Author: VD

Be very afraid

Big Tech is about to experience its Cersei moment, when it learns the difference between influence and power:

This is the moment the U.S. technology superpowers surely knew was coming: The U.S. government is preparing to crawl all over Google to figure out whether it is an abusive monopolist. Google parent company Alphabet Inc. and the other tech giants should be quaking in their fleece vests.

Bloomberg News and other news organizations reported late Friday that the U.S. Department of Justice is preparing to open an investigation into Google’s compliance with antitrust laws. If it goes forward, an investigation will no doubt be broad, lengthy, messy, and impossible for Google and its investors to predict.

That should terrify Google and every other big technology company — because there’s no guarantee that the antitrust Klieg light will turn on one company alone.

This isn’t Google’s first antitrust rodeo. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission in 2013 closed without further action its own antitrust investigation into whether Google wielded its dominant web search engine like a cudgel to disadvantage rivals, drive up prices for advertisers and ultimately harm consumers. (Google did agree to some voluntary changes.)

And in recent years, the European Union antitrust watchdog imposed billions of dollars in fines after finding antitrust violations, including over how Google conducted business with its Android smartphone software and its internet shopping service. In the U.S. and elsewhere, politicians from all party stripes have sought to attack Google or other tech giants for various perceived sins, including being too big for the good of industry and consumers. Being Google has meant dealing with perennial regulatory and political nightmares.

This latest chapter of “As Google Turns” may have started in January on Capitol Hill. “I don’t think big is necessarily bad, but I think a lot of people wonder how such huge behemoths that now exist in Silicon Valley have taken shape under the nose of the antitrust enforcers,” Bill Barr, now the U.S. attorney general, said to U.S. senators during a confirmation hearing. The DOJ’s chief antitrust enforcer, who represented Google during a merger more than a decade ago, has expressed similar views.

Antitrust investigations are difficult to predict, of course. Once the U.S. government pores over every internal email and business development contract, there’s no telling what it will turn up. If the DOJ moves ahead, it will also be an open invitation for every company or individual with a gripe against Google to pile on, and an investigation will embolden critics of Facebook, Amazon and other tech giants as well.

I’ve certainly got a complaint or two to register against Twitter, just to name one of the Big Tech companies that will be investigated, as do dozens of other individuals of my acquaintance. I think it might even be a good time to sign up for a few of these converged companies specifically in order to get deplatformed. Several of them are clearly dumb enough to continue the very activities that have put them in the DOJ’s sights.

By the way, it will be interesting to see if this serious problem with Google Cloud may have been the cause of everyone’s recent streaming issues. It’s not necessarily SJW action:

Google experienced several major technical problems Sunday that left YouTube down for many users in the US, South America and Europe. The Alphabet-owned search engine company said its tech troubles began at 12.25pm on Sunday. YouTube’s was first reported down at 2.50pm, according to downdetector.com. YouTube, Google Cloud and G Suite services including Gmail were affected, but Google said it believes it has identified the cause of the issue in its cloud network. Some users also said they were having issues with third-party sites and applications including Snapchat, Pokemon Go, Uber, Uber Eats, Vimeo and Discord.  

AH:Q #1 in print

In which I announce AH:Q #1: Where We Go One is now in print on Unauthorized and discuss a few other tangential matters.

You can pick up a gold logo edition here, but supplies are very limited because the first few hundred are reserved for AH:Q campaign backers.

Bring on the General Election

So much for Remainer Tory threats that No Deal Brexit meant Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister. The first-past-the-post system might actually demolish the Conservative Party to the benefit of Niles Farage and the Brexit Party. And it’s likely that the polls actually underestimate the growing support for Farage. As I’ve often noted in the U.S. context, the so-called “pragmatism” of the moderate Right is often the exact opposite of pragmatic and only assures defeat.

The genuine racists

“One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.”
– Rabbi Yaacov Perrin

“Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage.”
– Ben Shapiro

“One Jewish Life Is Worth More Than 10,000 non-Jews.”
– Birthright staffer, Haaretz

“A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.”
– Rabbi Dov Lior, Chairman of the Jewish Rabbinical Council

“It is important to make one thing clear – the life of one yeshiva boy is worth more than the lives of 1,000 Arabs.”
– Sephardi chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu

“It should be clear to us that there is no room for two peoples in this country.”
–Yossef Weitz

“The power of the administration to exile anyone is unlimited … it is not necessary to commit any type of infraction, a decision made in some office is sufficient.”
-Dov Joseph, Israeli Minister of Justice

“Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel.”
– Rabbi Ovadia Yosef

Keep these quotes in mind when you hear Jews crying about people criticizing and feeling less than enthusiastic about them. And do share with me, if you think you can, any race or religion that is more observably and demonstrably racist than the Jews. And as far as their playing the eternal victim goes, by my count, the Jews are among the six most genocidal nations in human history, with the Mongols leading the list.

These are historical facts. Deny them if you like, but delusion is never a safe refuge from reality for long.

Now, everyone has to live somewhere and the establishment of the state of Israel is also a fact. Which is precisely why I support Israel and the nationalist Israeli parties. I’ll consider crying about the Palestinians after all the surviving American Indian tribes get their original lands back from the U.S. government as per the original treaties. The point of quoting these individuals is not to claim that Jews are uniquely bad, only that there is absolutely no basis for pretending, as Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager, and other deceitful Neo-Palestinians do, that the Jewish people are a uniquely moral people, a uniquely victimized people, or even an example for any other nation on Earth.

The US media discovers Chinese ambitions

It’s mildly amusing to see the US media’s belated alarm over China’s global ambitions, considering that the Chinese haven’t exactly been hiding them, what with their plans to send 100 million settlers to Africa and their growing number of acquisitions of US cultural high ground in entertainment and education:

What started out two years ago as an effort by President Trump to wring better terms from China on the nuts and bolts of foreign trade now threatens to become a far wider and more ominous confrontation.

The conflict continues to be framed as a “trade war” between the world’s two biggest economies — as Washington and Beijing pursue an escalating series of tariff hikes and other retaliatory measures.

Even as Trump moved Thursday to open a new, potentially damaging trade war with Mexico, however, the conflict with China has widened beyond the original trade-based issues.

Beneath the surface, a new tone has begun to emerge since trade talks broke down in early May and Trump ratcheted up tariffs on imported goods from China, an action met with retaliatory duties from Beijing. Officials on both sides of the Pacific have begun to portray the U.S.-China relationship in nationalistic and emotion-charged terms that suggest a much deeper conflict.

Recently, for example, a private group of American economists and trade experts with long-standing experience in China traveled to Beijing, expecting their usual technical give-and-take with Chinese government officials.

Instead, a member of the Chinese Politburo harangued them for almost an hour, describing the U.S.-China relationship as a “clash of civilizations” and boasting that China’s government-controlled system was far superior to the “Mediterranean culture” of the West, with its internal divisions and aggressive foreign policy.

Translation: the media Jews have finally begun to realize that the Chinese plan to replace them rather than accept them as a ruling elite or permit them to move on to China when the USA breaks up. I’ve been predicting this conflict for years; the Harvard lawsuit was the Fort Sumter of what promises to be an epic struggle for primacy and control over the next 30 years.

I rather doubt it is an accident that this piece was written by a Korean journalist. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s been telling his editors at the LA Times about the situation for years, but been repeatedly told that there was no story there.

Everyone to the right of Mao

Embrace your extremists or you will become the extremist:

WHITE NATIONALISTS ON TWITTER

Though these accounts are easily discoverable on Twitter, publishing their names could bring them more attention. For that reason, HuffPost is only publishing their user IDs, not the @ “handles” most commonly associated with Twitter accounts.

Since we began assembling this list last month, four of the 62 accounts have been suspended. Two were not suspended but appear to have self-deleted to evade oversight. We are leaving these accounts on the list because Twitter permitted the suspended users to repeatedly post extremist content before taking action and seemingly took no action against users that deactivated their accounts.

This list is far from comprehensive. We are excluding prominent anonymous white nationalists, who can have thousands of followers and go through dozens of accounts, and propagandists such as Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, who work with white nationalists. Nor are we including Islamophobes like Mekelburg and Pamela Geller, who do not identify as white nationalists but whose views often align with the ideology. The same holds for mainstream Republican pundits such as Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson.

In the photos below, many white nationalists wear “Make America Great Again” caps or express support for Trump. During the 2016 election, white nationalists rallied around Trump en masse, accurately viewing the racist authoritarian as a means to seize a greater share of mainstream political power. Twitter was Trump’s medium of choice. So it was the medium of choice for far-right extremists. While their bigotry and propaganda is now echoed by much of the Republican base, several prominent white nationalists have since rejected Trump. He has done too much neoconservative saber-rattling for their taste or failed to deliver on issues like the border wall. Grotesquely, some now shun him for having too many close connections to Jews. But the damage these extremists ― and Twitter (and Trump) ― have done by spreading a message of hate and radicalization will linger for years.

By the Huffington Post standard, every single Founding Father was a white nationalist and right-wing extremist. Now they’re even after hard-core radicals such as Mike Cernovich and Steve Sailer!

Get off Twitter and get off Facebook now. Because the goalposts are going to move until you’re a Nazi too.

And isn’t it informative that not a single neocon is identified?

Mailvox: the tarantula’s dilemma

A gamma asks why he should not seek revenge for his unhappiness:

What do you do if you respect conservative views, you like the ideology and the principals they convey, but no matter no hard you try, no matter your character, how much you give you will never be equal simply because you were not born beautiful enough to be considered as worthy. For me I will never have a family, never feel loved. Never get any recognition. I Will always need to work harder than others for less reward. I would say I’m a 6 but have had almost no positive attention from anyone in 10 years while giving my best, working overtime often 10 or more hours per week, trying desperately to connect with people and going out of my way to make them feel welcome and understood but never getting the same in return. There is no happiness in my life, there is no prospect of happiness only an abyss. I’m a gamma born of a narcissistic single mother and a cucked pathetic father, indoctrinated in leftist schools, starved of humanity. Should I follow your doctrine? I know I was lied to. How can I not seek revenge? Why would I not seek revenge?

First, conservatism is not an ideology and it has no principles. So, there is nothing there to respect, it is merely a “sensibility” one may happen to share with others, which is of absolutely no more significance than a shared preference in music or video games. Second, upon whom are you going to seek revenge? Upon those who did this to you or to those who are innocent of everything but being less unlucky than you?

Understand that you were created to be a weapon against those you envy. Why would you ever want to do the will of those who turned you into a tarantula? Why not seek vengeance upon them by rejecting the fate they chose for you and becoming the man you were meant to be?

In the end, your choice will come down to whether you hate the lies or you hate the truth even more.

“Conservative” is a “sensibility”

That’s literally the title of George Will’s new book, The Conservative Sensibility, which in the 2019 post-American, post-Christian USA is less relevant than a book about the Manchu invasion of China:

Government needs to get back to basics. The political class, defined broadly to include persons actively engaged in electoral politics and policymaking along with those who report and comment on civic life, is more united by a class characteristic than it is divided by philosophic differences. The characteristic is a tendency to overestimate the importance of public policies, from which the political class derives its sense of importance. This is especially so regarding economic and social inequalities. These, the political class tends to believe, are largely the result of public policies and are therefore susceptible to decisive amelioration by better government actions. In the argument about which is primary, nature or nurture, the former receives an emphatic affirmation from the Founding Fathers’ philosophy. Beneath the myriad patinas of culture, there is a fixed human nature that neither improves nor regresses. What does change for the better is the capacity of certain portions of humanity to improve the legal, institutional and social structures for coping with the constants of human nature. And to do so without diluting America’s foundational commitment to take its bearings from the individual.

I used to admire George Will. Now, I marvel at his utter and complete cluelessness in the face of the conquest of the Land of the Free and the fearful, submissive state of a people who once considered themselves to be the Brave.

In Cuckservative, I told you that conservatism is not an ideology or a political philosophy, it’s just an attitude and a pose. Perhaps those who could not accept that reality coming from me will accept it from this leading conservative figure.

Get your books Direct!

Castalia House’s two latest paperbacks, MIDDLE RAGES by Milo Yiannopoulos and FREE PLANTS FOR EVERYONE by David the Good, are now available at Castalia Books Direct for less than you’ll pay at Amazon. The former is available for only $9.99 and the latter for just $14.99, which means that even with shipping, you’ll pay less than you will for them even with Prime and free shipping.

Both paperbacks are bestsellers in their respective categories and both average 5-star ratings. Castalia House is focusing more on non-fiction than fiction these days, and putting an emphasis on quality over quantity.

Chuck Dixon wept

I’m not sure even The Legend could do anything with Sparkly Batman:

He fought for the ultimate role as the famed Caped Crusader.

And Warner Bros. has officially approved Robert Pattinson as the star in The Batman, according to Deadline.

The 33-year-old former Twilight star had to battle his way through screen testing against Nicholas Hoult to portray the coveted superhero.

Snicker-snack….

In the meantime, check out Chuck Dixon On Comics #6 on Unauthorized.TV.