Ridicule is rhetoric

Because apparently the stories told by the McMartin daycare kids were supported by the evidence after all:

If the name McMartin Preschool rings a bell, it’s because the school gained infamy as ground zero for the child abuse case that kicked off the so-called Satanic Panic.

360 children were alleged to have been abused at McMartin daycare. Many of the children claimed that they’d been subjected to sexual and satanic ritual abuse in a system of tunnels under the school. When investigators declared that excavations turned up nothing, the claim of secret tunnels became a byword for spurious ritual abuse claims.

Now, after a generation of ridicule, the FBI has confirmed the tunnels’ existence, vindicating the children’s testimony.

The world is not only more evil than you believe, it is more evil than you probably imagine. We may be IN it, but we most certainly do not want to be OF it.

Cameras in the can

Apparently there are cameras in airplane bathrooms. What is wrong with these people?

A Southwest Airlines flight attendant says two pilots live streamed video from a hidden camera in a commercial airliner’s lavatory to an iPad in the cockpit, a lawsuit says. The alleged incident happened February 27, 2017, while Renee Steinaker was working on Flight 1088 from Pittsburgh to Phoenix, according to the complaint that Steinaker and her husband, David Steinaker, filed against the airline and the pilots.

About two and a half hours into the flight, Capt. Terry Graham asked for a flight attendant to come to the cockpit so that he could leave to use the restroom, the complaint says. Airline policy requires that two crew members are in the cockpit at all times, the complaint says.

After Steinaker arrived and Graham left, Steinaker spotted an iPad in the plane’s cockpit that appeared to be streaming live video of the pilot inside an airplane lavatory, the lawsuit said. When the flight attendant asked the co-pilot, Ryan Russell, if the iPad was streaming video from the lavatory, he said the camera was part of a “new security and top secret security measure that had been installed in the lavatories of all Southwest Airlines’ 737-800 planes,” the document alleges.

“Southwest does not place cameras in the lavatories of our aircraft.” That’s the official Southwest line and it might even be true. But even if it is true, that doesn’t mean that someone else, such as a federal agency, doesn’t put them there.

Professionally inept

One of the reasons why the converged media companies have been running roughshod over those they’ve targeted for deplatforming is that their victims are afraid to fight back. But if you have, or are, or can find, a competent lawyer who doesn’t play the usual lawyer’s game of waiting until the last possible minute to submit some boilerplate that he plans to revise later, you’ll likely be well ahead of the opposition.

Law firm mistakes number of days in the month, so lawyer files notice of appeal one day after actual deadline. Court dismisses appeal and awards fees.

They even have cute professional jargon for it: calendar the deadline. This sort of thing happens all the time. I’ve personally witnessed it and something similar happened in the Vic Mignogna case. Most lawyers, even very highly credentialed lawyers from very expensive law firms, take a disturbingly blase approach to deadlines, mostly because the established case law permits them to redefine clearly fixed time frames as indefinite periods that are entirely at the judge’s discretion.

Of course, the fact that it is reprehensibly stupid to proactively rely upon the judge being lax about deadlines never occurs to them. We are always careful to prepare our filings as soon as possible, and to file them several days ahead of time, in order to not provide a potentially adversarial judge an excuse to rule against us. Never wait until the last minute!

And on a not-unrelated note, the VFM, the Rubble-bouncers, and the Reprehensibles should be prepared to act very quickly when the Legion’s next campaign is announced tonight around 6:30 PM Eastern. I’ll send out emails, put up a post, and do a Darkstream once the link is live. The amount is irrelevant, as the objective is to establish standing for as many of you as possible. Now, don’t play Smart Boy and demonstrate how much you know about what’s going on here in the comments, but do feel free to indicate if you’re in on this one.

I don’t need the attention, Mike

Reality is hard when you’re an SJW. From the comments:

Don’t try to pin him on me. This kind of lede is practically an announcement that — just like Camestros — you pull the name of my blog into your disputes to generate attention. For shame.
– Mike Glyer, File 770

While Mike certainly isn’t to blame for Camestros’s foot-shooting antics, Camestros is part of the File 770 community and that serves as a useful identifier for those who have no idea who he is or why he’s nipping at my ankles. I would think it is readily apparent that I have absolutely zero need to generate attention these days; to the contrary, I methodically refuse every single request for interviews, stories, appearances and “perspective” from the mainstream media, the Internet media, and the YouTubers alike.

Wait, I did answer a few questions from someone connected to the Unz Review the other day, but then, I make exceptions for people with whom I am working….

I don’t blame the SF-SJWs for failing to grasp how much bigger Unauthorized is than their entire community at this point, since it’s outside their area of interest, but sooner or later, they’re going to be confronted with what is almost certainly going to strike them as a very ugly reality. This blog alone is much closer to Tor.com’s traffic than to File 770’s, and that doesn’t include the YouTube viewers or UATV viewers.

The end of asset forfeiture

It’s remarkable that it has taken this long for a court to find it unconstitutional:

Civil asset forfeiture has been in the crosshairs across the country for years now because it allows police and prosecutors to declare that any money or property owned by a suspect is “connected” to a crime, seize it, and then ultimately keep it for themselves. And because this is a civil process, police and prosecutors can do this without having to convict anybody. It’s the assets that are considered the defendants (in this case, the respondent is actually the $20,771 that Horry County wants to seize from a man charged with trafficking cocaine), prosecutors typically have a lower threshold to make their case than “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and people who are pulled into these forfeiture cases don’t have access to public defenders and have to fund their own lawyers.

The end result: Police trying to keep whatever they can grab off anybody they arrest, claiming it’s all proceeds or property connected to criminal activities, and using it to line their own pockets. This incentivizes police to look for people who have assets that can be seized. Local newspapers in South Carolina teamed up to investigate the extent of abuses and discovered police agencies across the state had seized more than $17 million in assets across three years. In one-fifth of the cases, nobody was charged or even arrested for a crime.

Judge John notes all of these problems in a decisive ruling that smacks down the practice of civil asset forfeiture. In his 15-page opinion, he writes that South Carolina’s forfeiture practice violate both the U.S. Constitution and the state’s because the statutes “(1) place the burden on the property owner to prove their innocence, (2) unconstitutionally institutionally incentivizes forfeiture officials to prosecute forfeiture actions, and (3) do not mandate judicial review or judicial authorization prior to or subsequent to the seizure.” He also notes that the statutes violate citizens’ Eighth Amendment protections against excessive fines.

It’s a good start. Now let’s get a conclusive Supreme Court decision setting precedent on the topic. And a federal law banning it.

Simmons’s Law

I was wondering why the otherwise excellent 1958 Junior Classics, on which I was raised, are so de-Christianized and de-masculinized in comparison with the 1918 edition. Then I looked a little closer at the title pages of the 1958 edition. At the front of each and every volume was this:

The JUNIOR CLASSICS
Edited by MABEL WILLIAMS and MARCIA DALPHIN

“The lesson, as always, is this: women ruin everything.”
– The Sports Guy aka Bill Simmons

The 2020 edition is therefore a restoration will make the Junior Classics great again. In addition to restoring the missing 1918 elements, we will be adding one (1) new classic of our own selection per volume. For example, to Volume 10: The Poetry Book, we will add my favorite poem, a darkly elegaic masterpiece by the inimitable Lord Byron.

Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull

Start not – nor deem my spirit fled;
In me behold the only skull
From which, unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull.

I lived, I loved, I quaffed, like thee:
I died: let earth my bones resign;
Fill up – thou canst not injure me;
The worm hath fouler lips than thine.

Better to hold the sparkling grape,
Than nurse the earth-worm’s slimy brood;
And circle in the goblet’s shape
The drink of gods, than reptile’s food.

Where once my wit, perchance, hath shone,
In aid of others’ let me shine;
And when, alas! our brains are gone,
What nobler substitute than wine?

Quaff while thou canst: another race,
When thou and thine, like me, are sped,
May rescue thee from earth’s embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.

Why not? since through life’s little day
Our heads such sad effects produce;
Redeemed from worms and wasting clay,
This chance is theirs, to be of use.

It may interest you to know that this will NOT be the only Byron work to appear in Volume 10, which is otherwise heavy on Blake, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Keats, and Longfellow.

Mailvox: spotting quality

One of the more inept File 770ers – which is saying something – is Camestros Fappletron. His Gamma backside is still burning from the spanking he received here in 2016 after he tried to pose as a Master of Rhetoric and only succeeded in demonstrating that he simply did not understand Aristotle’s distinction between rhetoric and dialectic.

So, it’s more than a little amusing to note that he’s been trying to retroactively rectify the situation for years, as Samuel Collingwood Smith noted.

Earlier today, a leftist left a negative comment on a review I did in 2016 of Vox Day’s “A Throne of Bones”. They ended by linking to a hatepost claiming the positive Amazon reviews were deceptive based on an analysis by a site called Fakepost.com from 2017. Because, of course, the accuracy of a self-appointed analysis site using an unpublished algorithm is beyond question..

I had no idea what he was talking about, because of course I pay absolutely no attention to Camestros or his incessant anklebiting. But apparently, back in 2017, File 770’s Master of Rhetoric decided to prove that many of the 332 reviews of A Throne of Bones, which average 4.5 stars, are fake.

I previously pointed to an article on people manipulating Amazon rankings for their books, today there is a bigger brouhaha on whether somebody has manipulated the New York Time bestseller list. The method used (if true) isn’t new and political books have been prone to this approach before i.e. buy lots of the book from the right bookshops and head up the rankings.

One thing new to me from those articles was this site: http://fakespot.com/about It claims to be a site that will analyse reviews on sites like Amazon and Yelp and then rate the reviews in terms of how “fake” they seem to be. The mechanism looks at reviewers and review content and looks for relations with other reviews, and also rates reviewers who only ever give positive reviews lower. Now, I don’t know if their methods are sound or reliable, so take the rest of this with a pinch of salt for the time being.

Time to plug some things into their machine but what! Steve J No-Relation Wright has very bravely volunteered to start reading Vox Day’s epic fantasy book because it was available for $0 ( https://stevejwright.wordpress.com/2017/08/23/a-throne-of-bones-by-vox-day-preamble-on-managing-expectations/ ) and so why not see what Fakespot has to say about “Throne of Bones”

Sadly for the ever-inept Fappletron, he didn’t bother checking Fakepost to confirm that its initial analysis still held true, as Mr. Smith informs us.

 However, when I requested a re-analysis, the book listing now gets an ‘A’ 

  • Fakespot Review Grade A
  • Our engine has profiled the reviewer patterns and has determined that there is minimal deception involved.
  • Our engine has determined that the review content quality is high and informative.
  • Our engine has discovered that over 90{d59209821fe989e78e8725839671fe688f075485293e05af5d9ebcd097c17187} high quality reviews are present.
  • This product had a total of 332 reviews as of our last analysis date on Oct 27 2019.
Nor is ATOB alone in this regard. The 100 reviews of ASOS are also graded A, whereas the 645 reviews of SJWs Always Lie are only graded B, most likely due to the 37 mostly-fake one-star reviews. Ironically, Fappletron has only managed to demonstrate that the higher-rated my books are, the more likely those reviews of those books are to be genuine.

All the way from Left to Fake Right

The Intellectual Dark Web is working as designed! Young white men are being deradicalized! The world is safe for degeneracy and Empire!

The third segment of the AIN are Conservatives who, in another media era, may have started conservative talk radio shows or hosted a show on Fox News.  These include Steven Crowder, famous for setting up booths at college campuses challenging people to “change his mind” about a conservative/pro-Trump belief;  Ben Shapiro,  a former Breitbart reporter known for criticizing the left for their use of “feelings over facts”;and Dennis Prager, host of “PragerU,” a channel that expresses conservative viewpoints with an educational motif.  Like the Skeptics, they often lampoon the use of identity politics  and  de-platforming  by  mainstream  progressive  social  movements,  but  unlike skeptics, they also disagree with mainstream liberals in principle.  They tend to have more traditional pro-market and socially conservative beliefs.  They are different from further-right segments of the AIN, however, in that they explicitly oppose anti-semitism and open appeals to race.

The fourth and fifth groups are the Alt-Lite and Alt-Right, which are often conflatedwith  one  another.   However,  there  are  key  distinctions  in  how  they  appeal  to  their audiences.  The Alt-Lite is a mixed bag ideologically.  Some, like Paul Joseph Watson,an InfoWars affiliate, argue for mainstream conservatism. Others, like Stefan Molyneux and  Lauren  Southern,  espouse  more  explicitly  white  nationalist  messages.   However,they all enjoy antagonizing and upsetting (“triggering”) liberals and leftists, and use racist and otherwise offensive humor as a means to transgress what they describe as authoritarian  boundaries  set  by  the  left-of-center.   The  Alt-Lite  is  also  strongly  pro-Trump.

In  contrast,  the  Alt-Right  is  wa rmly  committed  to  a  far-right  ideology.   Common features include strong anti-semitism and the belief that white people are are genetically superior (race realism”).  They advocate for an all-white ethnostate and an end to all(or at the very least, all non-white) immigration.  Well-known YouTubers in the Alt-Right include Richard Spencer, coiner of the term;  Red Ice TV, an alien conspiracy-turned-Alt-Right  talk  show;  and  Jean-Francois  Gariepy,  a  former  neuroscientist  who is virulently anti-feminist and uses his scienti c background to increase the perceived credibility  of  race  realism.   Unlike  the  Alt-Lite,  these  YouTubers  are  not  concerned with transgressing perceived social boundaries set by mainstream progressives, and do not disagree in principle with identity politics or deplatforming.  They argue instead that mainstream progressives are bolstering the wrong identities and deplatforming the wrong people. They also tend not to support Trump, believing he has been compromised by an international Jewish conspiracy due to Trump’s pro-Israel sentiment and closeness to his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

It’s certainly a fascinating methodology. The idea appears to be that because of the false alternative offered by a few neoclowns on YouTube, the viewership of other Fake Right YouTube channels, half of which have been disappeared, has declined.

Then again, proving that the Intellectual Dark Web is not “a gateway drug” to the Nationalist American Right, but instead act in a gatekeeping capacity against it, is akin to proving that water is wet. It doesn’t really matter how you try to “prove” it because the conclusion is always going to be correct.

Never trust the experts

It’s always amusing when midwits attempt to question their intellectual superiors:

The past few posts leave me wondering “where else do Vox and many of his fans entertain absurdly contrarian opinions on topics they demonstrably know next to nothing about?”

If this loser had any idea how much success I have had over the years by flat-out ignoring the advice and the opinions of the subject-matter experts who know vastly more about their subjects than I do, he simply would not believe it. In fact, two of my three biggest failures were the direct result of being overruled by people who knew considerably more and refused to listen to me.

Mere information very seldom overrules genuine intelligence. Remember, nearly all the economic experts will tell you that free trade is good for America and it wasn’t all that long ago when all the nutrition experts told you that not eating meat was the way to lose weight.