Tag: politics

Prepare to be disappointed

The Western media’s blind faith in democracy and magic negroes would be almost touching if it wasn’t so… blitheringly stupid:

Nothing invigorates democracy more than an incumbent’s defeat. In that and other respects, challenger Muhammadu Buhari’s win over President Goodluck Jonathan represents a potentially transformative moment for Nigeria — a victory by the opposition in Africa’s biggest economy. It may begin Nigeria’s first peaceful transition of power between political parties since independence from the U.K. in 1960.

The aftermath of Nigeria’s last presidential election, also between Buhari and Jonathan, was marred by violence that tapped divisions between north and south and Christians and Muslims. Thankfully, this time, President Jonathan has already called Buhari to congratulate him. That said, the first task facing Buhari, a former Muslim general from the north who had taken power after a military coup in the 1980s, will be to persuade Jonathan’s supporters that his campaign pledges to fight corruption and crime and restore growth are not a cover for settling old scores. One of Buhari’s former critics, the writer Wole Soyinka, believes Buhari when he says that he has shed his authoritarian past and become a “born again” democrat. Let’s hope they’re both right.

This reads as if it’s written tongue-in-cheek. A country with a Muslim insurgency just elected a Muslim who formerly led a military coup and we’re supposed to anticipate a positive outcome here?

I’m not saying it’s impossible, merely that it is unlikely. After all, the violence after the last election was because Mr. Buhari lost.

Spy vs spy

The latest revelations of Israeli spying on the USA may, in part, account for the increasing indifference the White House and the Democratic Party are showing to Israeli interests:

It is – rightfully – front-page news that Israel was caught spying on the closed-door negotiations between the U.S. and Iran. And the Obama administration is particularly outraged that Israel allegedly shared that information with Republican congressmen who want to stop any peaceful deal with Iran.

This is certainly outrageous … but small, in the grand scheme of things.

Why? Because Israeli spying on America is so rampant that U.S. officials have labeled it “alarming, even terrifying”.

And because the U.S. has only half-heartedly asked Israel to stop … Israel has told the U.S. to pound sand. As if that isn’t bad enough, the NSA voluntarily shares the raw data it collects on American citizens with Israel. This includes raw data on U.S. government officials.   This not only raises major privacy concerns for American citizens, but it might mean that Israel is spying on the American Congress and other high-level politicians.

Indeed, leaked NSA documents show that U.S. intelligence officials are concerned that the NSA may be putting Israel’s security needs ahead of America’s.

If true, the NSA is only doing what Tom Friedman does. I had to laugh after reading the conclusion of his article in the New York Times today:

So before you make up your mind on the Iran deal, ask how it affects
Israel, the country most threatened by Iran. But also ask how it fits
into a wider U.S. strategy aimed at quelling tensions in the Middle East
with the least U.S. involvement necessary and the lowest oil prices
possible.

This is rather remarkably blunt. Apparently US interests are now supposed to be an afterthought for Americans. Of course, it’s a little difficult for the US government to convincingly affect much outrage about Israeli spying, when the US is so actively spying on the rest of the world.

Understanding feminazis

I’ve always said that calling a feminist a feminazi was an insult to the German National Socialist Workers Party. Now a Firefox plugin makes that clear by translating feminist hate-speech into the original German:

“Not a coincidence it’s always zionists and jews committing mass shootings. The pattern is connected to ideas of zionism in our culture.”
– Anita Sarkeesian.

“All mainstream press of Judaisms, no matter how fair-minded the
writers try to be, has ended up concluding that they are, in fact, a
bunch of smelly Jews who are delusional at best and manipulative abusers
at worst.”
– Amanda Marcotte

“A radical fix to the world’s wage gap: why not just pay Aryans more – and pay Jews less?”
– Jessica Valenti

“The saddest thing for an Aryan to do is to dumb themselves down for a Jew.”
– Emma Watson 

It’s always very important to understand what one’s enemies are really saying, after all.

Wearing Murdoch’s leash

Fox News may be better than the ABCNNBCBS cabal, but don’t ever mistake them for the good guys, or even being reliably pro-American. And they do NOT like criticism coming from the nationalist right:

The blogger Mickey Kaus has quit his job at The Daily Caller after the conservative site’s editor-in-chief, Tucker Carlson, pulled a critical column about Fox News from the site, Kaus told the On Media blog on Tuesday.

“It’s pretty simple,” Kaus said in an interview, “I wrote a piece attacking Fox for not being the opposition on immigration and amnesty — for filling up the airwaves with reports on ISIS and terrorism, and not fulfilling their responsibility of being the opposition on amnesty and immigration…. I posted it at 6:30 in the morning. When I got up, Tucker had taken it down. He said, ‘We can’t trash Fox on the site. I work there.'”

Carlson, who co-founded The Daily Caller in 2010, is a conservative contributor to Fox News and the host of its weekend edition of “Fox & Friends.”

Kaus says when he told Carlson he needed to be able to write about Fox, Carlson told him it was a hard-and-fast rule, and non-negotiable.

“He said it was a rule, and he wouldn’t be able to change that rule. So I told him I quit,” Kaus explained. “I just don’t see how you can put out a publication with that kind of giant no-go area. It’s not like we’re owned by Joe’s Muffler Shop, so we just can’t write about Joe’s Muffler shop.”

This is entirely par for the Fox News course. Ten years ago I was writing a book called Media Whores that was signed to Thomas Nelson. The executives were very upset when they discovered that it wasn’t only about the media whores of the Left, but contained chapters about Michelle Malkin and Bill O’Reilly as well.

The official line about the sudden cancellation was that the book wasn’t expected to sell well enough to justify the marketing. However, I was told by someone inside the organization, who was definitely in a position to know what really happened, that the outline and sample chapters I’d provided were shown to Fox, who indicated that they would prefer that it was not published. So, the book was duly canceled six weeks after the contract was signed, although I did get paid for it.

This was not my only experience of this variety. And perhaps you’ll understand that my disregard for mainstream publishers is not entirely rooted in my disdain for the SJW gatekeepers in SF/F.

The Left devours itself

The long-anticipated breakdown of the Rainbow Coalition has begun on both sides of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, the White Minority has not really even begun to get into the game. But give them time.

I am a “lefty”. I have voted Labour all my life. I believe in the
abolition of public schools and the inviolability of the NHS, and that
the renewal of Trident is a vanity project. I believe the state must
work to ensure equality of opportunity for all: women, the LBGT
“community”, those with disabilities, those of minority cultures and
ethnicities, and the working class. The Guardian has been my newspaper
forever. I was glad to see the back of the Sun’s Page 3, and I believe
there should be more all-women shortlists for parliamentary seats. I
believe immigration is more of a positive force than a negative one.

However, you might be less certain about my status when I finish
laying out my stall. Because I find myself holding a “transgressive”
body of beliefs and doubts alongside my blue-chip leftwing ones that are
liable to get me branded a misogynist, an Islamophobe and a Little
Englander – at least by people on my Twitter feed, and others of my peer
group…. My stance on these issues makes some people in my “tribe” very angry. It is the anger of the pure believer towards the apostate….

One very key element of the liberal left has long been under threat: its liberalism – that is, its willingness to debate with anything outside a narrow range of opinions within its own walls. And the more scary and incomprehensible the world becomes, the more debate is replaced by edict and prejudice: literally pre-judging. Identity politics is one of the most significant developments of the last 50 years, but it has led to nerves being exposed in a way they rarely were by economic issues. Because identity is less about politics and more about that most sensitive of human constructions, the protection of the self – both group and individual.

And the more it becomes about the protection of self, the less it becomes about the back and forth of rational argument. All the beliefs, opinions and doubts I hold are just that: they are ideas, not ironclad convictions. I am not certain about any of them, and am quite willing to change my mind, as I have done many times in the past. But I will not alter them if I am faced with invective rather than debate; in fact, they will become more entrenched.

Meanwhile, in America, the low-intensity power struggle between blacks and browns stretches from Compton, California to Baltimore, Maryland:

A plan that would dedicate two public high schools in suburban Washington to immigrants and students struggling with English is pitting black and Hispanic communities -– usually allies — against one another.

The Prince George’s County, Md., chapter of the NAACP is strongly opposing the plan — which would take effect next school year, and cover about 800 students having English language difficulties — claiming it will pull resources from other students and unfairly redistribute them to Hispanic students. Some critics go so far as to compare the plan to segregation.

“It’s a slap in the face,” Bob Ross, president of the Prince George’s County branch of the NAACP, told FoxNews.com.

Ross believes the proposal to open two new schools violates the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that ruled separate schools for black and white students violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. 

“It risks turning Prince George’s County into a segregated school system,” Ross said, adding that he realizes the need for better education in the county but believes it should not come at the cost of existing students.

Latino advocacy group CASA de Maryland sees it differently. The group, which has pushed for the schools, argues that it’s not a violation of the Constitution because the schools are not mandatory and are being built to provide options to immigrants.

One thing that most white people have almost religiously failed to grasp is that Hispanics dislike blacks considerably more than whites do. They completely lack both white guilt and white paternalism, and they view blacks as their primary economic and political competition. As Hispanics begin to bring their numbers to bear on both fronts, they are going to ruthlessly crush the traditional sinecures that white liberals have carved out for their black supporters.

CPAC results

25.7            Sen. Rand Paul
21.4            Gov. Scott Walker
11.5            Sen. Ted Cruz
11.4            Dr. Ben Carson
8.3             Former Gov. Jeb Bush
4.3             Former Sen. Rick Santorum
3.7             Sen. Marco Rubio
3.5             Donald Trump
3.0             Carly Fiorina
2.8             Gov. Chris Christie
1.1             Former Gov. Rick Perry

One the one hand, it’s clear that conservatives have no patience for another “electable” moderate who will lose the general election. On the other hand, 11.4 percent for an anti-gun token black candidate indicates that a lot of them are still more concerned about being called racists than they are about winning elections.

From r to K: the end of post-scarcity

Anonymous Conservative’s take on Donglerape and #GamerGate:

I just kept seeing this scenario, as I read through Vox’s post here. First, this woman’s amygdala is so accustomed to total ease and control that a guy makes a dongle joke to a friend at a computer conference, and she immediately takes offense. That is an amygdala unaccustomed to harshness. Then she asserts to the interviewer that she tweeted her horror, out of a fear that the guy sitting five rows away was going to rape her, in the middle of a conference of 2000 computer geeks. The interviewer asks why she didn’t think any of the 2,000 other conference goers would stop the rape and her response is that they are all white males, as if they might rape her too, for good measure, all because she is a black Jewish female. The narcissism, self absorption, and expectation that everyone give her whatever she wants has to be read to be believed.

You can tell, the way she says “I’m a black Jewish female,” over and over, that she has used that phrase a lot. In the context she applies it, it isn’t a logical, thought-out response. It is a conditioned response thrown out in response to any threat or challenge – the type of response which can only be conditioned through frequent repetition when resources are free, and everyone avoids the fight….

What these incidents should show you, is that we are beginning the transition from r to K, and the rules are changing. Gamergate is a great accomplishment, but it required motivation, and motivation required irritation. If this were the dot-com boom, I suspect those gamers would have been too busy making money and partaking of other sources of pleasure, to unite together and mount a fight. Games would have deteriorated as everything does under r-selection, but the gamers would have found bliss elsewhere, and left gaming until it got better again.

Yet now, all it takes is a single web post somewhere to set off an army of angry warriors, obsessed with justice and right. Feminists like this bimbo used to dominate only because people avoided the fight, but now there are so many people itching to fight that they are looking for fights in other people’s battles. This is a big change, and we are not all that resource-restricted yet. Wait until the economic system collapses. The rage will be epic, and rabbits will run.

The rabbits are noticing this rule change now, even though it is so minor, and it is tripping their conflict-avoidance circuitry. Scalzi, the pied rabbit piper, sees his blog traffic plummeting as his followers retreat into the shadows, even as Vox’s traffic breaks new records. Blue SF is beginning to realize the gains in its economic muscle as it advances on pink SF. In American politics, Democrats are trying to figure out what to stand for to avoid getting destroyed in the future. And legions of little tyrants like the bimbo in Vox’s post are noticing that their social attacks are generating very real counter-attacks, making them begin to retreat from their side as well.

Being rooted as it is in an outmoded theory of evolution, r/K theory may sound more than a little alien, if not lunatic. But it is a remarkably useful explanatory, and at times, even predictive model. I highly recommend AC’s book, so much so that we recently began selling it in the Castalia House store.

Read the whole linked post, as he explains why an abundance of resources favors the rabbits and creates a false impression of reality with them. They are fearless and eager to engage in the posturing and verbal interplay that for them, passes for conflict, failing to realize that the only reason they aren’t being ripped limb-from-limb and devoured is because it’s less trouble for the wolves to simply go somewhere else where they can live in peace.

#GamerGate erupted because there is nowhere else to go. The demon-rabbits have invaded the Last Redoubt; Anita Sarkeesian calls herself a “gamer” and the likes of Zoe Quinn and John Scalzi even fancy themselves “game developers” now. They simply won’t leave us alone, and so we have no choice but to fight back simply to be able to do what we have always done, which is to make the games we want to make and play the games we want to play. As AC noted, the same thing is true of science fiction. After being being offered book contracts that were subsequently pulled or violated on purely political grounds by three different publishers, it became apparent that I would be better off simply starting my own publishing company. Now Castalia House is growing as fast as we are able to edit the books and authors are contacting us specifically because they know we will publish things that the r-selected mainstream publishers will not. And even after a record year with over 15 million pageviews, site traffic here is up an average of 35 percent in 2015; thanks to you, we’re presently on target to exceed 21 million this year.

The transition from r to K is in the process of taking place on a much larger scale as well. The white flight of the last fifty years, first to the suburbs, then to the exurbs, is no longer possible. Everywhere from South Africa to Vancouver, formerly white communities are being invaded by rainbow hordes of orcs who would rather live among white people than among their own kind. Once the land resources are scarce and there is no longer a choice between retreat and conflict, then conflict will inevitably begin. Whites aren’t unable to engage in the sort of ethnic cleansing that Hispanics are already engaging in across the Southwestern United States (look at the demographic history of Compton sometime; it is borderline mind-blowing to anyone who associates it with NWA), but tend to be reluctant to engage in it because they are too efficient and lethal at it. These furious attempts to enforce diversity by thought police are actually a harbinger of the ongoing transition.

The rabbits can sense the wolves beginning to turn on them, and quite rightly, they are afraid. Don’t forget who they truly are and what they have done.

93 percent corrupt

Apparently it’s very, very profitable running political “non-profits” these days:

Right Wing News hired a researcher who spent more than a month researching 17 conservative PACs so we could do a special report. What we found was shocking.

* The bottom 10 performing PACs we researched spent $54,318,498 overall and yet only paid out $3,621,896 to candidates.

* Did you know that despite the fact that it raised a staggering 13 million dollars, The National Draft Ben Carson for President isn’t affiliated with Ben Carson and the small percentage of money they spent on independent expenditures didn’t go to him? Now you know why Ben Carson’s business manager, Armstrong Williams wouldn’t allow the group’s campaign director to take a picture with Carson and said, “People giving money think it’s going to Dr. Carson and it’s not. …Our hands are tied. We don’t want people exploited.”

* The Republican Mainstreet Partnership is getting an enormous amount of union money.

“Labor unions provided significant funding for the (Republican Main Street Partnership) with Working for Working Americans, the International Union of Operating Engineers, and the Laborers International Union of North America all contributing around $250,000. The United Transportation Union ($30,000), Seafarers International Union ($20,000), were joined by the Teamsters, Air Line Pilots Association, International Association of Firefighters, and various other unions who contributed $10,000.  SEIU contributed $5,000, as did the Laborers Union, the Transport Workers Union and various others.”

In conclusion, “One of the things I realized while I was putting this report together is that perhaps the biggest reason grassroots candidates have been having trouble breaking through in recent years is because such a large percentage of the money that was intended for them is being siphoned off to vendors, wasted, and just plain old pocketed by people in these PACs.”

I’d like to be able to say that I was shocked, but I’m not even a little bit surprised. The only thing that is remarkable is the percentage of the skimming. That’s taking 93.3 percent off the top! They’re even worse than their sob-sister cousin charities; apparently fear-mongering is more profitable than tear-jerking.

No God, no rights

Every now and then, the mask accidentally slips from the ghoulish face of the Left:

During a heated discussion over gay marriage, CNN morning Anchor Chris Cuomo opined that the unalienable rights endowed to all Americans do not come from God. Cuomo was debating Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage. Near the end of the back-and-forth and after Moore argued that rights cannot be handed down by men, Cuomo blurted out:

“Our rights do not come from God, your honor, and you know that. They come from man… That’s your faith, that’s my faith, but that’s not our country. Our laws come from collective agreement and compromise.”

This is why the Left is so willing to abrogate and alienate what the Declaration of Independence declared to be self-evident and unalienable rights, among them being Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. They simply don’t accept that God-given rights are not laws, or that laws that do not respect those rights are illegitimate.

Worst of all, the Left fails to grasp the obvious consequences of their ill-considered actions. If the law can legitimately permit a homosexual man to force a Christian man to bake him a cake, then it can legitimately permit a white man to force a black man to pick his cotton. If the law can legitimately deem a man to be a woman, or two men to be married, it can just as legitimately deem a Jew to be subhuman or an African to be a monkey.

But the Right can certainly play the game by the new rules that have been established. Indeed, across Europe, it is beginning to do so. In America, it is beginning to recognize the need to do so. And the Right will have no mercy on the Left once it begins playing by the Left’s rules; they will cry out in appeal to the very rights they denied and alienated in vain.

Hoist by their own petard

I usually don’t like to see bookstores going out of business, but in this case, even the most inveterate book-lover has to make an exception and see the black humor in the situation:

San Francisco specialty bookshop Borderlands Books is going out of business. The store will close its doors no later than March 31, 2015, but may close earlier, depending on how quickly the inventory can be sold. Owner Alan Beatts explains:

The recent change in San Francisco minimum wage law will prevent the store from being financially viable no later than July of 2018 (at which point our payroll will have increased by roughly 39%). It is quite possible that the store would lack viability before that date, as wages will increase incrementally between now and then. Rather than wait, we have chosen to close now to allow us to get the most value from the businesses. Though all of us at Borderlands support the concept of a living wage in principle, the minimum wage law passed in San Francisco makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to run a viable business when retail pricing is set by publishers and our main competitors are companies such as Amazon.com.

Leftists never seem to think through even the most obvious consequences of the policies they support. What percentage of the people who will be upset over the closing of their local bookstore do you suppose support both a) central banking and b) the increase in the minimum wage law in San Francisco?

The effects of ebooks, the concomitant growth of independent publishing, and the declining power of the gatekeepers to dictate what books readers are permitted to buy is going to continue to take down bookstores and publishers alike. Some of these losses will be a pity. Others are to be celebrated. But whether we like the changes or not, they are coming.