Tag: media

The art of punditry

Ross Douthat doubles down. He may have been wrong about Trump before, but he’s still entirely confident that Trump can’t win the nomination:

I certainly overestimated poor Jeb Bush, whom I wrongly predicted would profit from Trump’s rise. But for the rest — no, I had a pretty low opinion of the right-wing entertainment complex to begin with, and I’m not remotely surprised that the white working class would rally to a candidate running on populist and nationalist themes.

I am very surprised, though, that Trump himself would have the political savvy, the (relative) discipline and yes, the stamina required to exploit that opening and become that populist. And for that failure of imagination, I humbly repent.

Of course I’m not completely humbled. Indeed, I’m still proud enough to continue predicting, in defiance of national polling, that there’s still no way that Trump will actually be the 2016 Republican nominee.

Trust me: I’m a pundit.

That’s the true art of punditry. Never changing your mind, even while you are admitting that you’re wrong.

No wonder I couldn’t hack it. Meanwhile, Reihan Salam explains what Douthat missed, and is missing, at NRO:

“[Trump’s] emergence as the voice of the anti-immigration Right is a reflection of the failure of the Republican establishment to grapple with lawlessness at the border and half a century of mass immigration. Consider the events of the past two years. Child migrants have surged into the United States from Central America, and working-class cities and towns across the country are struggling to absorb them. Before the federal courts stepped in, President Obama signed an executive order shielding roughly half of all unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. from the threat of deportation, a move he had previously suggested was out of bounds. And now the U.S. is experiencing yet another wave of Central American arrivals. Border Patrol officials report that many unauthorized immigrants believe that the U.S. is going to welcome them with open arms, and who can blame them given the president’s rhetoric?

Interesting to see that even the heart of cuckservatism is beginning to sense that all is not right with open borders.

Are you ready for 2016?

The Rabid Puppies are stirring in their kennels beneath the Dark Tower, straining at the chains that bind them. The Vile Faceless Minions are being starved, the better to whet their appetites. The Dread Ilk are gearing up and sharpening their blades. The Ilk are oiling their guns and adding to their ammo stores.

And we’re not alone. Because in 2016, an all-out war on social justice has been declared.

In 2016, battle lines will be drawn. On one side, people of all colours, genders and orientations are rallying around the flag of freedom of speech. On the other, a nasty set of authoritarians are rallying around a flag that identifies as a flag only on Mondays, uses they/them pronouns and will try to get you fired or expelled from school if you forget it.

Let me explain. In 2015, I saw the seeds of a movement begin to sprout. Across the internet, and even in fear-gripped halls on campuses, young people began to stand up and challenge the humourless, divisive, identity-obsessed elites that have taken over our cultural discourse. People of seemingly disparate interests and politics — gamers, pundits, metalheads, comic book and science fiction fans, atheists, Catholics, conservatives, libertarians and even many disaffected liberals — came together to agree on only one thing: art and culture should be left alone….

Had progressives wanted to stem the tide
of cultural libertarianism, the time to do it was a year ago. They could
have edged back, been reasonable and won us all over. But instead they
doubled down. Fine: now they get to lose. Let’s defend culture and free
expression and push these odious halfwits back into their dreary studio
apartments filled with cat-piss and alt rock-records and let them know
that we’ve decided to opt out of the soft bigotry of San Francisco-style
hand-wringing nonsense. We possess a working sense of humour and we’re
going to use it — whether they like it or not.
 

If you take their crybully pronouncements at face value, social justice warriors believe,
with all the fervor of a paranoiac, that they are helpless, fragile
things, buffeted by sinister structural forces they are powerless to
resist. They believe that their opponents possess power that, if used
ruthlessly enough, could eradicate them. What do you say we prove them
right?

Who needs seminary?

I know when I’ve got a question concerning some of the trickier aspects of Tertullian or the Summa Theologica, the first person I always turn to is a journalist:

Every journalist in America has been secretly attending seminary, and now understands Christianity better than most Christians do. This is the only conclusion I can draw after months of theology lectures from reporters whose most recent encounter with religious terminology was Hozier’s “Take Me to Church.”

To those of us for whom church isn’t a metaphor for sex, it’s been a frustrating few months. First, the chattering class endlessly assured Christian bakers, restaurant-owners, photographers, and florists that Jesus would be totally down with making same-sex nuptials fabulous (and presumably, with paying the $135,000 fine for those who felt differently).

Then, in the wake of June’s gay “marriage” decision at the Supreme Court, we got an earful about how mean and un-Christian it would be not to attend same-sex “weddings.” (Wouldn’t you know it, we’ve been reading the Bible wrong all these centuries!) Then the Kim-pocalypse struck, and we were treated to smug editorials on how the Kentucky clerk’s faith represents the dark side of Christianity, while those who ignore tertiary topics like—say—God’s design for human sexuality in favor of social justice issues, are the good Christians. (I once was blind, but now I see!)

Sci-fi writers are nearly as bad. The one thing – the ONE thing – they know about Christian theology is John 8:1-10. Of course, apparently they never proceed to verse 11, which states: “go forth and sin no more.”

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.

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.

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.

Did I not say as much?

I have never claimed to be a conservative or a Republican. For some reason, a fair number of people seem to have trouble grasping this. But the real self-proclaimed conservatives don’t seem to have any trouble doing so, such as Mr. Marcus from yesterday’s post concerning his Federalist article.

David Marcus ‏@BlueBoxDave
So @voxday did a portrait of me, the good news is he disavows conservatism as there is no place in it for him.

Vox Day @voxday
You’re absolutely right. Unlike conservatives, I have principles beyond “don’t get called racist” and “incoming, surrender!”

David Marcus ‏@BlueBoxDave
Good luck with your American Nationalist movement. I can’t wait to see the outfits.

Vox Day @voxday
It’s fascinating to see conservatives devolve to imitating the left. You’ve got nothing they don’t do better. #cuckservative

David Marcus ‏@BlueBoxDave
Opposing racial discrimination is not a leftist position. It’s an American position.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
That’s absolute ahistorical bullshit. Anti-racism is anti-nationalism. Which, by definition, is anti-American. Your position is opposed to Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton, just for starters.

He didn’t read the book

SJWAL didn’t reach New Zealand in time to prevent one gentleman from cutting his company’s throat by apologizing:

On the company’s Facebook page Mr Garratt offered his apologies.

“We apologise to all those who have been offended by our sign. It was very poor judgment on our part.”

In an earlier post, he said there was no offence intended.

“It was not our intention to offend any people in the community … Cait is more then [sic] welcome to stay at my house with my family anytime. I will have a wine or a beer with her quite happily and it would be an honour.”

Rebecca Jones, the mother of a 9-year-old transgender boy, was not satisfied and wanted a “face-to-face apology”.

“He seems to think a donation is enough. It is not,” she said. “I want an apology to my 9-year-old son AND a donation, and the transgender community is behind me on this.”

Ms Jones said he was just trying to “save his reputation”.

Well, he’s not going to be able to do so. When you find yourself in a position of repeatedly apologizing to child abusers – and as Camille Paglia says, treating a child as if he is “transgender” is child abuse – that should be your first sign that your strategy is less than entirely effective.

What part of NEVER APOLOGIZE is hard to understand? When someone comes to you and demands an apology, there is only one correct response: “No, absolutely not.”

An apology to SJWs is no different than a confession to the police. It is not the end of the matter, it is something to be delivered to the prosecution.

Black Friday shooter

An active shooter at a Planned Parenthood Chase Bank in Colorado. 9 victims reported so far.

An active shooter was reported Friday near Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs.

The office is at 3480 Centennial Blvd.

Colorado Springs police, El Paso County Sheriff’s Office and Colorado State Patrol officers are responding to the scene.

3:17 p.m. UPDATE

Police confirm that officers and the suspect have exchanged gunfire inside the Planned Parenthood building.

The president of Planned Parenthood Vicki Cowart issues a statement: “At this time, our concern is for the safety of our patients, staff and law enforcement.”

One would assume it is abortion-related, but the fact that the shooter engaged with the police makes me wonder if it might be something else.

UPDATE: It looks like I was correct to be skeptical of the narrative.

So once again, the media sets the narrative and get exposed for the frauds they are. The original target of this shooter wasn’t Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, it was a Chase Bank. 

You can just hear all the network executives telling everyone to stand down, there’s no need to send any talking heads out to Colorado Springs.

UPDATE II: Now the police are saying that while the shooter was in the Planned Parenthood building, “the connection between the shooting and Planned Parenthood was not clear.” Also, none of the victims appear to be Planned Parenthood staff.

Counter-Currents interview

A transcript of my interview with Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents:

GJ: How would you describe your political philosophy and who are some of the intellectual influences on its formation?

VD: I would describe myself as a Christian Western Civilizationist. I’ve been a libertarian for a long time. I was briefly even a card-carrying libertarian. But I was always more of a small L libertarian rather than a capital L one. Mostly because there were certain amounts of libertarian dogma that didn’t quite work out in the real world. Then as time went on it became readily apparent to me as I traveled around the world, as I lived in different countries, as I learned different languages, it became apparent to me that the abstract ideals that we often tend to follow in America in particular are not really relevant to most of the world.

I was being interviewed by a reporter from Le Monde in Paris about two months ago and he had absolutely no idea how to even describe the concept of libertarian to his readers. That’s in France, which is at least Western civilization and so forth. Trying to have a conversation about that sort of concept in Japan or China is just totally meaningless. So, that’s when I really became more cognizant of the importance of the nationalist element.

I think that just as Stalin found it necessary to modify international socialism for the Russians and just as Mao found it necessary to modify international socialism for the Chinese, it’s necessary for every other ideology to also understand that there are nationalistic, tribalistic limits to the abstract application of those ideologies.

GJ: That’s interesting. I’m an ex-libertarian myself. I was not a card-carrying libertarian, but I subscribed to Reason magazine and read lots of Ayn Rand and Hayek and Mises mostly when I was an undergraduate. There were things that led me away from that.

Two books in particular. First, I read Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions and the other was Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, which basically destroyed my liberal optimism about humanity.

What are some of the things that you think don’t work about libertarianism? You said that some of the abstract libertarian dogmas just don’t work, so specifically what are those?

VD: Well, the most important one, as we are now seeing, is the free movement of peoples. What really changed my thinking and it was a process, you know, it wasn’t an immediate thing, although it was a fairly quick process now that I think about it . . . I grew up on Milton Friedman. My father had me reading Free to Choose when I was fairly young, and so I was a big free trade dogmatist and around the time of NAFTA and all that sort of thing I could recognize some of the problems but I bought into the line that the problem is that it’s not real free trade. It’s a free trade agreement, but it’s not real free trade.

Then I read a really good book by Ian Fletcher, and he directly addressed the concept of Ricardo’s comparative advantage, and he really destroyed it. I think he had something like seven major problems with it, and that got me interested, so I started looking into it. I’m very fortunate in that I have a pretty active and intelligent blog readership and they really like to engage and they have absolutely no respect for me so they’re quite happy to argue with me.

Most of them were free-traders as well so we ended up having an on-going two or three week debate about free trade, and it got pretty detailed to the extent that I went through Henry Hazlitt’s entire chapter on free trade just to look at it critically rather than just reading through it and accepting it. Just looking at the arguments. I found that the free trade arguments were just full of holes. Not just Ricardo’s, but also Hazlitt’s. That’s what got me realizing that Ricardo’s argument was totally dependent on the idea that capital could move but labor couldn’t and so what that got me thinking about was the fact that a libertarian society – even if we could convince everyone in the United States that libertarianism was the correct way to approach things – would rapidly be eliminated by the free movement of peoples as people from non-libertarian societies, people from cultures where they have absolutely no ideals that are in common with the Founding Fathers or with libertarian ideals, would rapidly be able to come in and end that libertarian society in much the same way that the Californians have gone into Colorado and completely changed the political climate there.

So, Ian Fletcher’s book is what really triggered that whole shift in thought process. Now I look at the concept of the free movement of peoples, free trade, and those sorts of concepts with a considerable amount of skepticism. Of course, in Europe we’re seeing some of those problems related to the idea of the free movement of peoples just as you see it in the States with the Central Americans coming across the border.

Read the rest of it there. One factual update: the landmark Martin van Creveld essay mentioned will not be appearing in Riding the Red Horse Vol. 2 since I made the mistake of showing it to Jerry Pournelle, who promptly stole it for There Will Be War Vol. X.