Perfidious fake conservative (((Jennifer Rubin))) urges the future shunning of the White House Press Secretary:
Conservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin tore into White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Sunday, saying she should be shunned from her next job for her false and misleading claims.
“Sarah Huckabee Sanders is so concerned that people aren’t nice to her,” Rubin told MSNBC’s Joy Reid on “AM Joy.” “And people like me think that — not that she should be harassed — but that she should be shunned. The reason is that she lies. She attacks our free press and no respectable employer should hire her after this term,” Rubin continued. “Also, no university and no news outlet. She has lied and she has endangered the lives of reporters and that’s why she should be shunned. Not harassed — shunned.”
Earlier this week, the columnist declared in a scathing editorial that the GOP “isn’t fit to govern.”
If lying is justification for being shunned, then why is anyone on the planet talking to Rubin? Before moving into fake conservative opinion writing to derail Republicans, Rubin was “a labor and employment lawyer in Los Angeles, working for Hollywood studios, for 20 years.”
Rubin is as legitimately of the political Right as Richard Dawkins is an evangelical Christian. And she’s as about as American as Li Keqiang.
I didn’t really think about Shapiro at all until 2005, when I dubbed him the Littlest Chickenhawk, and the reason I did so – remember this is back in 2005 okay – and what Shapiro did, despite the fact that he was of an age to join the military, he wrote and claimed that invading Iraq and invading Iran and basically invading the entire Middle East and establishing an American empire that would be democratic was the most most vital issue of our time. It was the absolute priority for the United States of America, and yet he didn’t join the military! It was more important for him to go to college and go to law school. I mean, this is the literal definition of a chickenhawk, somebody who demands the country go to war but refuses to do so himself.
So back in 2005 I dubbed him the Littlest Chickenhawk after he tried to justify himself and defend himself and it was absolutely, totally inept. Totally unconvincing, you know, and it really astonished me that anyone took him seriously after that. I mean, Shapiro has no intellectual integrity at all! He prides himself, his supporters talk about how he’s supposed to be this fearsome debater, he’s written a little pamphlet on how to destroy liberals in an argument, but here’s the thing. He ran away from the opportunity to debate Milo Yiannopoulos. Twice he talked about a general debate challenge, I contacted him and said, “Ben, I’ll be happy to debate you.” Once it was on economics, I don’t recall what the other one was.
Both times he practically left tracks fleeing in the opposite direction, and so you know the guy is a complete and utter fraud. Did Iraq pose an immediate threat to our nation? Perhaps not. But toppling Saddam Hussein and democratizing Iraq prevent his future ascendance and end his material support for future threats globally. The same principle holds true for Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and others: Pre-emption is the chief weapon of a global empire. No one said empire was easy, but it is right and good, both for Americans and for the world. – Benjamin Shapiro, WorldNetDaily, Aug. 11, 2005
Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump The Fake News hates me saying that they are the Enemy of the People only because they know it’s TRUE. I am providing a great service by explaining this to the American People. They purposely cause great division & distrust. They can also cause War! They are very dangerous & sick!
Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump “Too bad a large portion of the Media refuses to report the lies and corruption having to do with the Rigged Witch Hunt – but that is why we call them FAKE NEWS!”
I could not agree more. The mainstream media is, without question, the enemy of the American people, and it has been for decades. Literally nothing they do or say is in the interests of the American people. And if the God-Emperor’s well-justified criticism of them happens to lead to bad outcomes for journalists, I expect the vast majority of Americans will applaud.
While it gives me great pain to publicly take exception with the greatest living science fiction writer, I have no choice but to do so with regards to what these days is an unfortunately all-too-pertinent literary matter:
A reader named Bellomy had a comment of dazzling insight I wanted to reprint by way of applause and emphatic agreement.
I learned the secret to what makes a character a Mary Sue.
You see, being great everything doesn’t make one a Mary Sue. John Carter of Mars is that. Batman is that. Wonder Woman, for a female example, is that.
What makes one a Mary Sue is the fundamental dishonesty in how the character is treated.
No, no, no! A thousand times no! A Mary Sue may well be a fundamentally dishonest character. Certainly most of them are. But a Mary Sue may also be an entirely honest character. The reader named Bellomy is confusing the observable fact that most Mary Sues are fundamentally dishonest characters with the basic nature of the Mary Sue.
The correct definition of the Mary Sue is very straightforward: a Mary Sue is a literary character who is an idealized stand-in for the author.
For example, the commenter HMSLion is correct in identifying Owen Pitt, from the Monster Hunter International novels, as an exemplary Mary Sue. Owen Pitt, the oversized accountant highly skilled with guns, who successfully steals the tall, beautiful dark-haired girl from his wealthy, popular, better-educated and more handsome rival, is a wonderful character because Larry Correia is himself a wonderful character. But there can be no doubt that Owen Pitt began as an unmitigated Mary Sue.
Authors have a tendency to reveal more about themselves than they realize, and often, more than they would like, when they write themselves into their stories. Consider the subconscious confessions contained in the two following quotes:
ITEM #1: She was beautiful. In fact she was possibly the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was tall, with dark black hair, light skin, and big brown eyes. Her face was beautiful, not fake beautiful like a model or an actress, because she was obviously a real person, but rather Helen of Troy, launch-a-thousand-ships kind of good-looking. She wore glasses, and I was a sucker for a girl in corrective eyewear. Since I was ugly it was probably some sort of subconscious reaction in the hope that I might have a chance with a cute girl who couldn’t see very well. She was dressed in a conservative business suit, but unlike most women I knew, she made it look good. If I were to guess I would have said that she was in her mid-twenties.
“Mr. Pitt?” she asked. Even her voice was pretty. She was a goddess.
I tried to answer, but no words would come out. Talk, idiot! “Um… Hi.” Smooth… So far so good, keep going, big guy.
“You can, um… my name is… Owen. My friends call me Z. Because of my middle name. It starts with a Z. Or whatever works for you. Come in. Please!”
Well, so much for smooth.
ITEM #2: I could not help but gloat a little as I smiled for my nemesis. Grant Jefferson. The smug bastard had only been able to do it in 2.5, which was still pretty respectable, but not even close to as fast as mine. And the best part was that he knew it. He was the one who said my first run had been a fluke. Grant was not used to being bested at anything. I enjoyed watching as he stomped off in frustration. He did not like me, and the feeling was mutual. I handed the shotgun over for the next shooter.
Grant was no Newbie. He was a full-fledged member of MHI, and also one of our instructors, though he was the junior man on Harbinger’s team. He had only come out to shoot in the hopes of showing us poor folks how it was done. Grant was totally my opposite. Lean and handsome, witty, charming, a product of the finest schools, and descended from the oldest established (as in super wealthy) New England families. He even had nice hair. He was the type of person everybody liked, and everybody wanted to be liked by.
I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. I thought he was a pompous ass from the moment I had met him, and I felt the primal and instinctual need to beat him up and take his lunch money.
But the real reason that I hated his guts was that he was Julie Shackleford’s boyfriend.
Now, would you like to bet against the surmise that there are real-life analogues to Julie Shackleford and Grant Jefferson? I would not recommend it. The line about “fake beautiful like a model” is particularly informative. Of course, as Larry Correia has improved as a writer, he is no longer reliant upon his own experiences and emotions to create credible characters, which is why Owen Pitt has grown beyond his origins as a Mary Sue.
The reason that most Mary Sues are dishonest is because most authors are not interesting and accomplished individuals like Larry Correia. Therefore, in order to make their characters appear attractive, successful, and interesting, they have no choice but to present them in a dishonest fashion, winning every argument and succeeding in every challenge with the greatest of ease. But that does not make a dishonest character, like Rey from the latest Star Wars abominations, a Mary Sue. She is not a stand-in for the various authors, she is merely a dishonest feminist archetype.
Despite being a mild Edgar Allen Poe aficionado, I wasn’t familiar with his Eureka, which is a sort of brilliant stream-of-consciousness intellectual exploration that is almost exactly what Jordan Peterson, in his fevered, cousin-devouring dreams, must have imagined his Maps of Meaning would be. I’ve been reading Eureka and finding it to be an absolute delight, particularly in Poe’s prophetic anticipation of the instrinsic limitations of the methodology of modern science, which he described in the summary of a letter said to have been written in 2848.
“Well, Aries Tottle flourished supreme, until the advent of one Hog, surnamed ‘the Ettrick shepherd,’ who preached an entirely different system, which he called the à posteriori or inductive. His plan referred altogether to sensation. He proceeded by observing, analyzing, and classifying facts—instantiæ Naturæ, as they were somewhat affectedly called—and arranging them into general laws. In a word, while the mode of Aries rested on noumena, that of Hog depended on phenomena; and so great was the admiration excited by this latter system that, at its first introduction, Aries fell into general disrepute. Finally, however, he recovered ground, and was permitted to divide the empire of Philosophy with his more modern rival:—the savans contenting themselves with proscribing all other competitors, past, present, and to come; putting an end to all controversy on the topic by the promulgation of a Median law, to the effect that the Aristotelian and Baconian roads are, and of right ought to be, the solo possible avenues to knowledge:—‘Baconian,’ you must know, my dear friend,” adds the letter-writer at this point, “was an adjective invented as equivalent to Hog-ian, and at the same time more dignified and euphonious.
“Now I do assure you most positively”—proceeds the epistle—“that I represent these matters fairly; and you can easily understand how restrictions so absurd on their very face must have operated, in those days, to retard the progress of true Science, which makes its most important advances—as all History will show—by seemingly intuitive leaps. These ancient ideas confined investigation to crawling; and I need not suggest to you that crawling, among varieties of locomotion, is a very capital thing of its kind;—but because the tortoise is sure of foot, for this reason must we clip the wings of the eagles? For many centuries, so great was the infatuation, about Hog especially, that a virtual stop was put to all thinking, properly so called. No man dared utter a truth for which he felt himself indebted to his soul alone. It mattered not whether the truth was even demonstrably such; for the dogmatizing philosophers of that epoch regarded only the road by which it professed to have been attained. The end, with them, was a point of no moment, whatever:—‘the means!’ they vociferated—‘let us look at the means!’—and if, on scrutiny of the means, it was found to come neither under the category Hog, nor under the category Aries (which means ram), why then the savans went no farther, but, calling the thinker a fool and branding him a ‘theorist,’ would never, thenceforward, have any thing to do either with him or with his truths.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s also fascinating to see how the Mozart-Salieri relationship seems to play out again and again over time, the inevitable public rivalries between the original thinkers with integrity and talent and the popular pretenders with neither. Sometimes the Mozarts win out, sometimes the Griswolds do. But time always eventually exposes the latter, as your complete failure to recognize the name of Poe’s bitter would-be rival should suffice to demonstrate.
On a possibly-but-not-necessarily-unrelated note, I found this email from a reader to be more than a little amusing.
I was over at my sister’s place today and saw a copy of The Irrational Atheist in their library. When I asked about it, her husband, who is a recent MDiv graduate, told me that it was assigned reading in seminary. Amen.
Anyhow, “Hogian” is an apt description of the science-loving dogmatists who demand “proof” and “evidence” for event the simplest and most straightforward claims. They inevitably confuse the means with the end, and not infrequently go so far to claim, without any apparent sense of irony intended, that any factual statement made without evidential support and reliable sourcing being subsequently provided is inherently untrue.
Dire Badger kindly provides newcomers with a useful basic guide to commenting at Vox Popoli without getting publicly mocked and banned:
It’s not about Vox Day. If you make it about him, you get banned.
You cannot talk crap about VD unless it’s actually true. And relevant to the conversation at hand. And it ‘seems’ like VD revels in being called stuff like ‘arrogant’ and ‘uncompromising’.
When he tells you the topic is over, shut up about it. Don’t try to get the last word, because the last word has already been spoken… and usually, when he says shut up about it, the rest of the board stops following the conversation… so getting the last word is pointless anyway, since mostly no one is going to read it.
It’s not about you. Personal anecdotes to illustrate a point is one thing, as long as it is a a valid illustration… but “not all _ are like that” with a personal anecdote that shows a statistical outlier just makes you look like a stupid troll with nothing of value to add… and people with no value are likely to get banned since it really won’t hurt anything.
Figure out your sociosexual hierarchy position, your personality profile, or any other shit like that yourself. No one wants to answer your ‘what am I?’ question. This is not a facebook personality quiz stream.
Figure out what people here are like. You can disagree, but if you voice a disagreement that has been covered a million times, you are going to get hazed. Don’t post a million times countering a million arguments, and especially don’t respond to every single insult because you said something most people here think is stupid. That’s spamming. (see the last word comment)
Cussing should be sparing. This is not HALO. Talking trash just for the sake of talking trash will get you banned as fast as making it all about VD.
When someone asks you a direct question without qualifiers, answer it. Even if the answer is “I don’t know”, or “I googled it but my search Fu was weak, I will find it later.” if they ask you a question that starts with ‘considering that…’ or adds a weird goalpost-shifting frame like “Answer in a Haiku” or “Without using examples or Allegories…” feel free to answer or tell them to kiss your butt.
Statements of known fact are okay. Patronizing statements sharing your secret king wisdom “Because you all need to know this” will get you mocked and banned, especially if you never bothered to notice that there was an article about that very thing less than two days earlier. I suggest lurking for at least a month before making your first post, so you can figure out what kinds of people are here, and maybe even learn a thing or two before you open your mouth.
DO NOT GET DEFENSIVE! When you are wrong, admit it. Being able to learn from your mistakes is vastly more important (and more respect-worthy) than ‘winning’ an argument in the thread… mostly when you ‘win’ it’s because people have just gotten bored with arguing with you. That doesn’t mean apologize. Men only apologize when their actions have inadvertently harmed others. If you go off on a tirade and insult someone and find out later that you were wrong, an apology is cool, but don’t apologize for being wrong. Just admit it, fix it if you can, and move on.
I would add that this blog has been here for 15 years. Readers, moderators, and blogger alike, we know what we’re doing. VP was here before you. VP will be here after you. And the better you understand that VP simply does not need you or your comments, the more likely it is that your comments will be valued by the other readers.
I spend a few weeks every year teaching high-school and college students, and in my interactions with young people in and around universities I have noticed a trend. After class, at meals, and in walks around campus, the politically engaged students invariably ask me the same question: What do I think of Ben Shapiro?
Nor am I alone. Recently Eliza Gray had a similar experience while reporting on young conservatives in the age of President Trump. “Oddly enough,” she wrote in the Washington Post, “the person who appeared to be doing the most to shape the thinking of the new generation of Republican leaders was not the president of the United States—but Ben Shapiro, a 34-year-old anti-Trump conservative pundit who came up unprompted in more than a third of my conversations.” Again and again, students turn exchanges involving politics and ideology into discussions of Shapiro, his media presence, his ideas, and his mode of discourse.
As it turns out, I happen to think well of Shapiro, and admire not only his intelligence but also the way he is modeling political debate for an audience of millions. (We’ve corresponded once or twice but have never met.) More important, though, is what Shapiro’s celebrity tells us about the changing nature of media, the emerging sensibility of conservative youth, and indeed the future of American conservatism itself.
Shapiro owes a lot to social media. His appearances on Fox News Channel are not the cause but the consequence of his fame. It is by searching YouTube that teenagers come across his debates with campus lefties, his speeches, his appearances on like-minded podcasts, and his extended interviews with friends and other members of the so-called intellectual dark web.
The idea that Ben Shapiro is shaping ANYONE’S thinking, let alone the coming Republican leadership, is downright hilarious. The trend is clearly moving well away from his outdated open borders, free trade, Israel-first nonsense. Ben Shapiro may well be “the future of conservatism” because conservatism is dead. The cuckservatives fantasize about Generation Shapiro, but what they will get is Generation Zyklon.
As with the dog that didn’t bark in the night, what is significant is the fact that they have literally no one else. All of the genuine intellectual energy is on the nationalist Right. Jordan Peterson is a propped-up fraud. Sam Harris is a recycled, propped-up midwit. Shapiro has been propped up and pushed on conservatives since he was in junior high despite this being the quality of his political analysis.
Okrane S. August 04, 2018 7:50 AM You seem weak and angry. Are these some of those nice Christian values you preach?
I neither know nor care who is the target of this comment, but this is exactly the sort of passive-aggressive gamma bullshit that is no longer tolerated here. If you’re an emotionally incontinent gamma male, just don’t try to comment here. It’s not going to go well for you and you will end up being banned sooner or later.
Read and learn, or read and go away and snark about it somewhere else, but either way, your comments are neither wanted nor permitted here.
I told you it was inevitable. But for the time being, conservatives are still determined to try to hold on to their bowties and good opinion of themselves as fine upstanding individuals who are above getting their hands dirty by actually laying hands on the enemy:
Ask any conservative hate-listed by the SPLC (me, for example) what it’s like to work for decades to achieve a successful career and then be labeled a menace to society based on some left-wing ideologue’s interpretation. The Left has been smearing the Right this way for so long — they did it to Barry Goldwater, they did it Ronald Reagan, they do it to every conservative — that we scarcely even notice it anymore.
What has happened in recent years is that the Right has begun to fight fire with fire, and the Left calls this “harassment.” This was the basic story of #GamerGate: Videogame enthusiasts had grown tired of their hobby being targeted by “social justice warriors” (SJWs) and decided to fight back. Defending themselves against the organized lobby of politically correct censors and critical-theory busybodies (e.g., Anita Sarkeesian), the #GamerGate crew were accused of “misogyny” and “haraassment.” And this exposes the double-standard: When the Left attacks the videogame industry, this is “activism”; when gamers fight back, this is “harassment.” Likewise, when left-wing outfits use the past words of conservatives to brand them racist, this is “research”; when the tables are turned, liberals call it “trolling.”
As John Sexton at Hot Air notes, the Left is defending Sarah Jeong’s anti-white hatred as simply “the way the social justice left talks”:
“White people” is a shorthand in these communities, one that’s used to capture the way that many whites still act in clueless and/or racist ways. It’s typically used satirically and hyperbolically to emphasize how white people continue to benefit (even unknowingly) from their skin color, or to point out the ways in which a power structure that favors white people continues to exist.
Having engaged in a bit of satirical hyperbole myself, I call bulls–t here. It’s a blatant double-standard — one rule for liberals, another rule for everybody else — that permits “the social justice left” to engage in blatant hate-mongering, while conservatives are compelled to tiptoe carefully and watch every word lest they accidentally say something that might somehow be interpreted as “racism.” What conservatives need to do is to start calling the Left’s rhetoric what it is: hate propaganda.
That actually made me laugh out loud. I like Robert Stacey McCain, his intentions are undoubtedly pure, but like most conservatives, he simply has no clue that there isn’t a silent majority that is going to gravitate to whichever side can present itself as the least hateful. Calling the Left’s rhetoric “hate propaganda” is going to be even less effective than “Dems R the Real Racists” was.
What conservatives need to do, what they will eventually be forced to do whether they want to or not, is to embrace science, history, and reality, and finally accept that blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims, Indians, and Jews are NEVER, EVER going to take their side or align with their idiotic, idealistic universalism. What conservatives need to do is accept that for better or for worse, they are the White American party now, and pursue their own interests accordingly. All anyone has to do to understand how any immigrant interest group is reliably going to vote is to look at how that interest group prefers to live in its own country. The dirt is not magic.
This really isn’t that hard a concept to grasp. Immigrants don’t move to the USA in order to live like White Americans any more than Californians move to Texas in order to live like Texans.
It’s really rather remarkable that the idiot SJWs who now run GenCon think that they can somehow make a violent criminal assault that took place in public disappear from the public awareness:
The story around the assault of The Quartering’s Jeremy Hambly appears to be getting worse. The promoters of the Gen Con are now silencing attendees who are fearful for their safety and are questioning Gencon’s silence over the assault. In fact, they are actively crushing ANY discussion on the manner.
They are specifically using 1984 style tactics on their Twitch channel. They first began giving users short bans if they brought up the assault, but then resorted to completely wiping their stream chat and limited it apparently to people who have been following for three months. Thanks to several Twitter users proof of the bans are clear. One user who was watching the GenCon live feed was told they were banned because “this isn’t the place to discuss this.”
While GenCon appears to be banning people and silencing those asking about the alleged assault against The Quartering, they have remained silent about his alleged assaulter despite their own Ethics & Conduct stating that “Violating any federal, state or local laws, facility rules or convention policies … constitute grounds for explusion from the convention without refund.”
In fact, their policy instructs people to “seek out Gen Con Event Staff or Gen Con Security to report the incident.”
Given they still have not released a statement regarding one of their one exhibitors being accused of assault one has to wonder if Gen Con’s silence means other attendees could be at risk. Are they protecting a client who has a booth over attendees?
Or could their silence be politically motivated? If you happen to think the wrong way, well then it appears Gencon won’t do its due diligence when it comes to any possible violence you might face.
It would appear that The Quartering’s mistake was to fail to identify as female. GenCon will leap in with guns blazing if a hapless dork stares at a female cosplayer for two seconds too long, but a violent attack on an attendee by an exhibitor goes unremarked. That’s not a viable strategy.
