Tag: politics

Donald Trump: democratic socialist

As I said before, Sarah’s take on these things is always amusing:

The
blogger has never understood the difference between European right and
American right.  Not stupid but strangely culturally blind — and
COMPLETELY misunderstood it. I mean, amazingly, bizarrely misunderstood.

What I find funny about this is that Sarah goes on and on and on about how no one can
possibly understand Europe, or European politics, except her (because
poor village in Portugal), when the easily confirmed fact of the matter
is that she doesn’t even understand what America is. And her logic is amusingly specious: she understands the danger that Donald Trump poses to America better than everyone else because Portugal.

Do you see what I mean about immigrants? They don’t even understand how their basic perspective is intrinsically foreign. They are fish wondering what this water of which you speak might be.

Now, she is right about one thing. I will not be Portuguese or Italian or German no matter how long I live in Europe. Here, you can move from a neighboring village that is a 10-minute walk away and you will always be stranieri to the locals. But what Sarah fails to understand is that she is no more American than I am Portuguese. She is a US resident, perhaps even a US citizen, but she is not an American. America is not an idea. America is not a concept. America is not a proposition nation. One cannot, contra her past assertions, become a genuine American just because one happens to believe one thinks a certain way.

Now, an immigrant may have a recognizably American spirit, just as it is possible for an American expat to have an Italian spirit, a Swiss spirit, a French spirit, or a Portuguese spirit, and even to have it recognized by the natives as such. But that does not make one any more an American than it makes one Italian, Swiss, French, or Portuguese.

The notion that America is nothing more than an idea is a modern one, a 20th century invention, and a fiction which immigration advocates hell-bent on replacing Americans with immigrants like Sarah herself, advocates such as George W. Bush and Barack Obama, have repeatedly attempted to sell to the public. Had she read Cuckservative, she would know this. Even the famous “melting pot” to which many so often appeal is a romantic 19th century invention of a Russian Jew who lived in Britain. It has nothing to do with America, Americans, or American history.

And
the fact is that I know the difference between the European right and
the American right much, much better than she does. I even happen to be acquainted with some of the various players on both sides of the
Atlantic.

As for Donald Trump being a Democrat and a
socialist, well, I can testify that he was not only at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans in 1988, but he sat right behind me in George H.W. Bush’s personal suite the night Bush
accepted the Republican nomination. He even apologized to me for nearly putting his shoe on my shoulder when he crossed his legs.

I doubt Sarah realizes how few of the
major players on either side of the aisle actually care in the slightest about their party’s platforms or official ideologies; they are in the political game for power and money. Trump
is no more a socialist than the self-styled “Houston Mafia” that surrounded Bush the Elder were; he doesn’t have any more ideological bones in his body than did
Bush ’41 or Bush ’43. Sarah talks about Trump’s connections to the Clintons, but what she doesn’t grasp is that the entire corporate-political elite is connected. Bill Clinton is closer to the Bush family than he is to Trump; in fact, it’s entirely possible that Trump’s connection to both Clintons is through the Bush family.

Is Trump going to govern like Obama? Or like the Bushes? Perhaps in many ways, but unlike the other Republican candidates, that is unlikely in regards to the only issue that matters at the moment: immigration. Trump is the only one talking about a wall, talking about stopping Muslim immigration, and even talking about deportations. And that, I strongly suspect, is the real fear of Trump opponents like Sarah. It’s not that they think he will govern like Obama on immigration and the American national interest, but they fear that he won’t.

That is why Trump is the only candidate who is worth supporting in 2016, despite being a member of the corporate-political elite, because he is an unpredictable rogue member of it and the only one that might – MIGHT – make a positive difference in the near future in the American national interest. Of course, he also may well not, but we already know beyond any shadow of a doubt that none of the other candidates are worth a damn.

He isn’t an ideal candidate, he probably isn’t even a good candidate, and he certainly isn’t a trustworthy candidate, but nevertheless, at this point, he is the only possible candidate.

A pernicious influence

Or so they say. This exchange over at Sarah Hoyt’s is both illuminating and amusing. It even features a rare appearance by Dr. Jerry Pournelle. Anyhow, they’re worrying about Donald Trump and America turning too far to the “right”, by which it appears they mean an America that is genuinely nationalist, cognizant of its own interests, and concerned about its own survival:

accordingtohoyt
I speak enough with millenials in private to see even the left ones “turn” – ya’ll are going to end up like my generation in Portugal. They pushed leftism on us every chance. And we ran right as fast as we could.

Foxfier
That’s what worries me. Rand was right about what was wrong, but wrong about what was right. (Mangled Chesterton, there.) There are a lot of other directions besides “right.” Mostly just tired of getting kicked by the people who didn’t manage to stop this from happening because we haven’t magically fixed it before 35.

accordingtohoyt
Yeah, a lot of them are becoming like VD. “Everything the leftists say is a lie, so racism, sexism, etc. must have a point.” Head>desk.

Joe in PNG   
So, in order to avoid the ditch on the “Left” side of the road, they are aiming right straight at the ditch on the “Right” side of the road. Either way, you wind up with a totaled car.

overgrownhobbit
VD doesn’t go far enough. Everything the vileprogs advocate needs to be re-examined down to the ground-level assumptions. Stopping part way just leaves one with bits of prog stupid rattling round the mental furnishings and gumming up the philosophy. Like mistaking an is for an ought.

Still have hope for the guy. He’s got some sound foundations, and he’s right more often than wrong.

Now, I like Sarah and I think that her heart is in the right place, but I can only conclude that she has either failed to accurately observe the current situation or to think the matter through sufficiently.

What she, and many conservatives, have yet to grasp is that classical liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, free trade, constitutionalism, and a whole host of other 18th century concepts that were largely theoretical as well as being near and dear to our hearts have fundamentally failed.

Technology and events have fundamentally changed the way we must now think about these things; the logical cases that were laid out by the various 18th century Enlightenment thinkers are now subject to the analysis of more than 200 years of readily available data. Let the cult of reason be silent when experience and history gainsay its conclusions.

I’m not reacting to the Left. I’m not a reactionary and I’m not reacting to anything except considerably more information than the likes of Smith, Ricardo, Jefferson, Voltaire, or even Mises, Friedman, and Rothbard ever had.

My thinking has changed dramatically because of what I have witnessed over the last four decades. We are still much the same humanity that we always were, but we live in a radically different world today. It was one thing to posture grandly about free trade and the free movement of peoples back in the 1800s, or even the 1970s, it is another to do so when a nation’s entire industrial base can be dismantled or the population of an entire nations can literally pick up and move across a continent without anyone, anywhere, so much as lifting a finger to stop them.

Contra Sarah, Trump is neither the potential problem nor is he the solution. What he offers is one last chance to get it right. That’s all. He will buy America a little more time to find itself again, to find itself and embrace the strong, self-confidence of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant American nationalism that made the USA a world power and turned it into a place to which people around the world wanted to come.

But they are on the verge of killing the golden goose because they are not, and they never will be, the kind of Americans who built America. Read Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America. Their ideas about America’s history and America’s founding are little more than romanticized fairy tales. They think they are extending and expanding on the founding concepts when in truth they have perverted them.

Race does matter. Sex does matter. Nationality does matter. Not because the Left lies about these things, but because they are materially and objectively significant. The romantic Right is outdated, ill-informed, and intellectually irrelevant. Here is a hint: if you’re even mentioning the word “mercantilism”, you are arguing against nationalist Frenchmen dead 300 years, not the nationalist Mil-Right of today.

Mailvox: why turn your back on conservatives

Doc Rampage doesn’t understand why I’m not courting conservatives in building a new social media alternative:

The words in parenthesis are not inherent characteristics of the group, but are prominent in the current environment.

    Left: envy, greed, (hatred)
    Conservatives: justice, propriety, (resentment)
    libertarians: pride, rationality
    Alt-right: clannishness, loyalty, (spite)

The Left is always talking egalitarian, but a Leftist never passes up a chance to get ahead of his fellows and they are always trying to create hierarchies with themselves on top. This is because they only want egalitarianism due to envy–they don’t want anyone to have an advantage they don’t have.

Everyone hates conservatives for being unreliable political partners. The reason is that their primary loyalty is not to a group but to abstract principles like justice, and they will follow their idea of justice even at the group’s expense, or even at their own expense.

Libertarians are drawn to their beliefs in large part because they think that starting on a completely level playing field, they would come out near the top. Many of them are right–they tend to be intelligent and well-educated. But their pride in their own ability makes them unable to sympathize with the fact that most people need social support of various kinds.

As to the alt-right, it is clannishness and spite that drives someone on the alt-right to capriciously insult conservatives in a message where they might instead be finding common ground and help in a common cause, driving them away instead of inviting them to help.

It’s interesting to see how Doc Rampage’s observations are so perspicacious while his conclusions about the alt-right are so wrong. It’s not spite that causes me to turn my back on conservatives, but rather, the very conservative unreliability he points out that is why I have no interest in finding common ground with them. They are worse than useless; it would be a tremendous mistake to rely upon them because they are unreliable.

Moreover, as Red Eagle and I showed in Cuckservative, conservatives don’t actually have any principles. They think they do, but what they really have is an attitude; one can hardly call it a philosophy. That’s why conservatives are forever going on about who is “electable” or which candidate is “serious”; those are not the words of abstract thinkers who reject pragmatism in the name of principle.

Even their oft-proclaimed self-definitions are unreliable.

If there are conservatives who want to help because what I’m doing will better serve their abstract principles than the alternatives, that’s great, but I’m not going to depend upon their support because I don’t trust them one little bit. I will place my trust in those who have repeatedly shown they have my back, in those who will not bug out the first time they get called names by SJWs or decide they don’t completely approve of my every word or action.

What are the VFM? What are the Dread Ilk? Are they conservative? Are they libertarian? Are they alt-right? I neither know nor care. What I know is that they will be there when called. They will show up when needed. They are implacably opposed to my ideological enemies. And that’s all I need to know.

Conservapedia is a good demonstration of what a social media project that relies upon conservatives looks like.

South Carolina results

This is the open thread to discuss the results in South Carolina and Nevada. On the Democratic side, I understand Fox has called Nevada for Hillary Clinton, but it’s close.

UPDATE: Fox News is running a non-stop commercial for Ted Cruz in the last 30 minutes of the SC polls being open. Doubt it will do them any good at this point. But it’s good to know who the cuckservatives are pulling for now.

UPDATE 2: “Preliminary exit poll results indicate that three-quarters of the
state’s primary voters support temporarily banning Muslims who are not
U.S. citizens from entering the United States. That’s even more than the
support for this proposal among GOP voters in New Hampshire, 65 percent
– a core support group for Trump in that state.”

UPDATE 3: Decision Desk has Trump winning at 32.8 percent with 44.4 percent reporting. Fox News has called South Carolina for Trump. Now the only question is how big he will win it.

So much for Trump being finished in Iowa….

I enjoyed this exchange with GOP media guy Rick Wilson:

Rick Wilson ‏@TheRickWilson
Anything less than 50% is a huge loss for @realDonaldTrump  #SCPrimary

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
You’d say anything short of collective mass suicide by the other candidates was a huge loss for Trump.

Rick Wilson ‏@TheRickWilson
LOL grow a sense of humor, Vox.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
So you didn’t think the idea that the SC mall shooter was a deranged Jeb Bush triggered by Trump’s victory was funny?

Rick Wilson
‏I have no idea what you’re on about.

For some reason, my sense of humor frequently goes unrecognized.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
Active shooter reported at South Carolina mall. Wow, @realDonaldTrump’s success is really getting to @JebBush!

Put a cassock in it, Your Holiness

Not being Catholic, I don’t pay much attention to Pope Francis, but I’m beginning to see why so many Catholics are not at all happy with him.

‘A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,’ Francis said in answer to a specific question about Trump’s views. ‘This is not in the gospel.’

Asked if American Catholics should vote for someone with Trump’s views, Francis said: ‘I am not going to get involved in that. I say only that this man is not Christian if he has said things like that.

‘We must see if he said things in that way and in this I give the benefit of the doubt.’

As you can imagine, Donald Trump’s response was appropriately withering:

‘If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened.

ISIS would have been eradicated unlike what is happening now with our all talk, no action politicians.

The Mexican government and its leadership has made many disparaging remarks about me to the Pope, because they want to continue to rip off the United States, both on trade and at the border, and they understand I am totally wise to them.

The Pope only heard one side of the story – he didn’t see the crime, the drug trafficking and the negative economic impact the current policies have on the United States. He doesn’t see how Mexican leadership is outsmarting President Obama and our leadership in every aspect of negotiation.

For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful. I am proud to be a Christian and as President I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened, unlike what is happening now, with our current President.

At this rate, Trump is going to end up being the first man being elected both President and Pope.

Big swing, bigger miss

I like Ace. But I think he has gone very aft agley on this most recent pronouncement concerning the latest imminent demise of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign:

I think Trump hurt himself badly tonight, enough to knock him out of his first-place standing in most states. Oh he won’t completely disappear — but 2nd Place Trump is not the same thing as Frontrunner Trump.

Trump damaged himself with his claim that Bush lied us into war in Iraq. Not botched the intelligence, not read too much into thin intelligence.

Most Republicans, I think, would agree that that.

No, Trump claimed that Bush deliberately lied us into war.

First, this is alarming because it once again demonstrates that Trump has a conspiratorial mind. It’s not enough for the conspiracist to say someone was wrong — no, they have unrealistically black/white minds, and if you made a bad call, you must have lied.

That conspiracism was always present in his claims about Obama’s birth certificate. But that bit of fantasy was about Obama, someone the average Republican voter isn’t exactly eager to man the battlements for.

This corker — this Al Gore roar of quote — is about George W. Bush, someone still looked upon with affection by most of the party.

Which brings us to the second problem.

If Donald Trump is right, and George W. Bush deliberately schemed with his neo-con advisers to “lie” us into a phony war with Iraq, what does that say about the average Republican voter who supported Bush from 1999, voted for him, defended him through the recount, cried with him on 9/11, agreed with him on Iraq, defended him from ceaseless liberal attacks on him during the war, defended him from Obama’s never-expiring “Blame Bush” blame-shifting, etc.?

If Trump is right, then we’re not just wrong to have supported him. If Trump’s right, we’re goddamned rubes and fools to have defended this Actual Hitler-Level Monster for going on 17 years now.

My first response is yes, you were all goddamned rubes and fools to have supported George W. Bush and the invasion/occupation of Iraq. I said so 12 years ago. I was right then, and Donald Trump is right now.

And my second response is to observe that there is already a candidate who is a proxy for the affection George W. Bush enjoys in the party, namely, his brother Jeb Bush. And Jeb has the support of about one percent of the party.

So, I very much doubt that the Republican voters are anywhere nearly as ego-invested in George W. Bush as Ace’s argument requires.

Shadowbanned by SJWs

Twitter knows the SJWs can’t win on a level playing field, which is why they are attempting to silence the influential voices of the social media Right:

Rumours that Twitter has begun ‘shadowbanning’ politically inconvenient users have been confirmed by a source inside the company, who spoke exclusively to Breitbart Tech. His claim was corroborated by a senior editor at a major publisher.

According to the source, Twitter maintains a ‘whitelist’ of favoured Twitter accounts and a ‘blacklist’ of unfavoured accounts. Accounts on the whitelist are prioritised in search results, even if they’re not the most popular among users. Meanwhile, accounts on the blacklist have their posts hidden from both search results and other users’ timelines.

Our source was backed up by a senior editor at a major digital publisher, who told Breitbart that Twitter told him it deliberately whitelists and blacklists users. He added that he was afraid of the site’s power, noting that his tweets could disappear from users’ timelines if he got on the wrong side of the company.

Shadowbanning, sometimes known as “Stealth Banning” or “Hell Banning,” is commonly used by online community managers to block content posted by spammers. Instead of banning a user directly (which would alert the spammer to their status, prompting them to create a new account), their content is merely hidden from public view.

For site owners, the ideal shadowban is when a user never realizes he’s been shadowbanned.

However, Twitter isn’t merely targeting spammers. For weeks, users have been reporting that tweets from populist conservatives, members of the alternative right, cultural libertarians, and other anti-PC dissidents have disappeared from their timelines.

Among the users complaining of shadowbans are sci-fi author and alt-right figurehead Vox Day, geek culture blogger “Daddy Warpig,” and the popular pro-Trump account Ricky Vaughn. League of Gamers founder and former World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern, as well as adult actress and anti-censorship activist Mercedes Carrera, have also reported that their tweets are not appearing on the timelines of their followers.

It’s pretty easy to tell when you’re being shadowbanned because your notifications decline dramatically. It’s also easy to see it in the 28-day profile.

Notice how despite the number of tweets being flat and the number of followers increasing, the number of impressions and profile visits dropped significantly at precisely the same time. As it happens, that’s right when I noticed my notifications declining and people began letting me know that they weren’t seeing my tweets.

The reason mentions don’t drop as heavily is because for an account with less than 10,000 followers, many of my mentions are not made in response to my tweets and are therefore not affectived by the shadowban.

But never fear. Alternatives are on the way.

Portrait of a leader

The reason Trump is dominating the other Republican candidates is that he is the only one who is actually a leader of men. The others are politicians, which is a very different skill set. Look at how Trump not only shows that loyalty runs in both directions, but insists on letting them speak for themselves.

Now THAT is a man of the people in action.

Hillary hides in the closet

It’s hardly a secret that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian. I remember an interview that Hannity and Colmes did with Gennifer Flowers during the Lewinsky scandal when she quite flatly stated that Hillary was of a Sapphic orientation – hardly a surprise when you consider Hillary’s alma mater – and I have never seen a show go faster to a commercial before or since.

But it is apparent that people in Arkansas who are aware of her orientation are considerably less afraid of the the Clinton machine than they were, as more and more people are speaking openly to the press about what everyone in Little Rock circles has known for decades. Such as, for example, another Arkansas woman who had an affair with Bill Clinton:

The twice-divorced 77-year-old took to social media in recent weeks to post an extraordinary warning that if she dies by ‘suicide’ no-one should believe it.

When Daily Mail Online visited Miller at her Arkansas home she insisted she had been stalked, spied upon and plagued by anonymous phone calls since word of her memoir leaked out.

‘She doesn’t care what I say about Bill, that’s old news,’ Miller told Daily Mail Online. ‘But I think she wonders what Bill told me. I think she wonders how much I know about her that came from Bill.

‘With the election coming up she can’t afford any sort of loose end. She’s the closest thing you can imagine to Al Capone. I don’t think she is going to rest until she puts me to rest.’

And what of those accusations so insulting or damaging that a potential Presidential candidate would unleash her operatives to intimidate or even bump off an elderly lady?

‘Hillary is a lesbian,’ Miller claims, reigniting a lingering but unsubstantiated rumor that has dogged the former First Lady for years.

Frankly, I’m surprised that anyone might still believe that Hillary is straight. One look at those pantsuits she favors would be sufficient evidence to convict in any court of law.

Obama makes a list

He’s getting ready for the Supreme Court appointment battle in the Senate:

Moving quickly to begin the process of filling the unexpected vacancy on the Supreme Court bench, President Obama spent much of the weekend compiling a shortlist of gay, transsexual abortion doctors to replace the late Antonin Scalia, White House sources confirmed Monday. “These are all exemplary candidates with strong homosexual values and proven records of performing partial-birth abortions, but am I missing anyone?” Obama reportedly asked himself while reviewing his list of queer, gender-nonconforming, feminist Planned Parenthood employees, all of whom were also said to be black immigrants. “I definitely have enough post-op transsexuals on the list, but it is a little light on pre-op candidates. And I should probably add a cop killer or two on here just to round out my options.”

Sources later confirmed that Obama was attempting to rapidly narrow the list down to the single best nominee to submit to the Senate in hopes of wrapping up confirmation hearings before his choice had to leave to attend the Hajj pilgrimage.

In related news, Majority Leader “Vichy” Mitch McConnell refused to reveal his plans for the upcoming Republican surrender in the Senate. “We haven’t decided exactly how, or how fast, we’re going to collapse,” the U.S. Senator from Kentucky said. “Perhaps just a few of us will bravely cross the aisle and join the Democrats in supporting whatever illiterate, homeless person of color is put up for the Court by the President, or maybe we’ll go all in and stab the grass roots in the back en masse. We’re still working out the strategy.”

When asked if he, personally, had held the pillowcase over the late Justice Scalia’s face, Sen. McConnell shook his head before replying, “No comment.”