Author: VD

National Review risks non-profit status

Justin Raimondo observes that Rich Lowry appears to have committed a serious legal blunder, as well as the obvious political one, with the “Stop Trump” issue:

The publication of a special “Stop Trump” issue of National Review was heralded in a blaze of publicity. Editor Rich Lowry appeared on Fox News and was interviewed by Trump nemesis Megyn Kelly, where he proceeded to denounce The Donald as a threat to the intellectual integrity of the conservative movement….

All well and good: there are plenty of reasons for principled conservatives (and libertarians) to oppose Trump. However, there’s one big problem with this well-publicized blast at The Donald.

In March of last year, Politico reported that National Review was becoming a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, which would enable it to solicit tax-deductible donations: “Since its launch, the magazine has operated as a not-for-profit business, even as it came to rely on more and more donations in recent years. Starting next month, it will become a nonprofit organization, which will make it exempt from federal taxes. National Review also plans to merge with the nonprofit National Review Institute, its sister organization, according to a source with knowledge of the plans.”

Rich Lowry averred that the shift would be good for the magazine, which was fighting a costly lawsuit and had never been profitable anyway. “We’re a mission and a cause, not a profit-making business,” he told Politico. “The advantage of the move is that all the generous people who give us their support every year will now be able to give tax-deductible contributions, and that we will be able to do more fundraising, in keeping with our goal to keep growing in the years ahead.’”

This anti-Trump issue of National Review is, in effect, a campaign pamphlet directed against a political candidate—indeed, the cover proclaims “Against Trump”—and, as such, is in clear violation of IRS statutes regulating nonprofit organizations.

The regulations are quite explicit that nonprofit organizations must “not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”

I’m sorry, I have no cogent analysis to offer; I’m not even sure what the article said. I found it hard to pay attention after cracking up when I got to the part about “the intellectual integrity of the conservative movement.”

That’s a good one!

Pity the poor orcs

The Head of the White Council writes an important letter to the Minas Tirith Times:

One of the major challenges that we face today, on a global scale, is how to protect people who have been forced, by armed conflict, human right abuse or other forms of persecution to flee their homelands.

  Overwhelmingly, refugees do not willingly leave their homes and families.   They do not come to Gondor seeking financial advancement.   Most do not even leave with a final destination in mind.

   They leave because of the fear of what will happen to them if they don’t.

  They leave because of the persecution and abuse that they have faced on a daily basis.

  As a country, Gondor shares responsibility with the rest of the international community, for protecting these refugees by offering them a place where they can be safe. 

Read the rest of it there.

National Review against America

A helpful list of all the National Review contributors who are against both Donald Trump and the American national interest.

National Review is so desperate to prop up its fading anti-nationalist conservatism that it has turned its entire magazine into an anti-Trump hit piece.

For months, Republican leaders have worried about how to stop 2016 frontrunner Donald Trump. Now, one of the conservative movement’s most influential publications is taking matters into its own hands.

National Review is dedicating a special issue of its magazine, one week before the Iowa caucuses, to stopping Trump. “Against Trump,” blares the magazine cover. Inside, a blistering editorial questions Trump’s commitment to conservatism, warning voters that backing him is tantamount to allowing the conservative movement to have “fallen in behind a huckster.”

“Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones,” the editorial reads.

And that’s just the start.

The National Review issue features anti-Trump essays from more than 20 conservative thinkers, leaders and commentators spanning the GOP’s ideological spectrum from David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian-infused Cato Institute, to William Kristol, the hawkish editor of the Weekly Standard, to David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth. All call for Republicans to nominate someone other than Trump.

Or to put it another way:

SF-SJWs double down

Allum Bokhari of Breitbart addresses the latest attempts by SJWs in science fiction to silence all dissent:

There is no doubt that some sci-fi authors hold views that are alien to much of mainstream, liberal opinion. However, the SJWs who are trying to drive them out continue to fail to grasp that no political opinion is justification for exclusion from awards participation, bookstores, or the sci-fi community at large. The point of sci-fi is good sci-fi, and the point of awards is to recognise good sci-fi, not politically conformist opinions.

SJWs continue to demonstrate their inability – or unwillingness – to separate good art from questionable artists. In a manner eerily similar to the anti-historical campaigns to scrub images of unfashionable – yet historically significant – individuals like Woodrow Wilson and Cecil Rhodes from university campuses and public spaces. At the behest of SJWs,  the face of H.P Lovecraft, one of the genre’s pioneers, was recently removed from the iconic trophies of the World Fantasy Awards.

There’s something ISIS-like to it: the purging of historical icons and works of art because they represent something that falls outside a rigid, intolerant ideology.

Political intolerance in sci-fi appears to be growing, not diminishing. The Sad Puppies of 2016 will have their work cut out for them.

The mere fact that they are having to do openly what they managed to do behind closed doors for 30 years is a victory. And from Castalia House to Brave, we’re seeing one example after another of those who love freedom fighting back.

We’re going to win, in the end, because they are nothing but parasites and cargo cultists. They can’t create, they can’t build, all they can do is latch onto something someone else has created and converge it. Now, as the recent actions by the Linux Foundation have demonstrated, people are realizing that if they do not keep out the entryists, if they do not expel the SJWs, their organizations will not survive.

No SJWs allowed

One senses the hand of Linus Torvalds behind this unexpected action by the Linux Foundation:

Linux Foundation quietly drops community representation

The Linux Foundation is an industry organisation dedicated to “promoting, protecting and standardising Linux and open source software”[1]. The majority of its board is chosen by the member companies – 10 by platinum members (platinum membership costs $500,000 a year), 3 by gold members (gold membership costs $100,000 a year) and 1 by silver members (silver membership costs between $5,000 and $20,000 a year, depending on company size). Up until recently individual members ($99 a year) could also elect two board members, allowing for community perspectives to be represented at the board level.

As of last Friday, this is no longer true. The by-laws were amended to drop the clause that permitted individual members to elect any directors. Section 3.3(a) now says that no affiliate members may be involved in the election of directors, and section 5.3(d) still permits at-large directors but does not require them[2]. The old version of the bylaws are here – the only non-whitespace differences are in sections 3.3(a) and 5.3(d).

These changes all happened shortly after Karen Sandler announced that she planned to stand for the Linux Foundation board during a presentation last September. A short time later, the “Individual membership” program was quietly renamed to the “Individual supporter” program and the promised benefit of being allowed to stand for and participate in board elections was dropped (compare the old page to the new one). Karen is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, an organisation involved in the vitally important work of GPL enforcement. The Linux Foundation has historically been less than enthusiastic about GPL enforcement, and the SFC is funding a lawsuit against one of the Foundation’s members for violating the terms of the GPL. The timing may be coincidental, but it certainly looks like the Linux Foundation was willing to throw out any semblance of community representation just to ensure that there was no risk of someone in favour of GPL enforcement ending up on their board.

The Foundation’s action doesn’t have anything to do with Karen Sandler being the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, but rather, her having been the executive director of the Gnome Foundation, which she bankrupted in three years by devoting nearly 50 percent of the foundation’s budget to a new Women’s Outreach Program.

This demonstrates the seriousness of the threat that the most influential  people in tech know that the SJWs pose to it. It is well worth destroying the community aspect of a project to keep them out, if necessary, because if they are allowed in, they will spend all their time and effort in attempting to take it over; even if they are prevented from doing so, far too many resources will be wasted in stopping them, resources that could have been spent on achieving the goals of the project.

Keep them out. As Linus knows, even it requires changing the rules, you have to keep them out.

Art internship

As part of the first Dev Game course, we’re doing four very small games that are updated remakes of Apple II classics. While we have sufficient programmer volunteers, we’re short an artist.

So, if you’re an animator/illustrator and you’re interested in a short, modestly paid internship in the game industry, send me an email with examples of your work. And by work, I mean animated illustrations.

The making of the Mil-Right

Caleb Q. Washington tells the tale of his intellectual development:

I learned that uncovering the truth often requires ignoring what you’re told and focusing on what you see; I became staunchly opposed to typical Salon/Slate variety feminists; I became more interested in developing myself as opposed to joining with others; I was first introduced to some of the figures of the hard right.

A few months later, Gamergate began. As Adam Baldwin sounded the horn to begin the biggest resistance so far to the unending march of progressivism through cultural institutions, I was caught up in the front lines of actually doing something to fight for culture. As we had successes and pushed back, it felt empowering.

Most importantly, it changed my expectations of what the conservative movement should be capable of accomplishing. It also disappointed me to be so completely ignored and dismissed by conservative writers and pundits. We were here pushing back against the very worst of progressivism, and they didn’t care.

This was followed by the Sad/Rabid Puppies campaigns which were another blow against progressives. Again silence from the conservatives I read.

Sooner or later, the Grants always replace the McClellans. Because if you don’t fight, there is no need for you.

A second SJW attack on PHP

Another SJW, this time one Derick Rethan, takes another crack at imposing a Code of Conduct on PHP:

Hi, I’ve decided to re-propose the CoC RFC. There are many reasons for it, but there are a few points I want to make. I strongly believe that a Code of Conduct is required. The amount of toxic behaviour on this list is in my opinion unacceptable. It drives people away, it certainly did. It is also one of the reasons I am not nearly as active as I used to be.

It also makes me reluctant to welcome and mentor new people wanting to contribute. I have said “no” to two people in the last few days, mostly because I am not sure whether I want them exposed to some of the things being said on the list.

But I think this list, and hence this project, and language, can be improved. A Code of Conduct alone is not enough. The focus for this list, and wider community, should be on collaborating to make PHP even better and faster than it already is. Collaboration works better in a happy environment, where people work together instead of against each other.

The new 0.5 version of the RFC that is up at  https://wiki.php.net/rfc/adopt-code-of-conduct focusses more on working  together and mediation than on acting with an iron fist on when things
go awry, although these parts of the RFC are still included. In my opinion, an CoC that is not enforced is nothing but some text on a piece  of paper—or in our case, a few bits on a disk. I have added a section,  Constructive Contributor Guidelines, in addition to the CoC. This section definitely needs improving.

I would everybody invite you to help out improving this RFC, but please take into account  https://wiki.php.net/rfc/adopt-code-of-conduct#constructive_collaboration_guidelines

I want this to work, and work together, to get this approved.

cheers,

If the project leader at PHP has any sense at all, he will expel this SJW from the project immediately. Notice how he spews squid ink the moment his idiocy is confronted:

There is no mechanism or ability for one to confront ones accuser

That is a tricky one. In my opinion, in the case of abuse as pointed out in the draft CoC, I think this is fair, and necessary that we all for reports of abuse in private, and with secrecy. Without it, an accusor is likely immediately going to be lambasted by the perpetrator.

Here we have the core of (yet another) problem: presumption of guilt. The “accused” is casually referred to as the “perpetrator.”  This is *exactly* why the accused needs to be able to confront the accuser.

The common reply here is to say “oops, sorry, I meant to say ‘the accused'”.  I don’t think that’s true; it’s a wink-and-a-nod, a recognition that one has revealed their true thoughts: all accusations are to be believed. Except, of course, the ones that are not to be believed, and those will (strangely enough) line up with the political beliefs of the enforcers. Because it is a political document, the Contributor Covenant is *intended* to work that way.

That is only one of the many reasons the Contributor Covenant, and all documents like it, should be removed in toto from any Code of Conduct discussion.

There is nothing “tricky” about it. SJWs want to be able to act arbitrarily, and in secret, without any oversight or possibility of public protest. Again, PHP should ban this SJW from the project immediately; he is actively seeking to destroy it and he is using deception to do so.

Furthermore, the Code of Merit appears to be an effective way to go, because the SJWs are definitely against it:

I had a look at this, and I think it is not suitable. It is almost the exact opposite of promoting collaborative behaviour, and instead only focusses on the “if you done nothing before, you have no voice”. There is also no chance the PHP project will have have a benevolent dictator (or group of people). And it only focusses on the technical aspects of a community, but even covering a set of guidelines to improve collaboration.

Remember, to the SJW, “not suitable” means “it won’t help us take control and play thought police.” But clearly it can be approved. “Almost the exact opposite” is not good enough. If they’re not shrieking and crying and protesting, it’s clearly not enough.

Show them you mean business and will not put up with the disruption. Kick them out as soon as they show themselves.

Poland and the return of the nation-state

It may sound strange, but based on Steve Sailer’s observations, Poland is a better bet these days than the USA, Germany, or China:

The upcoming GOP primary donnybrook between the establishment right and the antiestablishment right has had a foreshadowing in Polish politics over the past dozen years in the war between Poland’s two dominant parties, both conservative. If you want to know what a Trump presidency might be like, the bumptious populist conservative government elected in Poland three months ago offers some clues….

The once-popular Tusk’s travails in 2015 are worth recounting because they suggest that the failures of American establishment conservatives, such as former GOP front-runner Jeb Bush, aren’t just due to idiosyncratic personality flaws, but are systemic. In a world in which the biggest political issue is borders, the globalist right has a hard time answering to voters’ satisfaction the basic political question: “Whose side are you on?”
“Poland is everything you are not supposed to be in the 21st century: a conservative, religious, and homogeneous nation-state.”

To roughly analogize recent Polish political history for Americans, it’s as if Mitt Romney (Donald Tusk) had won two terms as president, but his plan to hand off power to Paul Ryan had suddenly been disrupted by a landslide for Donald Trump (Jarosław Kaczyński)…. Poland is everything you are not supposed to be in the 21st century: a conservative, religious, and homogeneous nation-state.

Which is why Poland is more likely to become a world leader as the 21st century proceeds, as long as it is able to remain Poland rather than becoming yet another orc-infested heterogeneous multinational state.