Category: Uncategorized

Let Scotland go

Boris Johnson and the Tories are making a massive blunder if they fail to support the Scottish National Party and embrace Scottish independence:

Already this morning the Twittersphere buzzes with talk of a renewed Scottish independence campaign, while the SNP yesterday announced its support for another referendum if a “material change in circumstances” arose between Scotland and the greater union. Surely a landslide victory by the Tories — who are widely disliked by the Scots — and a flashing green light for a deeply unpopular Brexit represent exactly such a change.

Scotland and England are not magically joined at the hip. If the Scots don’t want Brexit, don’t want Boris Johnson, and don’t want the Tories, who says the current political makeup of the UK is forever and unchanging? Political arrangements are not something to impose on reluctant, disbelieving people. If we favor independence and political self-determination only when we like the results, the only liberty on offer is the liberty to agree. But political universalism is an abstraction, and an arrogant one at that.

If Scots choose Holyrood over Westminster, or even Brussels over Holyrood, who are we to object?

Given the way in which the Scots have been the primary engine of left-wing power in the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson can secure not only the restoration of British sovereignty, but a multi-generational defeat of the Labour Left by excising the Scottish nation from the British crown.

This will, of course, mark the penultimate stage in the end of the British empire, but the empire has been shrinking steadily since the beginning of WWII. And there is absolutely no point fighting the nationalist trend in favor of a dying and discredited imperialism.

The Scots deserve to rule themselves. Let Scotland go!

Mailvox: Kurgan-Dyer debate

I will wait to read the transcript before even attempting to develop an opinion of the recent debate between Jay Dyer and The Kurgan, but this was a summary sent to me by one witness to it:

It was an interesting watch for me as an Ilk that has consumed a sizable amount of Dyer’s content and appreciates his niche.  Similar to you, my church background has been American Protestant Evangelical. Lately I’ve been studying the Orthodox faith, due in no small part to Jay’s content.

Kurgan has accused Jay of being a lying gamma sperg. What I witnessed today went a ways toward confirming two out of three. I simply don’t know enough about Catholicism to follow verbally what was flying around (especially from Jay), much less sedevacantism. So I have no idea if Jay is lying or not about Catholic law. He could simply be accurate or inaccurate.

But Jay’s performance was demonstrably gamma sperg. He was clearly triggered. For long stretches it felt like he was channeling Shapiru. I don’t watch a lot of debates, so I’m not sure shouting ‘You just lost the debate!’ is a validated method. Kurgan’s demeanor was consummate adult. And by the end seemed like an adult managing a child’s temper tantrum.

The chat was funny from a certain standpoint. It was like an audience of homeless people and junior highers having to sit through a theology debate. They just started giving each other wedgies and complaining about boredom. Can’t say I’m happy about it. But it probably needed to happen.

If you happened to watch the debate and would like to express your opinion about it, please feel free to do so. But be judicious and specific, as the sort of fanboy posturing one sees on Twitter will not be permitted. And neither of the two participants will be permitted to comment here on their own performances.

This isn’t how it was supposed to go

Democrats are quite literally losing Democrats due to the impeachment charade:

Anti-impeachment Democratic Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New York has confirmed that he will switch parties and become a Republican, following a lengthy meeting with President Trump, according to Politico. Van Drew is one of two Democrats who voted ‘no’ on opening the impeachment inquiry in the first place, and has been a vocal opponent of the effort, according to the report.

I think we can start using the “debacle” word to describe it about now. If they’re actually losing elected officials over this, imagine what is happening in the electorate.

Never believe the pollsters

Audacious Epigone makes the common mistake of believing the available evidence just because it is available:

From the GOP’s perspective, Texas and Georgia are terminal but the party’s electoral winter need not necessarily set in during the 2020s. If the party is able to sustain its 2016 gains in the upper Midwest while additionally picking off a couple of small New England states like Maine and New Hampshire, Republicans could continue to win presidential elections into the 2040s.

  • 368 Biden
  • 170 Trump

Polling up to this point shows Trump not only getting crushed in Michigan and Pennsylvania but also beaten in Ohio, so seeing the path to continued electoral relevance and managing to walk down it are two very different things.

  • 328 Sanders
  • 210 Trump
  • 293 Warren
  • 239 Trump

Polling is incomplete for the rest of the Democrat field. Several states also have results for Buttigieg, but a few do not. He falls in between Sanders and Warren in how he fares against Trump in the states he’s included in.

This is a complete non-issue. The pollsters haven’t suddenly improved their performance since getting it wrong in 2016. To the contrary, they have doubled down on their demoralization campaign, attempting to meme their imagination into reality. But it won’t work.

Think about this: do Democrats appear to be confident about their prospects the next presidential election? Or do they appear to be desperately casting about for someone, anyone, who might have at least a ghost of a chance of beating the god-emperor?

Trumpslide 2020.

Don’t spiral

Posting will be light today. We’ve got friends coming over for holiday drinks and whatnot, so I will leave you to contemplate where you’ve heard this before, more or less, prior to encountering Pascal’s PENSÉES.

Imagination—It is that deceitful part in man, that mistress of error and falsity, the more deceptive that she is not always so; for she would be an infallible rule of truth, if she were an infallible rule of falsehood. But being most generally false, she gives no sign of her nature, impressing the same character on the true and the false.

I do not speak of fools, I speak of the wisest men; and it is among them that the imagination has the great gift of persuasion. Reason protests in vain; it cannot set a true value on things.

This arrogant power, the enemy of reason, who likes to rule and dominate it, has established in man a second nature to show how all-powerful she is. She makes men happy and sad, healthy and sick, rich and poor; she compels reason to believe, doubt, and deny; she blunts the senses, or quickens them; she has her fools and sages; and nothing vexes us more than to see that she fills her devotees with a satisfaction far more full and entire than does reason. Those who have a lively imagination are a great deal more pleased with themselves than the wise can reasonably be. They look down upon men with haughtiness; they argue with boldness and confidence, others with fear and diffidence; and this gaiety of countenance often gives them the advantage in the opinion of the hearers, such favour have the imaginary wise in the eyes of judges of like nature. Imagination cannot make fools wise; but she can make them happy, to the envy of reason which can only make its friends miserable; the one covers them with glory, the other with shame.

The ride never ends

Owen Benjamin was deplatformed by Instagram today. Discuss amongst yourselves.

UPDATE: Mmmmm. What’s that? Smells like tortious interference….

Owen Benjamin, a right-wing comedian who regularly shares and creates hateful and anti-Semitic content online, was suspended from Instagram and Facebook Friday “following multiple violations of our policies,” a Facebook spokesperson told Right Wing Watch. Benjamin’s ban from Instagram and Facebook follows his permanent suspension from YouTube, reported earlier this month.

The suspension came after Right Wing Watch shared a collection of more than 170 racist and anti-Semitic posts Benjamin had shared on his Instagram page with Instagram and requested comment from the company. In the posts, which were assembled by a source and provided to Right Wing Watch, Benjamin spread hate against Jewish people and other minorities and perpetuated asinine conspiracy theories including claims that dinosaurs never existed and that the world is flat.

Awfully nice of them to openly confess to the crime like that.

Corporate junk science

It’s observably even worse than the coin-flip that is professional peer-reviewed science:

Three years ago, I put my faith in a 23andMe DNA test and got burned.

While most of my results initially checked out — about 50 percent South Asian and what looked like a 50 percent hodgepodge of European — there was one glaring surprise. Where roughly 25 percent Italian was supposed to be, Middle Eastern stood in its place. The results shocked me.

Over the years, I had made a lot of the Italian portion of my heritage; I had learned the language, majored in Latin in college, and lived in Rome, Italy, for my semester abroad. Still, as a rational person, I believed the science. But my grandmother, whose parents moved from Sicily to Brooklyn, where she was born and grew up speaking Italian, refused to accept the findings.

Fast forward to this summer, when I got an email about new DNA relations on 23andMe and revisited my updated genetic results, only to find out that I am, in fact, about a quarter Italian (and generally southern European). But it was too late to tell my grandma. She’s dead now and I’m a liar.

Nonna was right to reject the “science”. The science, as is all too often the case, was flat-out wrong. Logic and evidence now dictates that if the science smells off, that’s probably because it is.

Boris takes two scalps

The Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is done:

Labour was engulfed in a brutal civil war this morning as moderates warned of ’20 years of Tory rule’ unless Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters were removed from positions of power.

The bitter recrimination between Mr Corbyn’s hard-Left supporters and more moderate factions began as soon as the exit polls last night accurately predicted the party’s brutal pummelling at the hands of voters.

As Mr Corbyn revealed he would not fight another general election as opposition leader his closest confidants were quick to blame Brexit, the weather and his opponents to deflect from his failings in his four years in charge.

And so is the Liberal Democrat Party leader Jo Swinson:

The Liberal Democrats turned on their leader Jo Swinson today after she was ousted from her own seat in Scotland following a disastrous General Election campaign.

The party’s former deputy leader Simon Hughes launched a scathing attack on her as he said ‘every strategic decision’ taken since she took over had been wrong.

It came after Miss Swinson, 39, lost East Dunbartonshire to the SNP’s Amy Callaghan by just 149 votes – and when the result came in First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was caught on camera in nearby Glasgow celebrating like a football fan.

Today, Mr Hughes told Sky News: ‘Every single decision taken since Jo became the leader and Ed became the deputy leader has been the wrong decision. Every strategic decision. They decided to go for revoking Article 50, having ignored the referendum. They decided that they could argue that that was because we might be a majority government. Incredible, incredible – nobody believed it.’

The nationalist trend is in full effect now. Whether the politicians embrace it or not is irrelevant. People want to live among their own kind according to their own traditions, not in artificial multiracial, multicultural empires where they are forced to endure foreign rule, foreign traditions, and foreign religions.

Ms Swinson, 39, blamed a ‘wave of nationalism’ both north and south of the Scottish border for her party’s woes as the Tories and SNP gained seats. 

It’s not the first wave and it won’t be the last one. And yes, Boris Johnson may well be a gatekeeper who has been anointed in order to manage the wave. But it doesn’t matter and it won’t work. The gates are going to shatter under the pressure of the multigenerational socionomic trend.