Category: Uncategorized

The Adams Summary

I described our exchange as I saw it, Scott Adams describes it his way:

My summary of that exchange is that I asked you to defend your position and you succeeded. That is rare.

I’m not suggesting the U.S. should allow Muslims to immigrate at this point in history. I’m just trying to find a market price at which folks would agree the risk is worth the benefit, as they see it. You see no benefit in religious tolerance (in this specific context) and I judge that to be a credible and consistent point of view.

Rare.

To be clear, I see no way we could keep the risk to 100 terror deaths per year with continued Muslim immigration. So my price can’t be met.

We end up at the same place. I priced it differently but neither of us wanted the deal.

I concur with his conclusion. We place different values, as measured in American lives, on the principle of religious freedom in the USA. But because he correctly recognizes that there is no way to keep the risk below the price he is willing to pay – which, contra my assumption, turned out to be his actual position on the matter – he ended up on the same place that I did.

Which is to say that Muslim immigration should be banned on the basis of the tangible risk it poses to the lives of Americans.

Trump, the proto-Destructor

A great column by Glenn Reynolds in USA Today:

Enter Donald Trump. People who are unhappy with the things Trump is saying need to understand that he’s only getting so much traction because he’s filling a void. If the responsible people would talk about these issues, and take action, Trump wouldn’t take up so much space.

And there’s a lesson for our ruling class there: Calling Trump a fascist is a bit much (fascism, as Tom Wolfe once reported, is forever descending upon the United States, but somehow it always lands on Europe), but movements like fascism and communism get their start because the mechanisms of liberal democracy seem weak and ineffectual and dishonest. If you don’t want Trump — or, perhaps, some post-Trump figure who really is a fascist — to dominate things, you need to stop being weak and ineffectual and dishonest.

Right now, after years of Obama hope-and-change, a majority of Americans (56%) think Islam is incompatible with American values. That’s true even for 43% of Democrats.

In that sort of environment, where people feel unsafe and where the powers-that-be seem to be, well, weak and ineffectual and dishonest, the appeal of someone who doesn’t seem weak and ineffectual grows stronger.

You can see this in France, where the long-marginalized “far right” National Front is now winning elections all over. It’s doing so well because the French people, after not one but two Islamist mass shootings in Paris, feel that their government is not serious about protecting them, and their way of life, from their enemies.

Likewise, it’s a bit hard to take people seriously about Trump’s threat to civil liberties when President Obama was just endorsing an unconstitutional gun ban, when his attorney general was threatening to prosecute people for anti-Muslim speech (a threat later walked back, thankfully) and when universities and political leaders around the country are making clear their belief that free speech is obsolete.

Glenn is making two very important points here.

  1.  If the ruling parties break the laws and manipulate the democratic rules to keep out the law-abiding, democratic nationalists, they will soon find themselves facing the the lawless, anti-democratic, and violent ultranationalists. They are methodically cutting down the very trees of respect and authority that protect them from the people.
  2. The ruling Left has made it clear that they have zero respect for our free speech or our unalienable rights. That means we need not respect theirs.

The mainstream media and the political establishment pretends to be frightened of Donald Trump in order to try to keep American nationalism down, but they should treat him fairly and let the chips fall where they may rather than play their games in order to defeat him. Because despite being somewhat of a bull in a china shop, Trump plays by the rules. And others are watching his example, and learning from it.

Cuckservative at Return of Kings

Roosh introduced Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America, to the Return of Kings readership. If you’ve already read it, perhaps you might leave a comment there with your impressions for the benefit of those who haven’t otherwise heard of the book. From the Prologue:

What is now taking place in Europe is a microcosm of what is happening, on a larger scope and timescale, in the United States of America. Although the European population of 508 million is larger than the U.S. population of 320 million, the 28 member nations of the E.U. fit into about half the land taken up by the 50 united States. Moreover, unlike the heterogeneous American “nation of immigrants”, the European nations are homogeneous and distinct, with long histories, traditions, and collective memories that stretch back for centuries. That is why a much smaller number of immigrants arriving in a much shorter period of time has triggered the powerful nationalistic response that is already overturning governments and will ultimately shatter the European Union.

That is why it is important to realize that the same divisive process is well underway in the United States, albeit at a larger order of magnitude. And one of the tragic ironies of American politics is that it is the very group of people who most proudly proclaim their loyalty to the U.S. Constitution and to the traditional values of America’s founding fathers, conservatives, who have helped lead the way to America’s decline and eventual collapse. They have done so by forgetting the central purpose of the very document they revere.

The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America contains an extremely important phrase that is almost always ignored by those who appeal to it, or to the men who wrote it, in defense of immigration. It states:

    We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The key phrase is this: “to ourselves and our posterity.” The blessings of liberty are not to be secured to all the nations of the world, to the tired and huddled masses, or to the wretched refuse of the teeming shores of other lands. They are to be secured to our children, and their children, and their children’s children.

To sacrifice their interests to the interests of children in other lands is to betray both past and future America. It is to permit an alien posterity, like the newly hatched cuckoo in another bird’s nest, to eliminate our own, and in doing so, defeat the purpose of the Constitution. It is, like the cuckolded husband, to raise the children of another man instead of one’s own sons and daughters.

It is, in a word, cuckservative.

No, there will be no debate

Ken White of Popehat suggests how a reasonable discussion about guns could begin:

We yell, we signal to the like-minded, we circle our wagons, we take shots at opponents. But we don’t change minds. Take a look at the discussion of guns on your Facebook feed right now. Do you think it’s going to build a majority on any issue?

Say we wanted to have a productive conversation. Imagine we wanted to identify our irreducible philosophical and practical differences, seek any areas of agreement, persuade anyone on the fence, and change some minds. What might we do….

If you’d like to persuade people to accept some sort of restrictions on
guns, consider educating yourself so you understand the terminology
that you’re using. And if you’re reacting to someone suggesting gun
restrictions, and they seem to suggest something nonsensical, consider a
polite question of clarification about terminology.

No. We don’t want a discussion. We aren’t discussing anything. There is nothing to discuss. There will be no debate. There is absolutely nothing you can say to move us one iota. We have very clearly communicated the same message over and over again: No. Under no circumstances.

Come for them and we’ll come for you.

No more free Wacos.

Molon labe.

Mailvox: change is inevitable

Farmer Tom doesn’t like it and he is seriously thinking about taking his tractor and going home:

This place is really going down hill in a hurry.

The host is now full on Trump supporter.

The vast majority of the guests seem to be so uninformed as to not know who Nate is?

I guess it’s time to find somewhere else to hang out.

I liked the place when “The Yellow Bus” was new.

Some things have changed, and not for the better.

Translation: I’m a Christian conservative and I don’t like it if things aren’t going in the way that I approve at all times. If anyone feels this way, then don’t comment here. Stick to reading and stay out of the discourse. I have never been concerned with the opinion of those who prefer to stomp off in a huff or retreat to snarky sniping than to offer substantive criticism and to articulate their positions, no matter who they might happen to be.

Of course, it may be nothing more than FT not wishing to stick around to defend his self-assured Iowa prediction, as the most recent RCP average has: Trump 25.7, Cruz 22.3, Carson 15.7, and Paul behind !Jeb!.

I’m personal friends with the Iowa campaign managers for Trump and Cruz. I know Carson’s Iowa guy, Huckebee’s guy, hate the a-hole who was Perry’s guy. Met several times Rubio’ s guy, once in his Senate office.

I know these people and the insides of the system.

I can tell you right now that Trump will not win Iowa, he will get second or third.

1. Carson
2. Trump
3. Cruz
4. Probably Rand because the RP people will hang to the end.

Maybe he is right. Maybe he is not. I have no idea; I don’t do political predictions anymore. Regardless, the fact that you’ve been here for years means that I will occasionally cut you some slack, not that I will overlook it when you’re behaving like a run-of-the-mill anklebiter or a prima donna. I find it somewhat frustrating when Ilk demonstrate that, despite years of reading here, they still can’t manage to control their emotions, construct proper syllogisms, or gracefully accept being shown to be wrong.

As I told FT in the comments: This place has not changed, but the world has. In this electoral campaign cycle, Trump is the only candidate who matters, and it is not because of who he is or what he might do if he wins.

This is basic game theory. As I have said repeatedly in the past, there are only three issues that matter today. In their current order of importance, they are:

  • Immigration
  • Gun Control
  • Federal Reserve

We can ignore the latter. None of the candidates even understand the issue and none of them are likely to do anything about it. Trump, being a maverick, is the only one who might even look at the issue, but that’s totally speculative and therefore irrelevant.

On guns, Clinton and Sanders are terrible, Ben Carson is bad, and most of the Republicans, including Trump, are both good and reliable. I’m not at all concerned about Trump saying he would take a serious look at the no-fly list, that was in response to a question about Islamic terrorism and in no way indicates that he has any interest whatsoever in sailing against the populist pro-gun position.

Nate said that we would have come down hard on another candidate who said the same, which is true, because unlike all the other candidates, Trump speaks off the cuff and without having his statement massaged by fifty consultants. If Bush said it, you can bet he’s looking to push anti-gun. In the context that Trump did, he’s wondering why known terrorists are permitted to arm themselves; he’s more likely to jail or deport them than attack gun rights.

More importantly, no one is going to do anything about gun control. Obama has been calling for it non-stop, they’ve been staging multiple false flags to try to drum up popular support – yes, they have, there is no question about it – and yet people are gunning up like never before. Gun control is the most important issue, but it is not one that is any more relevant in this particular election than is the Federal Reserve. I trust every single Republican candidate in this regard, including Ben Carson, who has completely changed his rhetoric on the subject once being confronted with the American public’s cast-iron will on the topic.

That leaves immigration. And here, Trump is the only candidate who is even beginning to address the scope of the existential problem. All the Democrats, and more than half of the Republicans, actually want to make it worse. Even if you don’t support him, or trust him, the mere fact that he is in the race has changed the debate on the subject more than the combined efforts of every anti-immigrationist, every open-borders skeptic, and every anti-free trade economist. He has been a literal Godsend in this regard, no matter what happens in the end.

In short, Donald Trump has radically changed the culture, and culture always trumps politics. And that is why petty sniping about the usual politics is not only pointless, it demonstrates that you are too stuck in an intellectual rut to even understand what the rest of us are discussing.

A dialogue with Scott Adams

To put it into context, I was quoting this piece by Adams to which I had already linked:

Vox Day ‏@voxday
“I would accept up to 1,000 dead Americans, over a ten-year period, to allow Muslim non-citizens to enter this country.” @ScottAdamsSays

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
What’s your number?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Mine is zero. False dilemma. Plenary power doctrine permits Muslim immigration ban. 124 years of precedent.

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
The legal question can be separated.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
It can be, but it shouldn’t be. That IS the context, after all. Look, it’s a good question. Just bad answer.

emilio rodriguez ‏@emiliorrubio
Mine is also 0. Seeing as we gain NOTHING from muslim immigration. It’s no benefit for a cost.

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
Nothing except respect for people of different religions (freedom). Do you value that at zero?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Yes, because I know military history. Muslim immigration into Dar al-Harb means war. Always.

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
It’s a risk assessment about saving more than lives than you kill (in the long run).

Vox Day ‏@voxday
You need to reassess. Because the correct answer is definitely and absolutely zero.

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
Religious intolerance has bad history. Are you sure it always ends well?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Not always, but sometimes. If there was no intolerance at Vienna, at Lepanto, and Tours, no Enlightenment.

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
Would you expel legal Muslim residents in the country under the same principle of safety over principle?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Yes. And I predict that every single Western country will within three decades. Reconquesta 2.0.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
False dilemma, though. Your principle doesn’t exist legally, and it’s your principle, not mine.

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
Opinion noted. See my book, The Religion War (sequel to God’s Debris). Speaks to that scenario, in fiction.

Now, if you wish to analyze this, what you’ll see is Adams engaging in pseudo-dialectic, while I am utilizing dialectic in a rhetorical manner. With its 140-character limit, Twitter is a very poor medium for complex communication, but it does have the benefit of stripping away the ability to engage easily in word games. The simplicity of the medium makes communication cruder, but more direct.

Adams is not an SJW, but here he argues in a similar manner, simply moving the goalposts each time his point is successfully dealt with. However, Adams is an intellectual in the true sense; he likes to play with ideas so one should never assume that what he is saying is necessarily what he genuinely believes.

Adams knows the choice he puts forth is a false dilemma; it is based on a false foundation of the United States being a polity that enforces complete religious freedom. This is nonsense, as the transmutation of “Congress shall make no law” into “a moment of silence in public schools is outlawed” suffices to demonstrate. And Muslims are already banned from immigrating as “people who practice polygamy” as per the 1891 statute.

That’s why Scott wants to leave the legal aspects out, because they also render his dilemma moot. He tries risk assessment, but that’s even worse ground for him both rhetorically and dialectically due to the 1,300-year history of Muslim violence. So he tries to go to the abstract, but as numerous people on Twitter pointed out, “respect” is not synonymous with “granting permanent residence rights and citizenship”.

In the end, he’s forced to argue from incredulity concerning an proposition that no one has even made yet, but even there, he’s on shaky ground because most Americans would happily repatriate every Muslim in America tomorrow. While he does do a good job maintaining frame, the problem with doing so as your argument keeps shifting is that you eventually wind up looking like one of those whom Aristotle described as being unable to learn from information.

Muslim immigration ban is constitutional

Furthermore, there is even precedent for it:

Is an immigration ban on Muslims unconstitutional? Probably not. The Supreme Court has held consistently, for more than a century, that constitutional protections that normally benefit Americans and people on American territory do not apply when Congress decides who to admit and who to exclude as immigrants or other entrants. This is called the plenary power doctrine. The Court has repeatedly turned away challenges to immigration statutes and executive actions on grounds that they discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, and political belief, and that they deprive foreign nationals of due process protections. While the Court has not ruled on religious discrimination, it has also never given the slightest indication that religion would be exempt from the general rule.

There is even precedent for Trump’s plan. In 1891, Congress passed a statute that made inadmissable people who practice polygamy (directed, at the time, at Mormons), and in 1907 extended this ban to people who “who admit their belief in the practice of polygamy.” While Congress later repealed the latter provision (the former seems to be still on the books), no court–as far I know–ruled it unconstitutional.

Plenary power doctrine. Shove that in the face of every cuckservative who blathers ignorantly about the unconstitutionality of Trump’s proposed policy. There is more than a century of precedent demonstrating otherwise. Anyone who says a religious immigration ban is unconstitutional is either ignorant or lying.

Furthermore, the Federalist Papers make it clear that the several States have the ability to pass religious bans as well. And in a MSNBC poll, 92 percent of Americans 18-24 said Trump is not going too far in his proposal to ban all Muslim immigration.

After all, they’re the ones who would have to live with them.

How many dead Americans are you willing to pay?

In order to permit Muslims to live in the West? Scott Adams calls out the virtue-signalers:

I propose that instead of calling fellow citizens racists or idiots we do a deeper dive into the risks and put a price tag on our preference for religious intolerance. If the risk of future terror attacks is tiny, most of us would prefer maintaining our respect for religious differences.

But if the risk is more than tiny, can you put a price on your love of religious tolerance? In other words, how many dead Americans are you willing to accept? I’ll go first.

Personally, I would accept up to 1,000 dead Americans, over a ten-year period, to allow Muslim non-citizens to enter this country. My calculation assumes we are better off accepting some degree of tragedy in the name of freedom. That is often the case with freedom.

If you believe there is no risk from allowing Muslim immigration to continue as is, please explain that thinking in the comments. I have not seen that argument yet.

And if you believe there is some risk of a Muslim terrorist slipping through our current system of screening, what level of American deaths do you consider an acceptable tradeoff?

And keep in mind that you are not offering to die for freedom, since your personal odds of dying in a terror attack are negligible. What you are offering is a higher risk that other people will die so you can live in a country with uncontested religious freedom.

My answer is straightforward: Zero. We don’t have uncontested religious freedom; we already have people refusing to let Christians on sports teams freely pray. That being the case, we Christians have absolutely no duty to abide any religion or religious practice of which we don’t approve.

As The Duck observed on Twitter: “If you told American colonists they had to allow mosques because
religious diversity they would have laughed, then tarred & feathered
you.”

Cuckservative: initial responses

The sales have been exceptional. The reviews have been excellent, by which I don’t mean that they said the book is great, although they mostly do, but in their attention to detail and their substance. Sadly, some observers are just not taking it well.

Phil Sandifer ‏@PhilSandifer
Man, Vox Day must be spending an awful lot of his daddy’s money to drive up his new book’s Amazon ranking this high.

To which there can really only be one response.

Otherwise, the usual SJWs have been stunned into silence; the observable fact that I not only have considerably more support than they do, but actually happen to be in harmony with the popular zeitgeist at the moment is rather more than they are equipped to rationally process. The success of SJWs Always Lie was bad enough, as far as they were concerned, but to follow it up with an even bigger success of broader appeal is simply beyond imagining.

There has been only one real criticism aimed at the book to date, namely, the absence of footnotes. It’s a legitimate point, and I will address it, first as if I were Red Eagle, and second in my own inimitable fashion.

Cuckservative makes a strong rhetorical appeal to defend historic America, but its weak point is that you have to read it as an appeal addressed to you, the reader. It’s not factual ammunition for you, the already-convinced reader, to use in a debate with the unconvinced, because the authors have omitted footnotes. Cuckservative uses a lot of facts, and Vox Day has said on his blog that he’s got solid sources for everything, and that omitting references gives critics less to attack. That’s fine if you believe he’s not bluffing, and I do; but “one of the authors says he has a source for that, but he won’t say what it is” doesn’t fly in a serious argument.

Ann Coulter’s Adios America will supply facts by the ton when it comes out on Kindle. Meanwhile Cuckservative is the best current statement of the militant right-wing case against mass immigration and against ineffective “respectable” conservative politics regarding it.

Imagine, if you will, that you are a married man. You’ve worked a long day. You’re tired and you’re not in the mood for explaining yourself or getting into an argument with your wife, so when she asks you if you want Chinese for dinner, you have two choices. Either A) you simply say no, or B) you tell her no and you explain why.

If you say no, that ends the debate. Perhaps she suggests something else, perhaps you do, either way, there is no need for discussion. But if you go with option B), you have given her the opening to take issue with why your position is incorrect and to attempt to convince you that you really do want Chinese. Whether she manages to convince you or not, you’re in for an argument, and most likely, you’ll end up eating Chinese even though you didn’t want to.

Now, in case the analogy has escaped you, the reasons for not wanting Chinese food are the footnotes and the wife is the critics. Here endeth the lesson.

From my perspective, books are discourse. I expect and anticipate criticism both fair and foul. I remember when Ann Coulter was absolutely pilloried for having endnotes rather than footnotes. I also know that not having footnotes allows me, or the Cuckservative reader, to call out the critic who attempts to cast doubt on them.

The correct response to the critic who claims that something in Cuckservative is wrong is to ask him what the correct answer is. If he wishes to deny that the Danish army’s measured average IQ has fallen by 1.5 points, ask him for the correct delta. Ask him if it has risen, fallen, or stayed the same. He will not be able to do so, thereby discrediting himself and revealing that he is not an honest interlocutor.

The only people who actually need the footnotes are those who are attempting to undermine the arguments presented in the book by disqualifying the source data. Red Eagle and I simply made their task more difficult by denying it to them. If you want to cite a source, then cite our book. That is sufficient.

But perhaps my chief reason for not providing my sources, which are, of course, impeccable, is my experience with TIA. Simply because I cited my source, many people who read the book took my original arguments and credited them to the source, who, ironically enough, made precisely the opposite argument in the face of the data they had collected.

For much of the world before the 17th century, these “reasons” for war were explained, and justified, at least for the participants, by religion.
– The Encyclopedia of Wars, p. xxii

No, they really weren’t. I make mistakes, but I seldom make the same mistake twice.

UPDATE: My co-author speaks for himself:

This isn’t an academic treatise, it isn’t a book report we’re submitting for approval and critique by authority, and it isn’t a defensive, plaintive rearguard work in the cuckservative style.

We’re on the attack. Let the lefties and cuckservatives be on the defense. Let them impotently quibble and whine about us failing to cite our sources. Let them do their own homework if they want to argue or nitpick, and let them be the ones who try to qualify themselves.

Preach, preacher!

He hit send?

An incredulous Spacebunny asked the obvious question after Shaun King made the quixotic decision to email the indefatigable Milo about his attempt to bury the skeletons in his social media past:

Shaun King Just Sent Me The Greatest Email Any Journalist Has Ever Received

Here is a set of responses Shaun King just sent me after I asked why, following our report today, he was deleting thousands of tweets from his social media profile.

Shaun King, readers will recall, is a salaried employee of the New York Daily News, where he is employed as “senior justice writer.” In the email, he claims:

  • Volunteers from 150 countries are manually deleting every one of the 70,000 tweets King has sent
  • King has spoken to “legal counsel” at “several British media companies” all of whom told him I have “actual psychological challenges/difficulties”
  • I am “strangely obsessed with him” and that I “love, hate, worship and despise” him
  • “White supremacy” drives NRA gun policies
  • “Racial symbolism is present throughout the world” … including “depicting Jesus as an effeminate European”
  • The “game of pool” is another example of “racial symbolism”
  • I am “obsessed” with King’s children because I “want kids but know that you would be such a terrible father that you choose instead to be obsessed with Shaun’s kids”

Presented without further comment — because I am currently struggling to form words. Except to note that King’s latest strategy of responding in the third person, making vague allusions to an “administrative team” who apparently helps him out with his email, is almost as funny as his claim that people from 150 different countries are currently logged in to his Twitter account manually deleting every tweet he has ever sent…

I can’t say I’m not a little disappointed. But I hope that the photo montage I sent of my “Burt Reynolds on a bearskin rug” impression in honor of Milo 100k still managed to make the top ten.