Category: Uncategorized

James Delingpole Catches Up

By disavowing Jordan Peterson. His take is particularly damning because he gave Jordan Peterson every possible benefit of the doubt, but to no avail:

One of the more disappointing gigs of my life was An Evening With Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson & Douglas Murray at the O2 arena in 2018. It had been billed as ‘the Woodstock of live speaking and debate’ but, just like its rainwashed predecessor, it was all hype and no trousers. I walked out half way through, which was a bit embarrassing, given that I was in one of the more visible front row seats, that the PR from whom I’d got my free tickets was nearby and that Douglas was a friend.

In my head – and a subsequent article – I persuaded myself I’d quite enjoyed it and that I just needed to leave early because the O2 was miles from civilisation and I wanted to get back home. In my heart, though, I knew it had been shit. Harris had droned on, as he always does, about Marcus Aurelius. Peterson had been abstruse, remote, obfuscatory – by which I mean he was using lots of words, in that annoying wheedling voice of his, to tell us very little. And, like Led Zeppelin not playing Stairway To Heaven, he was determinedly refusing to offer any gobbets of juicy red meat to his puppyishly eager and forgiving young male audience. Douglas was feline and quite funny, but that was about it.

So why didn’t I say at the time that the Emperor was wearing no clothes? Because back then I wanted so badly to believe that he was. Peterson, I thought, just had to be a good thing because lots of people on my side of the argument, all the edgy right-wing contrarian types, were saying he was. We’d read – or even written – many pleasing articles celebrating how well he was doing (earning well over a million a year playing huge arenas like this one), which was just great because we were used to living in a culture where only liberals and leftists were rewarded. Peterson was our guy because though he came from leftie academe, he was sticking it the libs. He’d destroyed that prissy left-wing interviewer called Cathy Newman who’d tried to get the better of him on Channel 4 news; he was down with Pepe the Frog; his bestselling book was punchy, savvy, digestible; he said clever, funny stuff about lobsters. He was leading the backlash against the destruction of Western Civilisation.

Except, we now know, he wasn’t. Peterson is a bad actor – and probably was so all along.

Vox Day was ahead of the game on this as he so often is. As early as 2018, he published the (so I gather: I really must read it) corrosive and utterly damning Jordanetics: A Journey Into the Mind of Humanity’s Greatest Thinker. It has taken most of the rest of us till now to catch up.

For me, the clincher was watching a video called Jordan Peterson Dismantled, which argues, plausibly I think, that Peterson’s goal is not to bolster the political right but to neutralise it. That was made three years ago, so I’m a bit late to the party. The reason I’m thinking about him now – to be honest I’d pretty much stopped doing so since that 2018 snoozefest – is because one or two people on my side still appear to be taking him seriously. And I don’t think they should. He’s a menace.

Peterson is a bad actor. He’s a very bad actor in both sense of the term. He’s now such an obvious psychosexual train wreck that it’s astonishing anyone still even tries to take him seriously.

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Drawing Lines in the Sand

Xi makes it abundantly clear that China stands with Palestine.

Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed dissatisfaction Friday with the injustices suffered by Palestinians and affirmed China’s support for an independent Palestinian state. “It is not possible to continue the historical injustice suffered by the Palestinians,” the Chinese president said at the opening of the Riyadh-Gulf-Chinese Summit for Cooperation and Development in Saudi Arabia.

Xi emphasized the necessity for granting Palestine “full membership in the United Nations” and said Beijing “supports the two-state solution and the establishment of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

He said he considered the Chinese-Arab summit a “defining event in the history of Chinese-Arab relations.”

Relations between the two “are based on mutual interest in peace and harmony,” he said. “The Chinese and Arab sides should strengthen solidarity and cooperation and build a community for a closer future,” he said as he welcomed Arab participation in the global security initiative.

If Israel is the USA’s “greatest ally’, then it stands to reason that China, which has been engaged in unrestricted warfare against the United States for two decades, would eventually find common cause with that greatest ally’s greatest enemy.

It also explains why Soros and the other architects of Clown World fear Xi even more than they do Putin.

The intriguing question is when the Israelis will abandon the USA and the imperialist neocons in an attempt to appease the Chinese. Because that is probably the right strategic move in the long term; the Israelis are obviously aware that the Diaspora won’t hesitate to sell them out if necessary. And it’s not going to be possible to be the financial masters of both sides of The Great Bifurcation.

Beijing will work to make energy purchases in yuan instead of US dollar signalling another step towards shifting further away from the greenback, China’s President Xi Jinping told Gulf Arab leaders as cited by Reuters.

China’s leader highlighted the necessity of the move while speaking at a Chinese-Arab summit that was hosted by Saudi Arabia earlier this week. Xi had held separate talks with the heads of the Persian Gulf states at the summit that reportedly brought together 30 leaders from across the region.

The world’s biggest crude importer, China in November ramped up purchases of oil by 12% year-on-year, marking the 10-month high despite the severe pandemic-related restrictions.

As the world’s biggest buyer, China now has the ability to dictate how it pays for oil. And it has already begun paying for Arab goods in its own currency, as evidenced by this interview with a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry:

The Paper: We noted that the first RMB cross-border payment transaction between Saudi Arabia and China’s Yiwu city, known as “the world’s supermarket”, was completed ahead of the first China-Arab States Summit. Do you have any comment?

Mao Ning: I also noted this good news. The cross-border RMB payment has played an important role in boosting trade between China and Arab states. This is also a telling snapshot of trade and investment facilitation between both sides. Over the past decade, China-Arab states economic and trade cooperation has scaled new heights. China is Arab states’ biggest trading partner. In 2021, China’s FDI stock in Arab states hit $23 billion, a 2.6 times increase over 10 years. The trade volume topped $330.3 billion, 1.5 times more than 10 years ago. In the first three quarters of 2022, China-Arab states trade reached $319.295 billion, up 35.28 percent year on year and close to the total of the whole year of 2021.

This is precisely what the US invaded Iraq and Libya to prevent. But it’s not going to invade Saudi Arabia and it can’t invade China. It is safe to expect that other countries, particularly Russia and Venezuala, will follow suit in short order.

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Free Trade is Dead

In amidst the economic pain and disruption incumbent in the fall of Clown World, there are some significant silver linings:

The founder of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, Morris Chang, says geopolitics is having profound effects on the semiconductor industry.

Speaking at an event in Phoenix Arizona, where his firm was debuting an ambitious $40 billion upgrade and expansion of its new manufacturing facility in the state, he explained the new constraints being placed on the sector by the changing geopolitical scene.

Speaking of the new facility, which is TSMC’s first advanced chip plant built in the United States in over two decades, Chang said there remained a lot of hard work ahead, if it was to be a success.

The upgrades for the facility will enable the phoenix plant to manufacture the chips for Apple’s iPhone, which can perform almost 17 trillion specialized calculations per second. TMSC is planning an even newer facility in the state which will house even more advanced production technology, capable of producing the microchips for future smartphones, computers, and other smart electronics.

In an interview with Nikkei Asia at the event, Chang likened the plant to the first plant TSMC ever built in the US, in 1995 in Carnas, Washington.

Chang said, “Twenty-seven years have passed and [the semiconductor industry] witnessed a big change in the world, a big geopolitical situation change in the world. Globalization is almost dead and free trade is almost dead. A lot of people still wish they would come back, but I don’t think they will be back.”

The death of globalization and free trade is not only a good thing, it is absolutely necessary if Mankind is going to survive, and eventually, thrive. We’ve seen the best that globalism has to offer, and it is nothing more than idiocracy, debt slavery, and a relentlessly ugly monoculture.

It only took 30 years for 300 years of economic theory to be conclusively disproven by reality. But it was always false and totally incompatible with the existence of nations, as my critique of free trade on mathematical grounds demonstrated.

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Twitter Confessions

Elon Musk admits what we’ve known since 2017:

True, some accounts on the right were suspended even when Twitter internally acknowledged that no rules were broken

@elonmusk, 9 Dec 2022

Yes, I know. I never broke any of the Twitter rules. And yet, I’m still permanently suspended, without ever having a single violation of the rules cited.

Lesson: never trust a self-appointed Devil’s Champion.

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Death at the World Cup

We don’t know it was the vaxx… but it was the vaxx. Grant Wahl, the dean of American soccer journalism, is dead at 48.

Grant Wahl, a former Sports Illustrated senior writer, died Friday in Qatar while covering the 2022 World Cup. He was 48. Wahl is survived by his wife, Dr. Céline Gounder, and two dogs, Zizou (named after French soccer legend Zinedine Zidane) and Coco, who readers came to know over the years through Wahl’s coverage of the sport.

In a joint statement, SI’s co-editors in chief, Ryan Hunt and Stephen Cannella, said: “We’re shocked and devastated at the news of Grant’s passing. We were proud to call him a colleague and friend for two decades—no writer in the history of SI has been more passionate about the sport he loved and the stories he wanted to tell. Our hearts go out to Céline and his family, as well as everyone who loved his work. He will always be part of the SI family.”

Wahl spent 24 years at SI, joining in November 1996. Two years in, as a budding reporter, he volunteered to cover a growing game that few around SI’s offices cared about: soccer. He covered the World Cup in France that summer and quickly worked his way up to a senior writer for the publication in 2000. Eventually he would become one of the most respected soccer authorities in the world.

He was an excellent sportswriter, and he died with his boots on:

American sports journalist Grant Wahl, who died unexpected while covering the World Cup in Qatar, was in good spirits and joking with colleagues just minutes before his sudden death, an eyewitness said. Wahl, 48, died after he “fell ill” at the Lusail Stadium in the final minutes of the FIFA World Cup quarterfinal game between the Netherlands and Argentina Friday, a Qatari spokesperson said.

His SI colleague John Wertheim remembers him. RIP.

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Goodbye Brazil

And this is why no Brazilian has ever considered Neymar to be anywhere near Pele’s level despite setting the all-time scoring record for the Selecao. Nice goal in extra time, to be sure, but scoring just one goal in 120 minutes is a very bad idea against a team as good at taking penalties as Croatia.

FIFA’s dream final of Portugal (Ronaldo) vs Argentine (Messi) is still possible.

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10,000 Dead Canadians

Canada is literally massacring what once passed for its native population.

Last year, more than 10,000 people in Canada – astonishingly that’s over three percent of all deaths there – ended their lives via euthanasia, an increase of a third on the previous year. And it’s likely to keep rising: next year, Canada is set to allow people to die exclusively for mental health reasons.

To put things in context, that’s the equivalent of 186,000 US citizens being “assisted” last year. And if you put the trends together – depopulation, vaccination, and euthanization – Occam’s Razor suggest that the mass euthanization of the vaccinated may be the long-term result.

Today’s HYPERGAMOUSE provides an amusing take on a very dark matter.

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