Author: VD

She’s not wrong

Too many commentators are still caught up in the irrelevant Republican-Democrat shell game:

Tulsi Gabbard is running for president of a country that she believes has wrought horror on the world, and she wants its citizens to remember that. She is from Hawaii, and she spends each morning surfing. But that is not what she talks about in this unlikely campaign. She talks about the horror.

She lists countries: Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq. Failure after failure, she says. To drive the point home, she wants to meet on a Sioux tribe reservation in North Dakota, where, she explains, the United States government committed its original atrocity.

“These Indigenous people have been disrespected, mistreated with broken promises and desecrated lands,” Ms. Gabbard says.

Ms. Gabbard, 38, was a soldier in Iraq and currently serves as a major in the Hawaii Army National Guard, which she cites to temper her message: Get out of foreign wars. Leave other countries alone. Not everyone wants democracy.

Her position is hardly new. It’s essentially what George Washington recommended and what Donald Trump promised.

The US government has arguably committed more atrocities and broken more promises and treaties than any other extant government in the world, with the sole exception of Great Britain. That is an easily verifiable fact. The list of Indian treaties alone that it signed, then violated, are in excess of 100. In fact, it’s incredible that any foreign governments even bother to go through the charade anymore.

I’m not a fan of Tulsi Gabbard. But on this particular matter, she’s absolutely correct.

Shall we pretend to be surprised?

Another mass shooting, this time in El Paso:

KTSM can confirm that 18 people were shot inside the Walmart. The extent of their injuries is unknown at this time. El Paso Police and multiple other law enforcement agencies are responding to a shooting at the Walmart an active shooter situation.

I wonder how many people from Las Vegas and Gilroy will just happen to be there to be interviewed by the media? I’d put the over/under on three.

Update: A fake white nationalist manifesto has already made the rounds and been debunked.

Update: The Associated Press quotes three witnesses who report seeing four gunmen:

A family of three was among a dozen people waiting outside a bus station. They were trying to return to their car that was in a blocked-off Walmart parking lot. “I heard the shots but I thought they were hits, like roof construction,” said Adriana Quezada, 39, who was in the women’s clothing section of Walmart with her two children. Quezada said she saw four men, dressed in black, moving together firing guns indiscriminately. Police confirmed only one gunman.

And yet, the only shooter in custody is a young drug-addled man. Again. I understand that eyewitness reports in stressful situations are intrinsically unreliable, but “four men dressed in black” are considerably more likely to be confused with “three men dressed in dark brown” or “six men dressed in blue” than zero men. 

The problem with US nationalism

As Alan Mendenhall notes, it simply doesn’t exist, because it has never existed:

What is this national conservatism all about?

The succinct answer is the marriage of nationalism to conservatism. The conference organizers defined nationalism as “a commitment to a world of independent nations.” They presented national conservatism as “an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to theories grounded in race.” Their stated aim was “to solidify and energize national conservatives, offering them a much-needed institutional base, substantial ideas in the areas of public policy, political theory, and economics, and an extensive support network across the country.”

Sounds interesting. However, neither national conservatism nor nationalism — whatever the distinctions between them — can take hold in the United States.

The Difference Between a Country and a Nation

Why? Because the United States is not, and has never been, a nation. The founding generation referred to the United States as a plural noun (i.e., “these United States”) because several sovereigns fell under that designation. St. George Tucker called the United States a “federal compact” consisting of “several sovereign and independent states.” If his view seems unrecognizable today, it is because nationalism within the United States is dying or dead—and the United States killed it.

The United States of America in the singular is a country, not a nation. It contains nations within it, but does not itself constitute a nation. Nations involve solidarity among people who share a common culture, language, customs, mores, ethnicity, and history. A country, by contrast, involves political arrangements and governmental territories and boundaries.

From its inception, the United States has been characterized by faction and sectionalism, cultural clashes, and competing narratives — between Indian tribes in what is now Florida and California, Wyoming and Maine, Georgia and Michigan; between the British and French and Spanish and Dutch; between Protestants and Catholics and English Dissenters and nonconformists and splintering denominations; between the Calvinism of Cotton Mather and the Enlightenment rationalism that influenced Franklin and Jefferson. The United States has experienced, as well, numerous separatist movements, including, most notably, the secession of the states that made up the Confederate States of America.

The United States is not a nation.

The United States is not a nation, it is an empire. But the formerly dominant American nation that it contains is, despite its self-disbelief, nevertheless still a nation. And its national self-interest is naturally opposed to the self-styled “nationalist conservatives” who are neither nationalists nor conservatives, but rather, neoclown imperialists in nationalist clothing.

Mendenhall observes: “The national conservatism they envision for the United States can lead only to the suppression of actual nationalism.” And that, of course, is precisely the point.

The opportunity embiggens

It’s going to be interesting to see Rebel go up against the likes of SJW Black Widow and Captain Marvel:

Schaeffer, who also contributed to Captain Marvel and will be showrunning the upcoming WandaVision series on Disney+ added, “I wasn’t a huge superhero movie fan before starting to work [at Marvel], but now that I’m doing it, there’s just so much opportunity to make big, positive statements.” She continued, “Especially something like Captain Marvel and Black Widow, to have these female-centered stories — I just can’t not be involved in that.”

Schaeffer would go into detail about her ongoing experience with WandaVision and what it’s like to be showrunning a TV series without previous TV writing credits. Schaeffer states, “It’s highly unusual. It’s kind of ridiculous.” However, she adds that showrunning is “the most satisfying role that I’ve had. It combines almost everything. While I think I will get back to directing at some point, right now running a show – I feel like the luckiest person in the world. It’s a really phenomenal gig.”

She goes on to discuss the makeup of the writing room for WandaVision indicating there are four women on a staff of eight writes. Schaeffe states the writer’s room’s makeup is “incredibly intentional, and it was very much supported by Marvel.” She adds, “I felt incredibly strongly that we needed women and people of color and people of all backgrounds and perspectives in the room. I believe — I think it is fact — that stories are better the more perspectives you have.”

Schaeffer also called for superhero films to stop “glamorizing guns and weaponry.”

SJWs with an agenda and no experience. What could go wrong? And let’s just say Rebel doesn’t have any issues with glamorous weaponry. After all, her AR-15 is pink.

No safe space for the wicked

Not even Playboy can escape the ravages of the SJW.

Playboy has hired a team of millennials to transform it into a socially conscious publication as it struggles to find its voice in the modern era. It relaunched earlier this year as an ad-free quarterly under the editorial leadership of a gay man and two women who are all under the age of 32.

On the plus side, this is going to make Zoe Quinn’s forays into games and comics look like mega-successes by comparison. Lest you think I exaggerate, feast your eyes on one of Playboy’s new models.

Woke is the new hot!

Welcome to BoardGameGate

As previously noted, there is no white male space that SJWs will not seek to destroy:

In the continuing explosion of tabletop board gaming, there are numerous World War II games in which players get to be Nazis. There are American Civil War games in which players take the role of the Confederacy. Some of these games confront the victims of the Holocaust and enslaved people head on; most don’t, though of course they’re right there if players choose to look.

But even poorly designed games with war themes often get the benefit of the doubt. They are generally created and played by people deeply interested in history. They prize accuracy over fun. Most games in this genre are accompanied by extensive reading lists and explanations; players often treat them as a way to learn that is more engaging than just reading a book.

Scramble for Africa was a new strategy game — what is called a “eurogame,” to contrast the genre with war games and more confrontational luck-based American board games. In it, the player would “take the role of one of six European powers with an eye toward exploring the unknown interior of Africa, discovering land and natural resources,” as the game’s description put it.

And with that, Scramble for Africa became board gaming’s entree into the very particular, sometimes confusing and very of-the-moment culture wars of 2019….

Gene Billingsley, the owner of GMT Games, the game’s publisher, responded to the criticism by pulling the game, two months after its announcement. “It’s clear to me that the game is out of step with what most eurogame players want from us, in terms of both topic and treatment,” he wrote in an email to GMT customers….

The board game hobby — especially in the United States — is overwhelmingly white and male, though, anecdotally, that seems to be changing. Mr. Wehrle and Mr. Reuss said they see more women and people of color playing games and attending board game conventions.

It’s as if they are writing these pieces by rote from a very simple script. The moderately amusing thing is that the author of the article clearly doesn’t realize that there have been no less than four Scramble for Africa games published since 1973, and that doesn’t count games

Self-destruction is the aim

In the midst of an epic discussion of the SJW murder of Marvel’s god of thunder, John C. Wright pens an appropriately thunderous anathema:

If self destruction were not the aim, it is certainly an odd coincidence that the Left just so happens to destroy everything and create nothing.

They promote sexual perversion, they promote male athletes pretending to be female compeating in women’s sports, human feces heaped on the sidewalks in San Francisco while (at the same time) claiming it is racist to use hoses to clean the sidewalks, on the grounds that hoses were used against black protesters during the Civil Rigths march.

They side with terrrorists over the Jews, jihadists over homosexuals, and with the CIA and big business when and only when those organizations are acting in a corrupt and illegal fashion, but not when they fuction as designed.

When Russia was soviet, they all rushed to defend it. Not that is it not, they denounce it as the greatest of threats.

They are against nuclear energy but also against fossil fuels.

They favor infanticide, divorse, contraception, and euthanasia, but they hate the traditional family.

The hang toilets in modern art museums, cans of human feces, and paintings of the Virgin covered in dung.

They favor Newspeak over English, or, in other words, they are against language except when it is corrupt.

They adore and laud pervert pride parades, but then scream with bugeyed hysteria at a Fourth of July parade.

They hate cops.

And the list goes on and on and on. In not a single case is their any evidence of them building up anything after destroying what came before.

There is no new form of family, no new form of modern art, no new form of gender-free English, no new form of law enforcement, no new form of government, and no new rules of courtesy and politeness. There is nothing but continued condemnation of the old forms as unjust.

Imagine a man who aims and misses the mark but hits his rich uncle through a distant bedroom window over and over and over again. The claim that his true goal is to hit the mark cannot be believed after the hundredth shaft shot unerringly into the old man’s corpse.

Deliberate? Uncle Screwtape’s deceit of them might be deliberate. I am not sure if the word deliberate has any meaning when dealing with minds unable and unwilling to deliberate anything.

Self-destruction is always and ever the aim of Satandom. This is because the god of this world hates humanity, and he hates all that is Good, that is Beautiful, and that is True. Whether you prefer to call his servitors the Left, SJWs, the Chantry Guild, or the Synagogue of Satan, the single most important thing to understand is that their actions are never coincidental or ironic or mistaken, they are always purposeful.

Their entire purpose, their only objective, is to destroy. That is why no amount of appeals to reason, to capitalism, or to profit motive will ever prevail. That is why creators and builders must always remain awake and on guard against their blandishments, their appeals, and their offers.

The correct Brexit deal

Prime Minister Boris Johnson may be a historian, but I’m confident he can do the math dictated by the recent by-election that cut his parliamentary majority to one.

The Liberal Democrats’ Jane Dodds gave the Prime Minister a political headache as she overcame an 8,000-vote Conservative majority to take the Welsh seat for the Remainer party.

Disgraced expenses cheat Tory Chris Davies, whose conviction and expulsion via a recall petition forced the summer vote, held on to second with a better than expected showing despite the presence of the Brexit Party…. Ms Dodds, 55, secured a majority of 1,425 after a ‘Remain alliance’ with Plaid and the Greens, and Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson signalled this morning that she wants to extend the tie-up to a swathe of other winnable seats.

  • Jane Dodds (Lib Dem): 13,826  
  • Chris Davies (Conservatives: 12,401
  • Des Parkinson (Brexit Party) 3,331 
  • Tom Davies (Labour ) 1,680 
  • Lady Lily The Pink (Monster Raving Loony) 334 
  • Liz Phillips (Ukip) 242 

A Leave alliance with the Brexit Party means the Conservatives will easily win the next general election, which looks increasingly likely for any of a variety of possible reasons. But it also means that the Conservatives have to stop faffing around with idiotic “increase legal immigration” talk and other nonsense that literally no one actually cares about. Of course, given the fact that they were foolish enough to try to convince the Brecon electorate to accept a convicted criminal who had been recalled by petition as their MP, they may not be capable of accepting the obvious political logic here.

The other interesting fact is the way in which Labour got absolutely destroyed. Its position as a weak Remain party appears to be untenable in the current circumstances.

Rhetoric works

Especially when it comes from the Bully Pulpit:

Somalia President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo voluntarily renounced his U.S. citizenship, a country where he lived, received education and worked.

“This follows the completion of the required legal and immigration processes that had been initiated after the president’s election,” his office said Thursday in an emailed statement.

The renunciation comes about two weeks after President Donald Trump attacked four minority freshmen congresswomen including Somali-born Ilhan Omar, whom he asked to return to the Horn of Africa nation.

It’s a start, anyhow.