.
  • End birthright citizenship.
  • Put American Workers First
  • Increase prevailing wage for H-1Bs.
  • Requirement to hire American workers first.
  • End welfare abuse.
  • Jobs program for inner city youth.
  • Refugee program for American children.
  • Immigration moderation. 

Literally Wu proves SJWAL

Because SJWs always lie.

 [Larry Correia] and other conservative figures like Adam Baldwin are claiming that Twitter is breaking down on “free speech” and capitulating to the “SJWs,” which I guess means people like me. I have spent much of the last year asking Twitter and other tech companies to improve their harassment policies. There is one problem with Mr. Correria’s claim.

There is no evidence whatsoever for it.

None, zilch, zero. It’s a fantasy. A similar lie is going around that Twitter has put Anita Sarkeesian in charge of their Trust and Safety council, which is similarly baseless. I’ve spoken with a lot of tech companies in the last year and I have never heard anyone propose shadowbanning.

The only “proof” that Twitter is shadowbanning people comes from a disreputable conservative blog, that is so disreputable it cannot even be used as sourcing on Wikipedia. That blog used anonymous sourcing, and was written by someone with a personal axe to grind against Twitter.

The truth is, companies like Twitter are finally enforcing their own TOS if you threaten someone, dox someone, or set up an account specifically created to harass someone. That has led to some people being banned, and some accounts that perpetually break Twitter harassment rules to become deverified.

The backlash against Twitter is by people that prefer these system to remain as they are – a place where the women in your life will get rape threats, where anyone can have their private information posted, and where swarms of vicious mobs are destroying people’s reputation with slander.

The last I checked, almost 100 people have spread Mr. Correria’s baseless claim – and even more with Adam Baldwin. This is an important thing to fact check, and I hope you’ll share this to set the record straight.

Remember, Literally Wu is so stupid and dishonest that in addition to claiming that he is really a pretty, pretty girl despite conclusive evidence to the contrary, he once harassed himself without forgetting to log out of his other account first. He is as in complete denial of Twitter’s actions as he is of his own sex.

There is copious documentary and testimonial evidence that Twitter is shadowbanning various individuals on Twitter, among them me. Here is additional proof:

Samuel B Roberts @SBRoberts10 Feb 22
He’s so “boorish”! BTW, did the shadow ban thing end? I saw this on my feed.

ConantheCimmerian ‏@ConanTCimmerian Feb 21
Even though I follow him, I haven’t seen a direct tweet from @voxday in 2 weeks.

Taxi Driver ‏@northofdoom Feb 20
I never see direct @voxday tweets, despite following

ChateauEmissary Feb 20
Same here. No direct tweets from vox.

Some fantasy. It is telling that Twitter’s Committee of Public Safety isn’t saying anything, but has stalking horses running around publicly denying what Twitter is observably doing. Notice that the dates mentioned above just happen to correspond with the otherwise inexplicable decline and subsequent recovery of my impressions despite the number of my tweets being flat and the numbers of my followers increasing during the same period.

And if you weren’t already convinced that File 770 commenters are literal cretins, here is the relentlessly stupid Tasha Turner again:

15) BRIANNA WU DEFENDS TWITTER
A voice of reason

That, in a nutshell, is why I am more concerned about what my dogs think about the upcoming US presidential election than about anything an SJW might “think”. Any connection between what they say and objective reality is purely accidental.

Donald Trump: democratic socialist

As I said before, Sarah’s take on these things is always amusing:

The
blogger has never understood the difference between European right and
American right.  Not stupid but strangely culturally blind — and
COMPLETELY misunderstood it. I mean, amazingly, bizarrely misunderstood.

What I find funny about this is that Sarah goes on and on and on about how no one can
possibly understand Europe, or European politics, except her (because
poor village in Portugal), when the easily confirmed fact of the matter
is that she doesn’t even understand what America is. And her logic is amusingly specious: she understands the danger that Donald Trump poses to America better than everyone else because Portugal.

Do you see what I mean about immigrants? They don’t even understand how their basic perspective is intrinsically foreign. They are fish wondering what this water of which you speak might be.

Now, she is right about one thing. I will not be Portuguese or Italian or German no matter how long I live in Europe. Here, you can move from a neighboring village that is a 10-minute walk away and you will always be stranieri to the locals. But what Sarah fails to understand is that she is no more American than I am Portuguese. She is a US resident, perhaps even a US citizen, but she is not an American. America is not an idea. America is not a concept. America is not a proposition nation. One cannot, contra her past assertions, become a genuine American just because one happens to believe one thinks a certain way.

Now, an immigrant may have a recognizably American spirit, just as it is possible for an American expat to have an Italian spirit, a Swiss spirit, a French spirit, or a Portuguese spirit, and even to have it recognized by the natives as such. But that does not make one any more an American than it makes one Italian, Swiss, French, or Portuguese.

The notion that America is nothing more than an idea is a modern one, a 20th century invention, and a fiction which immigration advocates hell-bent on replacing Americans with immigrants like Sarah herself, advocates such as George W. Bush and Barack Obama, have repeatedly attempted to sell to the public. Had she read Cuckservative, she would know this. Even the famous “melting pot” to which many so often appeal is a romantic 19th century invention of a Russian Jew who lived in Britain. It has nothing to do with America, Americans, or American history.

And
the fact is that I know the difference between the European right and
the American right much, much better than she does. I even happen to be acquainted with some of the various players on both sides of the
Atlantic.

As for Donald Trump being a Democrat and a
socialist, well, I can testify that he was not only at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans in 1988, but he sat right behind me in George H.W. Bush’s personal suite the night Bush
accepted the Republican nomination. He even apologized to me for nearly putting his shoe on my shoulder when he crossed his legs.

I doubt Sarah realizes how few of the
major players on either side of the aisle actually care in the slightest about their party’s platforms or official ideologies; they are in the political game for power and money. Trump
is no more a socialist than the self-styled “Houston Mafia” that surrounded Bush the Elder were; he doesn’t have any more ideological bones in his body than did
Bush ’41 or Bush ’43. Sarah talks about Trump’s connections to the Clintons, but what she doesn’t grasp is that the entire corporate-political elite is connected. Bill Clinton is closer to the Bush family than he is to Trump; in fact, it’s entirely possible that Trump’s connection to both Clintons is through the Bush family.

Is Trump going to govern like Obama? Or like the Bushes? Perhaps in many ways, but unlike the other Republican candidates, that is unlikely in regards to the only issue that matters at the moment: immigration. Trump is the only one talking about a wall, talking about stopping Muslim immigration, and even talking about deportations. And that, I strongly suspect, is the real fear of Trump opponents like Sarah. It’s not that they think he will govern like Obama on immigration and the American national interest, but they fear that he won’t.

That is why Trump is the only candidate who is worth supporting in 2016, despite being a member of the corporate-political elite, because he is an unpredictable rogue member of it and the only one that might – MIGHT – make a positive difference in the near future in the American national interest. Of course, he also may well not, but we already know beyond any shadow of a doubt that none of the other candidates are worth a damn.

He isn’t an ideal candidate, he probably isn’t even a good candidate, and he certainly isn’t a trustworthy candidate, but nevertheless, at this point, he is the only possible candidate.

Mailvox: you are in their sights

DD knew about SJWs, but he erroneously believed that they wouldn’t target him:

I’ve been a reader of Vox Popoli on and off for a few years now, but I was stupid because I didn’t think the SJW stuff was relevant to my life experience. Until it was:

The TL;DR version is that I volunteered hours and hours of my time at an indie horror site over the course of about 8 months, but once the SJW proprietor learned that I was a conservative, he kicked me off the staff and attempted to blacklist me in the indie horror community. Which is pretty much a non-threat, but he figures it’s a big deal.

The culture war is relevant. It really is everywhere, and there’re no more sidelines to sit on. You were right about all of it, and I’ve since purchased SJWs Always Lie to get the full story and learn the best tactics.

You must understand this: SJWs are out to get everyone who does not submit to their Narrative. EVERYONE. This includes you. The fact that they haven’t attacked you yet only means that you’re not currently on their radar.

But at least he’s learned his lesson. He’s right: “Your forbearance is weakness.”

Don’t be weak. Don’t be quiet. Don’t be an easy target. Make sure they know that if they come at you, even with the benefit of an amenable authority, they’re going to come away bloody even if they manage to win.

I find this view unacceptable

Shall we therefore target him and hurt his career?

“Of course there are legitimate racists and we should target them, We
should find them and we should hurt their careers because racism is
unacceptable.”
– Ben Shapiro

Remember, these are the sort of people who not only say they’re on our side, they actually claim to be our opinion leaders and to speak for us.

They’re not on our side. They don’t share our opinions. Don’t fall for their nonsensical posturing. They’re just like every other pig that found itself on the upside for once and is trying to declare that equality now renders it more equal than others.

More and more, it seems the primary difference between the cuckservative and the SJW is that the former gives lip service to classic liberalism while the latter gives it to equality and tolerance. But they both exhibit a strong desire to play thought and speech police.

A pernicious influence

Or so they say. This exchange over at Sarah Hoyt’s is both illuminating and amusing. It even features a rare appearance by Dr. Jerry Pournelle. Anyhow, they’re worrying about Donald Trump and America turning too far to the “right”, by which it appears they mean an America that is genuinely nationalist, cognizant of its own interests, and concerned about its own survival:

accordingtohoyt
I speak enough with millenials in private to see even the left ones “turn” – ya’ll are going to end up like my generation in Portugal. They pushed leftism on us every chance. And we ran right as fast as we could.

Foxfier
That’s what worries me. Rand was right about what was wrong, but wrong about what was right. (Mangled Chesterton, there.) There are a lot of other directions besides “right.” Mostly just tired of getting kicked by the people who didn’t manage to stop this from happening because we haven’t magically fixed it before 35.

accordingtohoyt
Yeah, a lot of them are becoming like VD. “Everything the leftists say is a lie, so racism, sexism, etc. must have a point.” Head>desk.

Joe in PNG   
So, in order to avoid the ditch on the “Left” side of the road, they are aiming right straight at the ditch on the “Right” side of the road. Either way, you wind up with a totaled car.

overgrownhobbit
VD doesn’t go far enough. Everything the vileprogs advocate needs to be re-examined down to the ground-level assumptions. Stopping part way just leaves one with bits of prog stupid rattling round the mental furnishings and gumming up the philosophy. Like mistaking an is for an ought.

Still have hope for the guy. He’s got some sound foundations, and he’s right more often than wrong.

Now, I like Sarah and I think that her heart is in the right place, but I can only conclude that she has either failed to accurately observe the current situation or to think the matter through sufficiently.

What she, and many conservatives, have yet to grasp is that classical liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, free trade, constitutionalism, and a whole host of other 18th century concepts that were largely theoretical as well as being near and dear to our hearts have fundamentally failed.

Technology and events have fundamentally changed the way we must now think about these things; the logical cases that were laid out by the various 18th century Enlightenment thinkers are now subject to the analysis of more than 200 years of readily available data. Let the cult of reason be silent when experience and history gainsay its conclusions.

I’m not reacting to the Left. I’m not a reactionary and I’m not reacting to anything except considerably more information than the likes of Smith, Ricardo, Jefferson, Voltaire, or even Mises, Friedman, and Rothbard ever had.

My thinking has changed dramatically because of what I have witnessed over the last four decades. We are still much the same humanity that we always were, but we live in a radically different world today. It was one thing to posture grandly about free trade and the free movement of peoples back in the 1800s, or even the 1970s, it is another to do so when a nation’s entire industrial base can be dismantled or the population of an entire nations can literally pick up and move across a continent without anyone, anywhere, so much as lifting a finger to stop them.

Contra Sarah, Trump is neither the potential problem nor is he the solution. What he offers is one last chance to get it right. That’s all. He will buy America a little more time to find itself again, to find itself and embrace the strong, self-confidence of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant American nationalism that made the USA a world power and turned it into a place to which people around the world wanted to come.

But they are on the verge of killing the golden goose because they are not, and they never will be, the kind of Americans who built America. Read Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America. Their ideas about America’s history and America’s founding are little more than romanticized fairy tales. They think they are extending and expanding on the founding concepts when in truth they have perverted them.

Race does matter. Sex does matter. Nationality does matter. Not because the Left lies about these things, but because they are materially and objectively significant. The romantic Right is outdated, ill-informed, and intellectually irrelevant. Here is a hint: if you’re even mentioning the word “mercantilism”, you are arguing against nationalist Frenchmen dead 300 years, not the nationalist Mil-Right of today.

A lesson in combined arms

Ender and I haven’t been able to get back to Fifth Frontier War lately, but we did find the time to break out a short Advanced Squad Leader: Starter Kit scenario, S23: Monty’s Gamble. Ender is just learning how to use vehicles, and in this scenario, he learned a rather painful lesson concerning why tank commanders always insist on having an infantry screen when engaging enemy infantry.

The scenario is set in 1944 Holland, with a German Kampfgruppe counterattacking the British 1st Airbourne Division after the seizure of the city of Arnhem as part of Operation Market Garden. The British were attempting to hold out long enough to permit 30 Corps to reach Arnhem and reinforce them, while the Germans were hoping to cut them off from the Rhine and capture the entire division.

Interestingly enough, this scenario played out rather similarly to the historical event, where the Staffordshire regiment managed to hold off the Germans long enough to let the greater part of the 1st Airbourne to extricate itself and retreat. The Germans are attacking from the east and their objective is to exit a sufficient number of victory points (two tanks and two infantry units are enough) off the west side of the map. The British units are all set up hidden, and I’d chosen to present a false forward defense in the north while putting all of my anti-tank defenses in the middle and south. I figured that if a tank went the north route, I’d have time to turn my rear anti-tank gun and take a shot at its weak side armor before it exited.

However, Ender took me off-guard by deciding to race his first tank straight past the town using the north road. There was nothing I could do about that, so he had 7 of the 17 VP required right there. I thought that might have been a scouting move, but then he tried to run his second tank through the middle; I held my fire with the first anti-tank gun and blew it up with the second one when it came adjacent.

That made him a little more cautious, but not enough. The last tank was already following the previous one on the middle road and it managed to avoid being brewed up by the first gun, but when it turned up the road to avoid the second one, it took a PIAT up the tailpipe. Then, to make matters considerably worse for the Germans, thinking the northern route was clear, Ender moved an entire platoon, led by his best leader, adjacent to my single squad in forward defense. The paratroopers popped up, killed the leader, and broke the entire platoon.

That essentially ended the game on the first turn; although it is theoretically possible for his second platoon to fight its way past my guns and other infantry units, they can’t do that and go north to relieve the pressure my one squad will keep on the broken platoon to prevent them from rallying at the same time. We’ll play one more turn, just in case, but I’ll be very surprised if the second platoon even manages to cross the road, let alone the map.

Ender was more rueful than chagrined; now that he understands the concept of an infantry screen, I very much doubt he’ll ever make that particular mistake again. And now that I’ve taken full advantage of that specific gap in his knowledge, I can let him watch the Band of Brothers episode where the British tank commander makes the spectacularly unwise decision to ignore the advice given by the American infantry screening his tanks.

Why Boris is Leave

The Mayor of London explains his reasoning in The Telegraph, and for someone who reportedly vacillated on the matter, it is a surprisingly powerful and comprehensive case:

I am a European. I lived many years in Brussels. I rather love the old place. And so I resent the way we continually confuse Europe – the home of the greatest and richest culture in the world, to which Britain is and will be an eternal contributor – with the political project of the European Union. It is, therefore, vital to stress that there is nothing necessarily anti-European or xenophobic in wanting to vote Leave on June 23.

And it is important to remember: it isn’t we in this country who have changed. It is the European Union. In the 28 years since I first started writing for this paper about the Common Market – as it was then still known – the project has morphed and grown in such a way as to be unrecognisable, rather as the vast new Euro palaces of glass and steel now lour over the little cobbled streets in the heart of the Belgian capital.

When I went to Brussels in 1989, I found well-meaning officials (many of them British) trying to break down barriers to trade with a new procedure – agreed by Margaret Thatcher – called Qualified Majority Voting. The efforts at harmonisation were occasionally comical, and I informed readers about euro-condoms and the great war against the British prawn cocktail flavour crisp. And then came German reunification, and the panicked efforts of Delors, Kohl and Mitterrand to “lock” Germany into Europe with the euro; and since then the pace of integration has never really slackened.

As new countries have joined, we have seen a hurried expansion in the areas for Qualified Majority Voting, so that Britain can be overruled more and more often (as has happened in the past five years). We have had not just the Maastricht Treaty, but Amsterdam, Nice, Lisbon, every one of them representing an extension of EU authority and a centralisation in Brussels. According to the House of Commons library, anything between 15 and 50 per cent of UK legislation now comes from the EU; and remember that this type of legislation is very special.

It is unstoppable, and it is irreversible – since it can only be repealed by the EU itself. Ask how much EU legislation the Commission has actually taken back under its various programmes for streamlining bureaucracy. The answer is none. That is why EU law is likened to a ratchet, clicking only forwards. We are seeing a slow and invisible process of legal colonisation, as the EU infiltrates just about every area of public policy. Then – and this is the key point – the EU acquires supremacy in any field that it touches; because it is one of the planks of Britain’s membership, agreed in 1972, that any question involving the EU must go to Luxembourg, to be adjudicated by the European Court of Justice.

It was one thing when that court contented itself with the single market, and ensuring that there was free and fair trade across the EU. We are now way beyond that stage. Under the Lisbon Treaty, the court has taken on the ability to vindicate people’s rights under the 55-clause “Charter of Fundamental Human Rights”, including such peculiar entitlements as the right to found a school, or the right to “pursue a freely chosen occupation” anywhere in the EU, or the right to start a business.

These are not fundamental rights as we normally understand them, and the mind boggles as to how they will be enforced. Tony Blair told us he had an opt-out from this charter.

Alas, that opt-out has not proved legally durable, and there are real fears among British jurists about the activism of the court. The more the EU does, the less room there is for national decision-making….

We have given so much to the world, in ideas and culture, but the
most valuable British export and the one for which we are most famous is
the one that is now increasingly in question: parliamentary democracy –
the way the people express their power.

This is a
once-in-a-lifetime chance to vote for real change in Britain’s relations
with Europe. This is the only opportunity we will ever have to show
that we care about self-rule. A vote to Remain will be taken in Brussels
as a green light for more federalism, and for the erosion of democracy.

In the next few weeks, the views of people like me will matter
less and less, because the choice belongs to those who are really
sovereign – the people of the UK. And in the matter of their own
sovereignty the people, by definition, will get it right.

The choice facing the British people is a straightforward one: will you be sovereign or will you be slaves?

This is one of the great moments of our lifetime, comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. One of the great nations of history is deciding whether to extinguish itself or not. If there is to always be an England, then England must vote Out.

Burning down the house

If the German authorities don’t stop aiding and abetting the invasion, I suspect they’re going to start finding themselves locked in the buildings before they are set on fire:

A crowd is reported to have cheered as a building designated to house migrants in Germany was burnt out in a suspected arson.

The blaze in the town of Bautzen early this morning caused serious damage to the former hotel which was being converted.

Cops claim onlookers tried to prevent firefighters from tackling the blaze.

Officers said members of the crowd took “unashamed delight” in watching the fire.

Two drunken men were arrested after they refused to leave the scene, the BBC reports.

The converted hotel was supposed to house 300 migrants…. In a further sign of anti-migrant sentiment, police in the Brandenburg
region are investigating the distribution of leaflets urging “absolute
resistance” against “foreigner invasion”.

If the government won’t resist foreign invasion, then the people have no choice but to do it themselves. The arsonists aren’t the criminals, the quisling authorities are.

Nationalists who burn down migrant hostels are no more guilty of committing any crime than a combat engineer who blows up a bridge or a vehicle with a suspected IED.