Category: Uncategorized

No one cares what you want

Jonah Goldberg expresses concerns, concernedly, that Donald Trump will fail to be the kind of president Jonah Goldberg prefers.

I very much want Trump to be a successful conservative president — which is to say, I don’t want him to be a successful statist president. I understand all-too-well that many of Trump’s fans do want him to be a successful statist president. They don’t use the word “statist,” preferring the rough synonym “nationalist.” They either sincerely think, or convincingly pretend to think, that there’s a meaningful difference between a statist and a nationalist. There isn’t. That’s a worthwhile argument to have, and there will be many opportunities to have it down the road. But if Trump is going to be a successful conservative president, I think his biggest fans will have to recognize their own tribalism.

The intrinsic dishonesty of some civic nationalists runs so deep that they do not even appear to recognize it when they make massive blunders like confusing statism with nationalism.

Jonah is smarter than this. He understands the difference between a nation – a group of homogeneous people – and a state – a sovereign political entity. He’s written about the Kurds before, so he knows there is a Kurdish nation but not a Kurdish state. He’s written about the Soviet Union before, so he knows there was a Soviet state despite there being no such thing as a Soviet nation.

Moreover, conservatives have been overt statists since the first Bush ’43 administration. Has Jonah already forgotten “big government conservatism” or the bank bailouts of 2008? The fact is that conservatism is a dying non-ideology, and that’s why all the anti-Trumpers and Never Trumpers are beginning to cozy up to the God-Emperor Ascendant, whispering their wicked advice in the hopes that they can influence him.

But it won’t do them any good. Their electoral impotence, their intellectual irrelevance, and their lack of character was revealed in last year’s primary and general election campaigns. And very, very few of them are indicating that they learned anything from the experience.

And as for tribalism, we readily admit ours. We would just like to see Mr. Goldberg and company be honest about theirs. Given the absence of a strong demographic majority, tribalism and identity politics are the inevitable order of the day. See Thomas Sowell for details.

Martin Luther King, in his own words

The myth of Martin Luther King often appears to have more to do with Gandhi or the Buddha than to the actual man himself. It can be amusing to use his words to trigger SJWs, who don’t hesitate to declare them deplorably racist right up until the moment they discover whose words they are.

Alex Haley: Your dissatisfaction with the Civil Rights Act reflects that of most other Negro spokesmen. According to recent polls, however, many whites resent this attitude, calling the Negro “ungrateful” and “unrealistic” to press his demands for more.

Martin Luther King: This is a litany to those of us in this field. “What more will the Negro want?” “What will it take to make these demonstrations end?” Well, I would like to reply with another rhetorical question: Why do white people seem to find it so difficult to understand that the Negro is sick and tired of having reluctantly parceled out to him those rights and privileges which all others receive upon birth or entry in America? I never cease to wonder at the amazing presumption of much of white society, assuming that they have the right to bargain with the Negro for his freedom. This continued arrogant ladling out of pieces of the rights of citizenship has begun to generate a fury in the Negro. Even so, he is not pressing for revenge, or for conquest, or to gain spoils, or to enslave, or even to marry the sisters of those who have injured him. What the Negro wants—and will not stop until he gets—is absolute and unqualified freedom and equality here in this land of his birth, and not in Africa or in some imaginary state. The Negro no longer will be tolerant of anything less than his due right and heritage. He is pursuing only that which he knows is honorably his. He knows that he is right.

But every Negro leader since the turn of the century has been saying this in one form or another. It is because we have been so long and so conscientiously ignored by the dominant white society that the situation has now reached such crisis proportions. Few white people, even today, will face the clear fact that the very future and destiny of this country are tied up in what answer will be given to the Negro. And that answer must be given soon.

Alex Haley: If it’s morally right for supporters of civil rights to violate segregation laws which they consider unjust, why is it wrong for segregationists to resist the enforcement of integration laws which they consider unjust?

Martin Luther King: Because segregation, as even the segregationists know in their hearts, is morally wrong and sinful. If it weren’t, the white South would not be haunted as it is by a deep sense of guilt for what it has done to the Negro—guilt for patronizing him, degrading him, brutalizing him, depersonalizing him, thingifying him; guilt for lying to itself. This is the source of the schizophrenia that the South will suffer until it goes through its crisis of conscience.

Alex Haley: One of the basic precepts of black nationalism has been the attempt to engender a sense of communion between the American Negro and his African “brother,” a sense of identity between the emergence of black Africa and the Negro’s struggle for freedom in America. Do you feel that this is a constructive effort?

Martin Luther King: Yes, I do, in many ways. There is a distinct, significant and inevitable correlation. The Negro across America, looking at his television set, sees black statesmen voting in the United Nations on vital world issues, knowing that in many of America’s cities, he himself is not yet permitted to place his ballot. The Negro hears of black kings and potentates ruling in palaces, while he remains ghettoized in urban slums. It is only natural that Negroes would react to this extreme irony. Consciously or unconsciously, the American Negro has been caught up by the black Zeitgeist. He feels a deepening sense of identification with his black African brothers, and with his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean. With them he is moving with a sense of increasing urgency toward the promised land of racial justice.

Alex Haley: Do you feel that the African nations, in turn, should involve themselves more actively in American Negro affairs?

Martin Luther King: I do indeed. The world is now so small in terms of geographic proximity and mutual problems that no nation should stand idly by and watch another’s plight. I think that in every possible instance Africans should use the influence of their governments to make it clear that the struggle of their brothers in the U.S. is part of a worldwide struggle. In short, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, for we are tied together in a garment of mutuality. What happens in Johannesburg affects Birmingham, however indirectly. We are descendants of the Africans. Our heritage is Africa. We should never seek to break the ties, nor should the Africans.

Alex Haley: Do you feel it’s fair to request a multibillion-dollar program of preferential treatment for the Negro, or for any other minority group?

Martin Luther King: I do indeed. Can any fair-minded citizen deny that the Negro has been deprived? Few people reflect that for two centuries the Negro was enslaved, and robbed of any wages—potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants. All of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation. It is an economic fact that a program such as I propose would certainly cost far less than any computation of two centuries of unpaid wages plus accumulated interest

Alex Haley: If Negroes are also granted preferential treatment in housing, as you propose, how would you allay the alarm with which many white homeowners, fearing property devaluation, greet the arrival of Negroes in hitherto all-white neighborhoods?

Martin Luther King: We must expunge from our society the myths and half-truths that engender such groundless fears as these. In the first place, there is no truth to the myth that Negroes depreciate property. The fact is that most Negroes are kept out of residential neighborhoods so long that when one of us is finally sold a home, it’s already depreciated. In the second place, we must dispel the negative and harmful atmosphere that has been created by avaricious and unprincipled realtors who engage in “blockbusting.” If we had in America really serious efforts to break down discrimination in housing and at the same time a concerted program of Government aid to improve housing for Negroes. I think that many white people would be surprised at how many Negroes would choose to live among themselves, exactly as Poles and Jews and other ethnic groups do.

Looking back with the benefit of 52 years of hindsight, it should be entirely clear to anyone with a reasonable grasp of history that the Civil Rights movement was founded on a series of misconceptions, erroneous beliefs, false predictions, and outright lies, and that those who opposed the movement were entirely right to do so. 1965 was a seminal year in the destruction of the United States of America, and it is deeply ironic that one of the more symbolically important destroyers is celebrated today.

Social media and the threat to the status quo

I don’t think it is a coincidence that we’re seeing a growing push against social media from the Left, as it has largely ceased to serve their social justice purposes and has now been transformed into a sword that cuts both ways:

We are learning that all of our thoughts aren’t welcome, especially by social media company investors. We are also learning that social media companies are a business. This means conversation is encouraged as long as it runs the gamut from mundane to vicious but stops at the overtly sexual or violent. Early in its life-cycle Pinterest made a big stink about actively banning porn while Instagram essentially allowed all sorts of exposition as long as it was monetizable and censored. Facebook still actively polices its photographs for even the hint of sexuality as an artist named Justyna Kiesielewicz recently discovered. She posted a staid nude and wanted to run it as an targeted advertisement. Facebook mistakenly ran the ad for a while, grabbing $50 before it banned the image. In short the latest incarnation of the expository impulse is truncated and sites like Facebook and Twitter welcome most hate groups but most draw the line at underboobs.

Further, social media is no longer protected. As careless CEOs quickly discover saying the wrong thing in a “private” chat or deleting an errant tweet does not mean someone won’t screencapture your rant. In fact social media has become an id and ego collector, a fly strip where all of our worst thoughts are captured permanently. We exhale in anger and chuff in frustration. We tell people to unfollow us if they don’t like what we’re saying and we turn neighborhood pages into political cesspools. Then, when we cross too many perceived boundaries, an army of trolls is ready to pounce and our private spaces become public very quickly.

In short social media is no longer a safe place. I don’t mean this in the politically correct sense but in the very mental and physical sense. Whereas the web was once a broadcast medium it is now a two-way or many-to-many medium. Our errant Twitter thoughts can make us targets and we often don’t know we’re being watched. Entire wars can break out online that have real-world consequences – see Pizzagate – and hoaxes flit through the memetic bloodstream like cancer, breaking down our defenses. A prominent writer and friend recently mused about what would happen if he posted some political rants. The first thing that leapt to his readers’ minds was the potential for SWATing and doxing and then an visit from the FBI. Then, as evidenced by the above CEO example, you get fired.

Social media has become a very real, very visceral, and very censorial force and it can now only worsen the human condition. It was once an experiment but that experiment is over.

That being said, this is a genie who won’t be easily put back in the bottle, because it still serves too many powerful and vested interests. What we can expect is what we are starting to see; a one-sided crackdown that will ultimately fail because it necessarily sacrifices the moral level of war, and in its hypocrisy, gives up both the moral and intellectual high grounds.

The intrinsic problem that the Left faces is that in its constant attempts to destroy every Right-wing figure who surfaces, those who survive become impervious to their methods and become examples to others. Observers then learn what approaches work, such as the open antifragility pioneered by the likes of MILO and Stefan Molyneux, and which ones don’t, such as the aggressive anonymity that is easily neutered by a simple doxxing.

The Left can’t win on an equal playing field, so they have fought dirty for nearly a century. That was effective so long as the Right was the establishment and sensitive to accusations of fairness and violating its own standards. But now the Alt-Right is rising, and has demonstrated that it is capable of winning on an equal playing field or tilting the field, as needed. This is why their attempts to discredit, disqualify, and destroy will be more furious than ever, and why antifragility and reliable allies rather than anonymity are necessary for every Alt-Right and Alt-Lite figure, however minor.

Divisional Round, Day 2

Yesterday went as expected. Atlanta walked over Seattle and New England had no trouble with Houston. Today, I think Dallas will run over the Green Bay defense and keep the ball out of Aaron Rodgers’s lethal hands enough to win. No idea about Pittsburgh vs Kansas City, except that if it’s close late, Mike Tomlin will manage the clock better than Andy Reid.

UPDATE: Wow! Incredible play by Rodgers, both to not fumble the ball on the sack, then to hit Cook to set up the game-winning field goal. But the game was lost, not won, by the Dallas coaching staff. I couldn’t BELIEVE it when they downed the ball on 1-and-10, then didn’t run the ball twice when facing third-and-3.

If you don’t play to win in the playoffs, chances are you’re going to lose. And Jason Garrett did not play to win. What on EARTH was he thinking, to give the ball back to Aaron Rodgers with 35 seconds and two time outs in a tie game?

Mailvox: the illustrated shiv

VFM #7634 wasn’t entirely sure to whom Literally Who’s self-outing as… something was referring.

I’m confused… is this another post about Scalzi?

No, as it happens, THIS is a tremendous post about the most important author in science fiction history, the Fifth of the Big Three, the biggest, baddest, bestselling dog at Tor Books, the man with more Hugo nominations than Arthur C. Clarke or Jerry Pournelle and more Hugo Awards than Ray Bradbury, A.E. van Vogt, Lester del Rey, Gregory Benford, Norman Spinrad, Terry Pratchett and Iain M. Banks combined, the writer whose innovative “he said, he said, he said” structure has shocked and awed and intimidated the entire science fiction writing community and forever altered the way it approaches writing dialogue.

Our case study today is John Scalzi, a quisling male emblematic of so much that has gone haywire with White American men (and their beards).

Exhibit A: This is Scalzi’s Christmas card. He signed off on it. He approved of it. This is how he wants the world to see him.

Exhibit B: Scalzi in love. Here Scalzi is in the submissive position, an obvious inferior looking up to his wifely better.

Exhibit C: Scalzi smooches. Kissing upward and nuzzling his doughy face into hard manjawline, eyes closed as his hunky lady peers into the middle distance looking burdened with the weight of the world (or for an escape from her husband’s octopus lips), Scalzi eagerly inverts the sexual polarity, taking on the role of the woman in his marriage, ceding all the T to his wife.

Exhibit D: Serious Scalzi. Scalzi tries to look serious (ie like a normal man), but is still out-mugged by his wife, who looks more serious, and tougher, than him.

People have mostly given up trying to sell the narrative, but I always found it bizarre when people tried to claim that I envied John Scalzi. On what planet, and for what reason, would I, or any man, ever envy a gamma male like that?

I find the most interesting thing about Scalzi to be the fact that he somehow managed to delay the inevitable gamma self-implosion until he reached a much higher level of success than is conventionally the case. This suggests that his implosion, when it inevitably comes, is going to be absolutely spectacular.

The best part of the Chateau post is the comments from the women there.

  • What I really despise about this guy is that he’s contributing to the further ruin of science fiction. So why do these mannish women latch on to these beta guys? Seeing stuff like this out of a man makes me hurt inside. It’s instinctive, like being scared of rattlesnakes. How do women kill them in themselves, and why would they want to?
  • Exhibit B made my ovaries shrivel.
  • Who’s that gay bloke standing next to the giant woman?

Some might fear that the lack of compassion and respect shown in this post might cost Heartiste any chance of being nominated for the Vox Day Mutual Respect Award from The Vox Day Center for Mutual Respect. However, I would observe that the metric for the Vox Day Mutual Respect Award given out by The Vox Day Center for Mutual Respect is “showing compassion and respect” for one’s “fellow man”, and therefore, due to the subject’s observable lack of any identifiable signs of actual manhood, it would not be correct to hold this post against le Chateau.

Thank you for caring.

Closing down corruption

Even prior to his ascendance, the God-Emperor Ascendant is cleaning up corruption in America by putting the Clinton Machine out of business:

The Clinton Foundation’s long list of wealthy donors and foreign government contributors during the 2016 elections provoked critics to allege conflicts of interests. Clinton partisans defended the organization’s charitable work, and dismissed claims that it served as a means for the Clintons to sell off access, market themselves on the paid speech circuit, and elevate their brand as Hillary Clinton campaigned for the presidency.

But as soon as Clinton lost the election, many of the criticisms directed toward the Clinton Foundation were reaffirmed. Foreign governments began pulling out of annual donations, signaling the organization’s clout was predicated on donor access to the Clintons, rather than its philanthropic work. In November, the Australian government confirmed it “has not renewed any of its partnerships with the scandal-plagued Clinton Foundation, effectively ending 10 years of taxpayer-funded contributions worth more than $88 million.” The government of Norway also drastically reduced their annual donations, which reached $20 million a year in 2015.

On January 12, the Clinton Foundation received more bad news: a WARN notice was filed with the New York Department of Labor. The main office of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City would be closing, laying off 22 employees. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) “offers protection to workers, their families and communities by requiring employers to provide notice 60 days in advance of covered plant closings and covered mass layoffs. This notice must be provided to either affected workers or their representatives (e.g., a labor union); to the State dislocated worker unit; and to the appropriate unit of local government.” The reason for the filing was stated as the “discontinuation of the Clinton Global Initative,” after CGI previously announced layoffs leading up to the general election.

There is no more value in the Clinton Foundation. The Clintons have nothing left to sell now that their 16 years of national power and influence have come to an end. However, that doesn’t mean their nefarious activities have ended, as there appear to be an awful lot of loose ends lying about that require cleaning up now, given the growing number of mysterious deaths and disappearances of individuals connected to the foundation in some way.

The Trump administration’s investigative efforts are likely to prove more than a little illuminating in the next year or two. And despite all the people are worrying about attempts being made on the God-Emperor Ascendant’s life, I would expect that it is the Clintons who have considerably more to fear in that regard. Evil has a habit of callously casting aside its servants who are no longer useful to it.

No apologies

Hater Foz Meadows refuses to apologize to the Jewish people for her despicable insult to Holocaust survivers. So hateful! Incredibly, she sneeringly waves off public demands for an apology as “batshit ridiculous”.

Have you ever heard anything so nakedly anti-semitic? Sad!

And in the meantime, Literally Who isn’t taking Literally Wu’s latest bid for public attention lying down and has come back strong by coming out as… something nameless that appears to be somehow related to ambiguous non-cisgendered cross-dressing special snowflake status.

I’m going to tell you something I’ve been afraid to say for basically ever. And it’s gonna be messy, and it’s gonna go to some dark places (including eating disorders so pls be advised) because I’m barfing my heart out onto the page and hoping I can do it fast enough that I won’t reconsider, or hold back. I can’t say all this without first pausing to say this is only my story, and it’s a privilege that I am able to share it. I want to gently remind people that I’m only trying to speak for me and my own experiences, and in no way does that change or speak to others’ realities. I’m coming out (holy shit typing that made me anxious), so this is just my story.

My entire life I’ve not been a girl or a woman.

Growing up, I’d have hissyfits over being talked to or referred to as a girl. People have had to remind me that they see me as a girl or a woman my entire life, because it doesn’t exist in my head. All that ever has is “this isn’t me”.

When I was 12, I started smoking cigarettes because I thought they’d make my voice lower, and I was tired of hearing a high alien pitch come out of my face. About a year later, I started starving myself because i wanted to look like anything other than a girl, and because I didn’t identify with being a boy either. The closest thing I could find to what looked “right” was the waif thin androgynous body type, and when combined with my hatred of my own body I developed a full on eating disorder that I never told anyone about. At one point, I hovered around 100lbs, despairing that my hips were still wide, my shoulders and chest still broad, and that I’d be an hourglass no matter how much I starved.

I managed to recover, mostly, but the hatred of my own body remained, strong enough that I still can’t objectively see myself in the mirror with any sort of accuracy. I found out recently I’ve been wearing the wrong size of everything, always overestimating, always going baggier, always trying to hide what I’d been so ashamed of.

There is more. Oh, there is so much more than you could ever want to imagine. But it inspires a very important question, which is: how is Literally Who 2 going to respond to this? Let’s face it, it’s going to be hard to top the competition from the other two professional victims, especially when they’ve shown themselves more than willing to match death threat with death threat, and terrified-flight-from-home with terrified-flight-from-home, in the past.

I should think, at a bare minimum, LW2 is going to have to come out as a transgendered male rape victim and run for the U.S. Senate just to stay in the game.

Play fair or there will be no game

Mike Cernovich lays down a reasonable rule for the media:

You received this because you sent in a media inquiry. I generally don’t respond to media for a number of reasons. One is that I get a lot of them. Two is that traditional media doesn’t move the needle for me or the movement as well as social media does. Three is that most of you people won’t even describe me accurately.

If you do not agree to refer to me as an author and filmmaker, then I am not going to talk to you.

I’m an author and documentary filmmaker. Among other people, I interviewed Alan Dershowitz in his home for the feature-length documentary, Silenced. Scott Adams, Dave Rubin, Milo, and many others are in Silenced.

My first book, Gorilla Mindset, has over 735 reviews after 18 months. Maybe you don’t like the subject matter because you do not want to improve your own life, whatever. My second book, on Trump’s rise, already has over 200 reviews and has sold more copies than 99% of books released in 2016.

I am neither “alt-right” nor a men’s rights activist.

Mike Cernovich, author and filmmaker….If you lack the basic journalistic integrity to refer to me as who I am, then there’s nothing to talk about.

This is a good strategy for dealing with the media, as far too few reporters have the basic journalistic integrity to bother getting their facts straight.

And it’s important to force them to do so, because they are the sort of people who won’t hesitate to claim that Christianity, the Alt-Right, and White Nationalism are all one and the same thing.

Author and prolific Tweeter Joyce Carol Oates openly pondered the state of Christianity in America in a post to her Twitter account Thursday afternoon — and believes Christianity is now indistinguishable from white nationalism in many parts of America.

Thus demonstrating that a dedication to social justice and mental retardation are even less distinguishable.

NFL Divisional Round 1

Seahawks-Falcons. Seattle has the pedigree, but Atlanta has been the quietly good team this year, their loss to the Vikings notwithstanding. I’d expect Atlanta to win without too much difficulty.

This is really not good

The clock is rapidly running out on antibiotics. Indeed, it may have already run out.

A US woman has died from an infection that was resistant to all 26 available antibiotics, health officials said this week, raising new concerns about the rise of dangerous superbugs.

The woman, who was in her 70s, died in Nevada in September, and had recently been hospitalized in India with fractured leg bones, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

The cause of death was sepsis, following infection from a rare bacteria known as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), which is resistant to all antibiotics available in the United States.

The specific strain of CRE, known as Klebsiella pneumoniae, was isolated from one of her wounds in August.

Tests were negative for the mcr-1 gene — a great concern to health experts because it makes bacteria resistant to the antibiotic of last resort, colistin.

This is genuinely terrifying. Remember, once a species becomes overpopulated, Nature usually figures out a way to cut it back down to size again. Human intelligence doesn’t eliminate that reaction, it merely raises the bar. Immigration and global travel are creating significant health risks, and may even be putting the future of the species in jeopardy.

“The report highlights international travel and treatment overseas as a feature in the introduction of this pan-resistant isolate into the USA,” he said.

Complicating matters is the fact that lower average intelligence across the West means that humanity is less able to address these concerns should they arise. Sooner or later, the Trump administration will have to look very seriously at denying antibiotics to everyone who cannot, or will not, abide by a strictly observed drug-taking regimen. The potential consequences are that serious.