Author: VD

Don’t trust the media

Joe Blow explains why:

The Smartest Attorney I Have Ever Known (SAIHEK) is a former White House Counsel. He tells the story of when the NY Times approached him about writing an essay defending a Bush 41 or maybe a Reagan policy. He asked, “you’re not going to get me to do all this work, then give it to an op-ed writer who will write something debunking this, then not publish my essay, are you? Because you guys did that to ______ and he told me about it.”

“No, of course not,” the NY Times editor said. “We’d never.”

So the SAIHEK, a guy who should have known better, spent several hours out of a couple very busy days where he really didn’t have several hours to give, writing a cracking essay defending Administration policy. He faxed it to the Times. He waited several days and was thinking about calling the editor, when he happened to open the Sunday Times, and there was an op-ed thoroughly hammering the Administration policy. There were several arguments in it, and each was a clever rebuttal to the arguments of the SAIHEK. They were even in the order that they’d be written, if they were directly in response to the order of the Smartest Attorney & etc.’s op-ed. He didn’t bother calling the editor back because he presumed he’d be told they never got the fax.

As the SAIEK puts it, “I learned a very important and highly sophisticated lesson from that experience. Don’t trust the media.”

It is amazing how many intelligent people who know the media is not on their side readily fall for this sort of thing.  I turned down several requests to appear on Alan Colmes’s show a few years ago after I wrote certain columns that proved to be controversial because I knew that I would only be there to serve as cannon fodder. At the time, my media jujitsu was insufficiently developed to permit me to go on a national show with the confidence that I could get my points across no matter how the host tried to spin things.

The thing to always keep in mind is that the media are two-faced and shamelessly dishonest.  They always smile and act friendly when they are hunting for a get.  They are friendly right up until the moment that the microphone goes live, at which point everything changes.  Their voice, their demeanor, even the look in their eyes is transformed.  And if you betray any sign of weakness, they are very good at identifying and exploiting it to rhetorical effect.

This is why so many guests on various news shows so often look bewildered and taken aback when they are being interviewed.  You are seeing, or hearing, the guest’s first introduction to the media figure with their attack face on.  They’ve been told how interesting their thoughts are, how fascinated the viewers or listeners will find them, and how much the media figure has wanted to discuss this with them.  They’ll be assured that it is not a hostile interview, not at all.  And then, the moment the red light goes on, the mask drops.

However, if you are sufficiently prepared and you understand their tendencies, you can use their instinct to attack perceived weaknesses against them. As Jill once pointed out, they are binary thinkers, and binary thinkers are the easiest people to manipulate no matter how smart they are.  The key is that they are superficial and limited to rhetoric so they have neither depth nor the ability to distinguish between real and false dialectical weaknesses.  Get them lunging for X, and then you have them by simply showing X to be Not-X.  And the more controversial or outrageous to PC sensibilities X happens to appear, the more irresistible they find the lure.

Remember, the media game is all about perceived credibility as opposed to the real thing.  They are in the business of producing rabbit food.

Mailvox: combatting ignorance

Phoenician, in his imitable style, can’t even understand Wikipedia when he quotes it:

“The 2000 Equality amendment to the Military Service law states that “The right of women to serve in any role in the IDF is equal to the right of men.” As of now, 88% to 92% of all roles in the IDF are open to female candidates, while women can be found in 69% of all positions. […]

A combat option for women is the Caracal Battalion, which is a highly operational force that is made up of 70 percent female soldiers. The unit undergoes training like any combat infantry. The IDF commando K9 unit, Oketz, also drafts females as elite combat soldiers.”

You’re a moron, Dipshit.

I do so enjoy when Pharyngulans comment here.  All they ever manage to do is publicly demonstrate that their IQs are at least two standard deviations below mine.  In this case, he clearly fails to understand the significance of the fact that 8 to 12 percent of the roles in the IDF are closed to women; those are the actual combat roles.  Women in the IDF are simply not permitted to serve in any combat role.  They haven’t served in them since 1948. They are allowed to train for combat, but they are not permitted to actually perform any combat role for the very reasons I originally cited and more.

“Women serve in support and combat support roles in the IDF, recently they have been allowed additional options but they still do not serve in active combat.  Around the world there has been some discussion about whether or not women should serve in active front-line combat. In Israel it is clear that despite the vast contribution of women in the military, active combat is not an option. This decision is based on the physical and biological differences between men and women but also for moral reasons. As Michal, a combat fitness instructor in the IDF, says, “No one wants to even think of the possibility of an Israeli girl falling into the hands of the enemy.” Our history is already filled with too many such stories of atrocities.

The Israeli military has always combined the practically of combat with the morality of our Jewish way of life. For political reasons women’s groups have tried to break down barriers but the simple fact is that physically women are not capable of doing the job men do. There was an attempt to integrate women in the Search and Rescue units but it was discovered that a great deal of physical damage was caused to them as a result of the increased effort. Even the girls who were integrated into the anti-aircraft unit suffered great physical damage during the long hikes. They suffered more than 30% more stress factors than the boys.”

Wake Up is dubious:

Congratulations on your exploits in Tekken.

Yeah, it wasn’t a video game, it was a similarly dubious active-duty Marine officer with significant combat experience.  He doesn’t mock the martial arts any more.  Nor would you if you tried to last even one minute against me or any other Dragon from my old dojo.  I’ve seen no shortage of doubters and mockers.  No one ever remained that way after stepping onto the mats and experiencing what a combination of speed, strength, experience, and training can do to the average tough guy.  We never did any choreographed fight demonstrations either.  We simply gave people a pair of gloves and told them to take their best shot.  Most of them did exactly the same thing.  Step-step-cock-grimace-BIG rear hand.  The rest tried the midsection tackle.

RealMatt, on the other hand, is simply misinformed:

The odds of a person trained in every single martial art ever known to man, with little to no real life fight experience, performing well in an actual fight, are very low.

Totally false.  It depends upon the school and the training.  The first time I got into an actual fight after I’d had a few years of training, it took me about ten seconds to incapacitate the guy with an arm bar after breaking his nose.  There is a very real difference between the fighting schools and the non-fighting schools.  I’ve been knocked out and had bones from my nose to my toes broken in training, whereas in the four real fights I was in, no one ever even managed to touch me.  In my experience, heavy contact sparring with someone who is trained is a lot harder than real fighting, as untrained brawlers not only tend to present a myriad of open targets, they advertise what they are going to do.

For example, they have a tendency to lead with their face, which is when the guy cocks his rear arm back as he leans or actually steps forward.  This is a very, very bad mistake against a trained fighter and usually results in eating a jab.  The instinctive grapplers, on the other hand, like to tackle at the waist.  That is how the aforementioned Marine managed to put himself in position to get his neck snapped so quickly.  Go with the flow, drop the arms, slide the left up and over, grab, twist, and lock.  Then ride to the ground, but carefully.

However, most men tend to start with punches, so my preference is usually to sidestep and catch the arm as it comes at me, pull it past and pivot to either a) slam the guy face-first into a wall if it is there, or b) keep turning and put him down on the ground in an armbar if it is not.  If the wall is there, I jam his arm up high behind his back while he’s stunned, then turn him and sweep his legs to put him down.  Then I put one knee on the back of his neck while keeping his arm pinned high. I also try to speak reassuringly, telling him to calm down, it’s all right, and so forth. They can’t do anything in that position, but you don’t want them to panic and cause you to break something.  The combination of the shock, the pain, and the helplessness usually causes them to relax in short order.

The only time this didn’t work without a problem was the second time, because I stopped with the guy pinned against the wall.  He seemed calm enough, so I stepped back and let him go, at which point he lunged at my bouncer friend.  That was how I learned not to stop until the guy is not only temporarily incapacitated, but down as well.

Flirting with Hultgreen-Curie Syndrome

Because I am in the midst of reading Terms of Enlistment, a new military SF novel, I found this USMC news to be more than a little amusing:

“The only two women to participate in the Marine Corps Infantry
Officer Course (IOC) failed ongoing tests to determine which infantry
positions should be available to women, according to the Marine Corps Times: 

‘The women failed the introductory Combat Endurance Test, a
punishing test of physical strength and endurance, officials at Marine
Corps headquarters said Tuesday. The latest class began March 28 at
Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va., with 110 lieutenants participating.
Ninety-six men passed the initial endurance test. Twelve men and two
women — the only female Marines taking part — failed.’

The two women both volunteered to participate in the IOC. Two other
women had previously volunteered in September but also failed.”

The Marines will have no choice but to make the Combat Endurance Test more equal.  Which is to say easier.  Because, after all, everyone knows that actual military combat is considerably less difficult than an introductory fitness test.

What I’d love to see is for the Marine Corps to address the political pressure it is facing by creating an all-female combat battalion.  Give them the very best of training, the best equipment, and then put them right on the front lines.  After one-third of them suddenly fall pregnant before the deployment, another third flee at the first sound of gunfire, and the remaining third are captured and raped, there won’t be any need to continue the debate any longer.

When faced with lunatic nonsense, agree and amplify.  To be honest, I’m genuinely surprised that none of the four female pioneers managed to break their necks or otherwise get themselves killed during the test.

Mailvox: on national libertarianism

“Maybe it doesn’t interest you but, I would really appreciate if you
could spell out what exactly it is that you oppose in National
Socialism.“

The Socialism.  I oppose 20 of the 25 points of the National Socialist political program, which is considerably more than the average Democrat or Republican does.

“Do you have a theory, or belief, or some posts on national libertarianism?”

I do.  I have long described myself as a Christian Libertarian, but this is a description that only makes much sense to Europeans, where Christian Democrat is still a meaningful political term rather than something rapidly approaching a contradiction-in-terms, if not yet an actual oxymoron. 

In terms of the US political spectrum, I have concluded that it would make more sense to describe myself as a National Libertarian, which some might erroneously conclude is synonymous with paleoconservative or some form of conservatism.

Therefore, I intend to begin a series of posts entitled National Liberty, which will address the subject of why National Libertarianism is not only not a misnomer, but is the only logically coherent form of libertarianism as well as the political ideology best suited for maximizing human freedom in a sustainable manner.

Immigration as ideological weapon

Peter Hitchens admits what was always obvious: the reason the Left has favored mass immigration is because they believed, correctly, that they could use it to politically transform the nation:

The greatest mass migration in our history has taken place…. Our leaders only had to go to Boston, any time in the past five years, and they would have known.

But all our leading politicians were afraid of knowing the truth.

If they knew, they would at least have to pretend to act.

And the truth was, they liked things as they were.

And it was at least partly my own fault.

When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible.

It wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t like Britain. We saw immigrants – from anywhere – as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties.

Also, we liked to feel oh, so superior to the bewildered people – usually in the poorest parts of Britain – who found their neighbourhoods suddenly transformed into supposedly ‘vibrant communities’.

If they dared to express the mildest objections, we called them bigots.

Revolutionary students didn’t come from such ‘vibrant’ areas (we came, as far as I could tell, mostly from Surrey and the nicer parts of London).

We might live in ‘vibrant’ places for a few (usually squalid) years, amid unmown lawns and overflowing dustbins.

But we did so as irresponsible, childless transients – not as homeowners, or as parents of school-age children, or as old people hoping for a bit of serenity at the ends of their lives.

When we graduated and began to earn serious money, we generally headed for expensive London enclaves and became extremely choosy about where our children went to school, a choice we happily denied the urban poor, the ones we sneered at as ‘racists’.

What did we know, or care, of the great silent revolution which even then was beginning to transform the lives of the British poor?

To us, it meant patriotism and tradition could always be derided as ‘racist’.

And now the pro-immigrant Left belatedly discovers they have a tiger by the tail that doesn’t give a damn about their careful distinctions between what is useful to them and what is not.  This is par for the course for the Left; the Mensheviks always end up being cast aside by the Bolsheviks. The Richard Dawkins of the world are always happy to foolishly embrace Islam as an attack on Christian culture, if they weren’t too short-sighted to grasp that Islam would prove every bit as implacable a foe as Christianity, they wouldn’t be Leftists in the first place.

Many, if not most, white progressives, libertarians, and conservatives who bought into the Myth of Ellis Island are going to come over to the nationalist side in the next ten years, frightened by the realization that what they celebrated and advocated has come to pass in a very different way than they expected.  But those of us who have always valued nationalist culture and traditions need to always keep in mind that they are, at best, modestly useful allies of demonstrably inferior judgment on such matters.

The Right has a long and sordid history of elevating those who have “seen the light” to be its opinion leaders.  National Review and Pajamas Media is chock full of former progressives, ex-Democrats, and reformed socialists, which is why their positions are so reliably meek, ineffective, and apologetic.  They still want to curry favor with the Leftist institutions they once revered; they simply do not regard the Left with the contempt such organizations and people merit.  Look, for example, at Hitchens’s attack on Enoch Powell in the very article in which he belatedly comes around to accept the essence of Powell’s
position on immigration.

That is why this rush of newly reformed transnationalists cannot ever be trusted or taken very seriously.  They are still the same traitors to their cultures and traditions they have always been, all that has changed is that they are now frightened of what their own actions have wrought and alarmed at the extent to which the transformations they sought are destroying even the aspects of their society they expected to retain.

Even now, the transnationalist right is still trying to finesse an irrelevant difference between illegal immigration (bad) and legal immigration (good).  This is a fool’s game. The fact is that ALL immigration beyond a small and readily absorbed amount is invariably destructive and will always transform the invaded nation into something different than it was before.  Whether the transformation is desirable or not is a separate and debatable matter, the point is that the transformation is definitely going to take place.

Still too big to jail

The banks are still above the law:

Money laundering by large international banks has reached epidemic proportions, and U.S. authorities are supposedly looking into Citigroup Inc. (C) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Governor Jerome Powell, on behalf of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, recently testified to Congress on the issue, and he sounded serious. But international criminals and terrorists needn’t worry. This is window dressing: Complicit bankers have nothing to fear from the U.S. justice system.

To be on the safe side, though, miscreants should be sure to use a really large global bank for all their money-laundering needs.

There may be fines, but the largest financial companies are unlikely to face criminal actions or meaningful sanctions. The Department of Justice has decided that these banks are too big to prosecute to the full extent of the law, though why this also gets employees and executives off the hook remains a mystery. And the Federal Reserve refuses to rescind bank licenses, undermining the credibility, legitimacy and stability of the financial system.

Considering that the banks can get away with laundering drug money and committing large scale mortgage and deed fraud with impunity, what makes you think they won’t get away with taking as much of their depositors’petty creditors’ money as they decide they need?

Women’s rights are anti-freedom

The truth tends to reveal itself over time. Over the last ten years, I’ve observed that the intrinsically anti-freedom authoritarianism of feminism is increasingly out in the open. At this point, only those who aren’t paying attention can still pretend to buy into the idea that feminism and women’s rights are even remotely compatible with Western civilization or resemble anything that the Western intellectual tradition would consider legitimate rights.

Consider the words of one Barbara, who isn’t shy about speaking for all women when she quite seriously argues “we should be able to make you not offend us”:

I think that I can speak for all women when I say that this very
important because we cannot offend science fiction fans of other
religions. The right to free speech is irrelevant to women’s rights and
freedom of religion. People need to understand that being offended is a
really big deal and that we should be able to make you not offend us.
And science fiction cannot be sexist or minority-phobic either. This is
what it is. Period.

That is the true heart of feminism.  As I wrote when I pointed out that feminists are sub-civilized: “This is what the feminist’s vaunted concept of equality means.  This is
what it has always meant: the legal protection of a woman from all and
any consequences of her actions.  This includes a woman’s ability to
break any contract at will, to steal from anyone as she pleases, and
murder even the most innocent without having to even hear a whisper of
protest to make her uncomfortable.”

Barbara helpfully adds an element that I neglected to include, which is that women “should be able to make you not offend” them. Being intellectually incoherent and unjustifiable in the eyes of every rational observer, feminism is necessarily an ideology of force. This is why it has to be resisted every bit as strenuously as other such ideologies, including communism and National Socialism.

And a science fiction that cannot be sexist or minority-phobic is not science fiction at all, but a dogmatically limited sub-genre in which all literary value is necessarily subservient to ideological whimsy.

Feminist SF/F convention battles lookism

I suppose it was really only a matter of time before the appeal of the strong horse began to take its toll among the feminist swaddle.  And to be honest, given what I saw of Madison the last time I was there, burqahs probably aren’t the worst idea considering the amount of corpulent, graffitied flesh on display:

WisCon Makes Burqas Mandatory for All Attendees

Today the SF3 ruling committee for the Madison,
Wisconsin-based feminist SF convention WisCon announced that starting
this year, all attendees would be required to wear burqas.

“We were trying to think of what we could do to make Wiscon more
inclusive,” said con chair Belle Gunness. “Suddenly, we realized that
devout Muslims could easily be offended by the amount of sinful and
wanton flesh on display at Wiscon. Therefore, starting with this year’s
Wiscon, we’ve made burqas mandatory for all attendees. Allah Akbar!”

Both male and female members will be required to don the traditional
black, face-covering, head-to-toe Islamic garb for all convention
events. Gunness indicated that the convention would have substantial
quantities of Burqas for rental to congoers, from Small to 5XL sizes. As
an added benefit, she said that the new regulations would help
eliminate “rampant lookism.”

Gunness said that guests would be required to wear the garb as well, “in the spirit of egalitarianism.”

Wiscon also announced that next year’s guest lineup would consist of
J. K. Rowling, Stephen King, George R. R. Martin, Joss Whedon and
Suzanne Collins. “At least as far as you know.”

You do have to wonder about a convention of lunatics so psychologically disturbed that Elizabeth Moon, of all people, is too rabidly right-wing for them.

UPDATE: The utter cravenness of Locus’s apology is considerably funnier than the originally posted article.

“We would like to offer our apology for the offensive April Fool’s
post that was published on the site today. The April Fool’s pieces were
not seen by the Locus HQ staff before being posted — it was an ugly
moment this morning when we saw the post already online, and we
immediately took steps to remove it. Of course, being after the fact, it
was too late, and the offense had already happened. We did not find the post funny at all, and it does not reflect in any
way the opinions of the magazine staff. We apologize for it appearing
under our auspices.”

It’s not funny.  It’s not funny at all!  Also, and I quote, “John Scalzi is a rapist.” 

A graphic argument

This is why the USA should have let the banks fail in 2008.  This is why it is an expensive mistake to allow the very people who created to problem to provide the solution to it.  And if you think this looks bad, imagine how the Cypriot employment rate is going to look next month.  The chief problem with bailouts isn’t the moral hazard involved, although that is not insignificant, it is that they prevent the necessary reset of the economic system. From Zerohedge:

Nocturne: a novel

Sometimes, you just know something is going to turn out a certain way, but even when it does, the fact that it turns out that way doesn’t prevent it from being every bit as deliciously and delightfully funny as you imagined.  As some of you are aware, an anklebiting troll by the name of Will aka Dan aka Dimwit Dan aka Luscinia Hâfez aka Yama the Spacefish has made a habit of denigrating my fiction at every opportunity for years, marks every positive review of my books on Amazon as “unhelpful”, and now claims “give me one minute and I can write a sentence better than anything in The War In Heaven.” 

Fortunately, we can put this hypothesis to the test thanks to the astonishing act of literatury greatness he has committed and graciously made available to the public.  And so, with not inconsiderable pleasure, I am deeply honored to present to you a selection of text from the next great American novel, Nocturne, by Will aka Dan aka Yama etc.

A young woman with close-cropped hair, dark at the roots and bleached
almost white at their tips, held with a band and a gold disk pendant
amongst silver chains, dressed in black clothes under a white wool
cardigan and midnight blue coat came out of the building. “Spies?” she
said, momentarily puzzled and starry-eyed, pushing the door shut. Snow
fell in flurries, the flakes were melting on our hair. “No matter,” she
said, unsheathing a blade. She sighed, and ran after me, stopping and
slashing. I blocked it with my pipe. “You don’t have your patron
Cleisourarch to help you. He’s dead by Red hands, impaled with a stake
and paraded naked and flayed open through the streets of Mediolanum and
dumped in the river. You face me alone. Me, the greatest swordswoman in
all of Carantania.”
“Marciana, can you support me?” Adrenaline warmed my body.
“I don’t know. I’ll try.”
“Good.”
“Stop! I know them,“ another woman cried.
“Anysia?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Uh, I’m terribly sorry,” the woman who attacked us said, her voice
languid and melodic. The gold disk on her neck was inset with a large
red stone with a carving of an eye at the center of a star and six
cabochons of varying tones of green at the points, actually
light-emitting diodes. A bead of amber with a fly, like Ava’s, hung from
the side of the headband, wrapped in fine gold chains. A sardonyx
brooch with a cameo was pinned to her coat. “I heard you walking around
up there, and I couldn’t really see you. Thought you were Selinian, or
worse, Pannonian agents. I’m Cantianilla, by the way. Cantianilla
Vasilescu, if you were wondering. Veridiana told me to wear it with
pride because it’s part of who we are, for better and worse. I’m not
sure but for what it’s worth, there’s a lot of people with that kind of
family name, Vasilescu and Gavrilescu and Stefanescu and a bunch of
other people with -escu at the end. Mine reminds me of basilisks. Do you
know what a basilisk is? There’s a folktale about a feathered lizard
that can turn a man to stone with its gaze. But maybe I’m mixing them up
with dinosaurs. Those were real, but they didn’t have a petrifying
glare or anything. I see you know Anysia. So, what are your names,
wayfarers?”
“I’m Marciana. And only Marciana.”
“I’m Nicasius
Patrescu. Ava calls me Nica. It’s nice, but a little feminine.
Marciana’s been my friend ever since we were small children. Are any of
the others here?” I asked.
“Yes, I heard you say that. It was a bit
comforting, since Pannonians think we’re idolators and don’t have names
like yours and keep their women in the home as a mandate, but who knows?
Nobody really knows who the Synod is. Rumors abound that the Synod
members wander the streets of Vindobona as vagrants, that the
Magisterium funding the Pannonian Revolutionary Front as a lure for
potential traitors to the Church and Nation. Should I believe it? It
seems more like an old story than reality, but you know what they say
about stories and half-truths. I understand that there are Saugumas, I
mean, agents of the Synod in the Pannonian Revolutionary Front, and thus
they decentralized it, and everyone can name only the members of their
cell. You must forgive me for not trusting you. Eight others are all
with us,” Cantianilla said. “Veridiana’s heartbroken. She’s with Ava
now. They’re in the basement.”
“What happened?” Marciana asked.
“Theopemptus happened,” Anysia said.
“Curse the house Daubresse until the sun goes bloated and rotten and
the stars are shaken from the heavens. Mansuetus died in an attack on
the Cleiousarch’s soldiers a day after you left. They had some kind of
warmech with them, and I don’t know where they got it, maybe a blue-gray
alliance of sorts. A mortar tore him apart. I witnessed it, oh, oh,”
Cantianilla said. She seemed less brash once she knew we were friendly.
“I’m sorry,” Marciana said. “I know all too well the pain of loss.”
“There’s nothing you could do. I mean, we won in the conflict against
the Blues, but victory has a price and many of us wondered if it was
worth it. There’s a stela on the demesne with fifty names on it. If you
could ever go back, you’d notice the number of Pannonian names on it.
They fought valiantly, and their sacrifice for a free Carantania was not
in vain.”

Great stuff.  FREEDOM!  I particularly enjoyed this line: “Me, the greatest swordswoman in
all of Carantania.” That’s QUALITY literature.  Look out, Doestoevsky!  Now, what do you think the odds are that Cantianillawafer
Vasilfawltytowerescu’s starry eyes are purple?  Five-to-one?  Ten-to-one?