Tag: politics

Another Republican cave-in

At this point, can anyone even pretend to be surprised?

IMMIGRATION:
The bill only funds the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees most immigration policy, until February. But negotiators gave new money for immigration programs at other federal agencies. There’s $948 million for the Department of Health and Human Service’s unaccompanied children program — an $80 million increase. The program provides health and education services to the young migrants. The department also gets $14 million to help school districts absorbing new immigrant students. And the State Department would get $260 million to assist Central American countries from where of the immigrant children are coming.

AFFORDABLE CARE ACT:

The law is still
funded, but there’s no new money for it. There’s also no new ACA-related
funding for the Internal Revenue Service and the Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services, the two agencies most responsible for
implementing the law. The bill also would cut the budget of the
Independent Payment Advisory Board — what Republicans have called “the
death panel” — by $10 million.

OVERSEAS MILITARY OPERATIONS:

There’s $1.3
billion for a new Counterterrorism Partnership Fund; $5 billion for
military operations to combat the Islamic State, including $1.6 billion
to train Iraqi and Kurdish forces; $500 million for a Pentagon-led
program to train and equip vetted Syrian opposition fighters; $810
million for ongoing military operations in Europe, including
requirements that at least $175 million is spent in support of Ukraine
and Baltic nation

SEXUAL ASSAULT IN THE MILITARY:

There’s
$257 million for the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response
programs, including $25 million more to expand the Sexual Assault
Victims’ Counsel program. But Democrats, led by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand
(D-N.Y.), are expected to make a final push to expand the program this
week.

As Drudge puts it: “REPUBLICAN BETRAYAL: OBAMACARE FULLY FUNDED AMNESTY TOO!”

But no doubt Republican lawmakers will hasten to point out that there is no ADDITIONAL money for Obamacare. By Washington standards, that counts as a severe budget cut.

The customer is not always right

Or desired. This is an interesting technological development in customer relations:

Travelers are often asked to review their hotel, restaurant and car service. But increasingly, it goes both ways.

Drivers for Uber and Lyft, for example, rate their passengers from one to five stars at the end of each ride. If a rider receives three stars or fewer, the driver and passenger will not be paired up again. And at OpenTable, the restaurant booking system, customers are banned if they do not show for a reservation too many times.

These are among the ways that sophisticated rating systems can turn on the customer, identifying the best and worst among them.

I wonder how long it will take for this to go ideological. After all, if we know one thing about SJWs, they politicize absolutely everything and they aren’t shy about cutting off their nose to spite their face. It won’t surprise me if we see customers being banned from various establishments and services because their patronage is unwanted due to politics. Which is, of course, an unprotected right, or at least it is until Christians start using it as an effective proxy to deny services to those whose behavior they believe to be abomination.

I’ve lost one job and three book contracts due to corporate correctness to date. Which I always enjoy pointing out to those who claim bakers have to bake cakes they do not wish to bake and permit bed-and-breakfast guests they do not wish to have. As always, the SJWs seek to establish laws that only bite in one direction.

Of course, the costs of corporate correctness can be blessings in disguise. I’d much rather be publishing books through Castalia House than have published Media Whores and The Red Hand of Government with Thomas Nelson and A Throne of Bones with Lion Hudson.

Temperatures rising in the East

Taiwan hasn’t declared independence yet. But they are clearly moving in that direction, apparently in response to the Chinese crackdowns in Hong Kong. From Generational Dynamics:

Taiwan’s ruling nationalist party KMT (Kuomintang) suffered disastrous losses in local elections across Taiwan on Saturday, giving victories to the opposing DPP (Democratic Progressive Party), and forcing the resignation of the prime minister. Thousands of municipalities, including the capital city Taipei, that had been ruled for years by KMT mayors and politicians will not be ruled by DPP mayors and politicians.

The Kuomintang (KMT) is the modern day incarnation of Chiang Kai-shek’s original nationalist party of soldiers that fought against Mao Zedong’s Communist Revolution and lost, and fled to Hong Kong, then a British colony, and from there to Formosa (Taiwan) in 1949, at the conclusion of the civil war. The KMT position has always been that Taiwan would reunite with China.

KMT held an iron grip on power in Taiwan after the war, and that only began to fade in the 1980s with the founding of the DPP. However, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, which people in Taiwan viewed with horror, proved to be a catalyst in turning Taiwanese people against Beijing, and by 2000 the DPP won a national election. A DPP corruption scandal in 2006 put KMT back into power, and KMT officials have been working closely with Beijing officials to woo Taiwan’s public to voluntarily want reunite with China.

The policy hasn’t really been effective. There are two groups of people who don’t want to reunite. One group is the indigenous Taiwanese people who lived there before 1949, and who have suffered at the hands of the KMT. Young people generally form the second group, and they distrust China and they distrust the KMT for selling out to China.

The problem isn’t that the Red Navy is capable of defeating the US Navy. It isn’t. But it increasingly looks capable of giving the US Navy a seriously bloody nose if it intervenes in cross-strait hostilities between China and Taiwan, and never forget, the Chinese always play a long game. And there is no way, none, that the American people have any stomach whatsoever for war with China after thirteen years of pointless and desultory war in Afghanistan.

I suspect the Chinese may be aware of that, which may explain why so many of their wealthy are stashing their children and buying up properties in the USA. I doubt there will be any open war, but there will likely be growing pressure being exerted on Taiwan with the threat of force behind it.

Why the Left hates Thanksgiving

Mr. John C. Wright explains:

There is an old Chinese legend of a golden scroll on which the secret of human happiness was written; and sages and warlords, merchant-princes and emperors sought the scroll with fervor. When found, they saw the secret of the scroll consisted of one ideogram printed over and over, an ideogram they could not read. However, there was a beggar girl who could read the mysterious word.

If you know that word, then you know the secret of human happiness.

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays for three reasons: first, it drives the Leftists crazy because it is a clearly and openly Christian holiday in the midst of a society they are fervidly attempting to dechristianize; second, it drives Leftists crazy because it is a holiday based on a historical fact, namely, Indian and Pilgrim cooperation, which flips the middle finger at the Leftist preferred narrative about non-civilized White men committing malign genocide on the non-savage Red men; and finally and most of all, it drives the Leftists crazy because the concept of being thankful, of feeling gratitude, of thanks for benefits never to be repaid, is utterly alien to their way of thinking and their way of life.

One benefit that accrues to the Christian, even if all of history, logic, and revelation should turn out to be false, and God a myth no more real than Global Warming, nonetheless, is that we Christian men feel gratitude toward our Creator for the infinite gift of creation. A noble pagan can indeed receive a gift in his stockings at Christmas, and be grateful to the giver, but a Christian can feel grateful for the legs he puts into his stockings each morning, and the world on which he walks.

The Left does not give thanks, not to anyone, human or divine, past or present, not for any reason.

Why not?

This would explain, among other things, why they prefer to call it Turkey Day.

Presidential prosecutorial discretion

Obama leads the way in developing a useful tool. Republicans, take note:

President Obama completely fumbles when George Stephanopolous asks him how he’d respond if a future president takes the same action on taxes that Obama has taken on immigration. Incredibly, Obama responds as if he’d never heard or thought of this argument before, stumbling blindly along immigration talking points without answering the actual question.

Stephanopolous asked: “How do you respond to the argument, a future president comes in and wants lower taxes. Doesn’t happen. Congress won’t do it; so he says ‘I’m not going to prosecute those who don’t pay capital gains tax.’”

“The truth of the matter is George,” said the President, haltingly, “The reason that we, have to do.. uhm prosecutorial discretion in immigration, is that we know, that we – are not even close to being able to deal with the folks who have been here a long time…” Obama then pivoted to immigration talking points, without addressing the original question.

“The vast majority of folks understand that they need to pay taxes, and when we conduct an audit, for example, we are selecting those folks who are most likely to be cheating,” said Obama. “We’re not going after millions and millions of people who everybody knows are here and were taking advantage of low wages as they’re mowing lawns or cleaning out bedpans, and looking the other way.”

“So you don’t think it’d be legitimate for a future president to make that argument?” Stephanopoulos said.

Obama: “With respect to taxes? Absolutely not.”

Now that the President of the United States of America has declared prosecutorial discretion in immigration to be an executive power, it is obvious that any future president will possess similar prosecutorial discretion in taxation. This is a weapon that any small government party should be able to wield with a considerable degree of effectiveness.

If it is genuinely a small government party…. The Republicans certainly can’t pretend they don’t have the power to starve the beast anymore, not once they reclaim the White House.

It’s always fascinating to see how SJWs have absolutely no ability to grasp logical consequences. Which tends to demonstrate the fundamental illogic of their thinking. It reminds me of the gay “marriage” proponents who genuinely couldn’t figure out how redefining the legal nature of marriage once would likely lead to future legal redefinitions of marriage.

Casualty in the Cabinet

Obama fires his Secretary of Defense:

Chuck Hagel has been fired as defense secretary. We were critical of his appointment, and opposed his confirmation by the Senate. But let’s be clear: Hagel has done what he was asked and what was expected of him at the Pentagon. To the degree he has deviated from the Obama White House line, he’s been more right than wrong (e.g., on the threat the Islamic State poses).

So why has he been fired? Because the Obama White House needs a scapegoat. President George W, Bush fired Don Rumsfeld in connection with a change in strategy (the surge) and to bring in someone of independent stature. That’s not the case today. President Obama continues to want a Pentagon with weak leadership and little independence. There’s therefore no reason to expect the next two years of Obama foreign and defense policy to be any better than the past two.

He’s fired an awful lot of generals too, come to think of it. I don’t know if there have any bigger purges among the brass since pre-WWII Stalin.

Why Obama is pushing amnesty through

This not-entirely-coincidental article in the New York Times is so timely that one has to suspect it was published yesterday in order to try to mollify Democrats who are little more enthusiastic than Republicans about the prospect of Obama magically converting millions of illegal aliens into citizens with the same rights and privileges they possess through unConstitutional executive action.

This region has become so solidly Republican, particularly since President Obama was elected, that there isn’t much left there for the Democratic Party to defend or salvage. For instance, prior to the 2010 midterms there were 54 Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. In the outgoing Congress, there are only 19 left, including eight from the South.

And Republican gerrymandering has further weakened Democratic power, even when Democrats vote in high numbers. As Lee Fang wrote this month at Republic Report, “Republican gerrymandering means Democratic voters are packed tightly into single districts, while Republicans are spread out in such a way to translate into the most congressional seats for the G.O.P.”

After the midterms, The Associated Press provided this tally:

“In January, the G.O.P. will control every governor’s office, two U.S. Senate seats, nearly every majority-white congressional district and both state legislative chambers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas.”

It is important and relevant that The Associated Press pointed out the racial dichotomy because, in the South, ideology and racial identity are nearly inseparable.

Obama and the Democratic Party leadership are desperate to boost the non-white portion of the population because they understand that what has happened in the South, where there is a White Party and an Anti-White Party, is going to gradually spread to the West, East, and Mid-West. That division will probably occur last in the Mid-West for the counterintuitive reason that there are more whites there, so they will be the last to abandon multicultural ideology for pure racial power politics.

But this amnesty is about nothing but trying to create more Anti-White voters. The problem the Anti-White party faces, of course, is that La Raza hates blacks far more than whites do and considerably more than they hate whites. And while La Raza is socialist and likes big government as well as the largesse it produces, they aren’t particularly keen on most Democratic social causes. Still, what choice do the Democrats have? The only non-whites to whom they can turn are the very people who are in the process of ethnically cleansing southern California.

As I’ve previously noted, we will know that the transformation of America from a freedom-oriented white Christian European representative democracy to a conventional post-ideological ethnically divided state where rival groups scrabble for power is complete when SJWs like John Scalzi turn in their SJW cards and flee for the perceived safety of the White Party they have excoriated for years.

SJWs are Gramscian culture warriors

In which esr points out that SJW tactics are the same as those utilized by the Nazis and the Communists before them:

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithet. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.

We don’t expect ideas to matter — or, when they do, we expect them to matter only because people have been flipped into a vulnerable mode by repression or poverty. Thus all our divagation about the “root causes” of Islamic terrorism, as if the terrorists’ very clear and very ideological account of their own theory and motivations is somehow not to be believed.

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists….

I think there is still an excellent chance that the West can recover
from suicidalism without going through a fevered fascist episode and
waging a genocidal war. But to do so, we have to do more than recognize
Stalin’s memes; we have to reject them. We have to eject postmodern
leftism from our universities, transnational progressivism from our
politics, and volk-Marxism from our media.

The process won’t be pretty. But I fear that if the rest of us don’t
hound the po-mo Left and its useful idiots out of public life with
attack and ridicule and shunning, the hard Right will sooner or later
get the power to do it by means that include a lot of killing. I don’t
want to live in that future, and I don’t think any of my readers do,
either. If we want to save a liberal, tolerant civilization for our
children, we’d better get to work.

Esr is addressing the danger posed by Islam here, not SJWs, and he’s talking about the entire West rather than the assault on the game industry but he’s describing the same tactics derived from the same playbook as part of the same anti-Western cultural war.

I have little doubt that he is right. Many, if not most, #GamerGaters would rather drink the blood of every single SJW than submit to them. In the same vein, many Americans would rather see a ruthless pro-white, pro-Western government led by the hard-eyed likes of Vladimir Putin than watch their nation continue to vanish in a swarm of third world immigration. The Left, for all their drama queen antics, doesn’t realize how many Men of the West are never, ever going to submit to them.

And if the sweet reason of the esr’s prove impotent, the Breiviks will rise. Esr thought, back in 2006, that there was an excellent chance the West can recover from the intellectual disease without violence. Eight years later, in 2014, I am considerably less sanguine about those odds.

What we can do

That’s what I was asked in the comments yesterday. I came up with one solution, which I’m pleased to see that about 100 of you implemented right away. But that’s just a start. First, I think it is important to take Cailcorishev’s observation into account of why the SJWs are so often successful with their entryist tactics and how they so regularly obtain positions of power in an organization or an industry.

They’re able to take over the things they do because normal people just don’t care that much. It’s how they run all the committees in a school: no one else wants to. People who create games and play games don’t care much about the incidental stuff like reviewing. We don’t need that to exist at all, so when someone emerges to do that, we figure “Better her than me.” Most of us don’t realize until too late how much power that concedes to them, because what they do looks so irrelevant from our ends.

This is true. I know the power of what he’s saying, because I entered into the industry via reviewing games myself. I started out as a contributor to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, then was syndicated by Chronicle Features, and before long was appearing in papers from the North Bay Nugget to the Boston Globe and the Atlanta Journal/Constitution. Within 18 months, I was personally acquainted many of the major game developers, guys like John Carmack, Richard Garriott, and Chris Roberts, as well as important media and publishing figures like Johnny Wilson and Scott Shannon.

How? It was easy. No one at the Pioneer Press seriously played computer games. They didn’t have anyone to do it, and they even started to rely upon me to do things like analyze the Unabomber’s manifesto for the editorial page. Of course, the Left polices itself much more carefully than the Right. When there was a vacancy on the op/ed page, I asked for the spot. The editor met with me – I was only the sixth columnist in the paper’s history to be nationally syndicated, so he couldn’t just blow me off – and politely made it clear there wasn’t a chance in hell he was going to put a libertarian extremist on the page every week. But the tactic works.

Now, I have to go for the time being. Work takes priority over the Cause. It might, however, be worthwhile to consider this until I’m able to finish this post and provide some concrete suggestions. Everyone knows that I don’t get paid for blogging. But what many people don’t know is that I never took any money to write eleven years worth of columns on WND. (Hence my amusement when people talk about Daddy getting me the “job”.) They couldn’t afford it when I first started, but I supported the alternative media that the Farahs were attempting to build.

That’s why the Left is progressing. Because they are willing to invest the time.

Leaving Leftism

A onetime red-diaper baby, Danusah Goska, lists ten reasons for abandoning the Left:

10) Huffiness.

In the late 1990s I was reading Anatomy of the Spirit, a then recent bestseller by Caroline Myss.

Myss described having lunch with a woman named Mary. A man approached Mary and asked her if she were free to do a favor for him on June 8th. No, Mary replied, I absolutely cannot do anything on June 8th because June 8th is my incest survivors’ meeting and we never let each other down! They have suffered so much already! I would never betray incest survivors!

Myss was flabbergasted. Mary could have simply said “Yes” or “No.”

Reading this anecdote, I felt that I was confronting the signature essence of my social life among leftists. We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation. I did not want to live that way anymore. I wanted to cultivate a disposition of gratitude. I wanted to see others, not as victims or victimizers, but as potential friends, as loved creations of God. I wanted to understand the point of view of people with whom I disagreed without immediately demonizing them as enemy oppressors.

I recently attended a training session for professors on a college campus. The presenter was a new hire in a tenure-track position. He opened his talk by telling us that he had received an invitation to share a festive meal with the president of the university. I found this to be an enviable occurrence and I did not understand why he appeared dramatically aggrieved. The invitation had been addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. X.” Professor X was a bachelor. He felt slighted. Perhaps the person who had addressed his envelope had disrespected him because he is a member of a minority group.

Rolling his eyes, Prof. X went on to say that he was wary of accepting a position on this lowly commuter campus, with its working-class student body. The disconnect between leftists’ announced value of championing the poor and the leftist practice of expressing snobbery for them stung me. Already vulnerable students would be taught by a professor who regarded association with them as a burden, a failure, and a stigma.

Barack Obama is president. Kim and Kanye and Brad and Angelina are members of multiracial households. One might think that professors finally have cause to teach their students to be proud of America for overcoming racism. Not so fast, Professor X warned.  His talk was on microaggression, defined as slights that prove that America is still racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, that is, discriminatory against handicapped people.

Professor X projected a series of photographs onto a large screen. In one, commuters in business suits, carrying briefcases, mounted a flight of stairs. This photo was an act of microaggression. After all, Professor X reminded us, handicapped people can’t climb stairs.

I appreciate Professor X’s desire to champion the downtrodden, but identifying a photograph of commuters on stairs as an act of microaggression and evidence that America is still an oppressive hegemon struck me as someone going out of his way to live his life in a state of high dudgeon. On the other hand, Prof. X could have chosen to speak of his own working-class students with more respect.

Yes, there is a time and a place when it is absolutely necessary for a person to cultivate awareness of his own pain, or of others’ pain. Doctors instruct patients to do this — “Locate the pain exactly; calculate where the pain falls on a scale of one to ten; assess whether the pain is sharp, dull, fleeting, or constant.” But doctors do this for a reason. They want the patient to heal, and to move beyond the pain. In the left, I found a desire to be in pain constantly, so as always to have something to protest, from one’s history of incest to the inability of handicapped people to mount flights of stairs.

9) Selective Outrage

I was a graduate student. Female genital mutilation came up in class. I stated, without ornamentation, that it is wrong.

A fellow graduate student, one who was fully funded and is now a comfortably tenured professor, sneered at me. “You are so intolerant. Clitoredectomy is just another culture’s rite of passage. You Catholics have confirmation.”

When Mitt Romney was the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, he mentioned that, as Massachusetts governor, he proactively sought out female candidates for top jobs. He had, he said, “binders full of women.” He meant, of course, that he stored resumes of promising female job candidates in three-ring binders.

Op-ed pieces, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show,” Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon posts erupted in a feeding frenzy, savaging Romney and the Republican Party for their “war on women.”

I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip. Crickets. I’m not saying that that outrage does not exist. I’m saying I never saw it.

The left’s selective outrage convinced me that much canonical, left-wing feminism is not so much support for women, as it is a protest against Western, heterosexual men. It’s an “I hate” phenomenon, rather than an “I love” phenomenon.

This is all very well and good. But I note, with mingled amusement and contempt, that of these 10 reasons, only Nos. 2 and 3 have much to do with the only thing that should matter from the dialetical perspective: “It doesn’t work.  Other approaches work better.” 

So what does this tell us? Nothing that Aristotle didn’t already inform us more than 2,400 years ago. For most people, dialectal reasoning is only ever going to be part of the holistic super-rational process that wins people over to the truth. Rhetorical factors that appeal to people’s emotions on some level are usually going to be more important. This is a hard lesson for some of us to learn, a hard reality for those who pride themselves on their logic and clear-sightedness to accept.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a place for pure dialectic. But so long as men are not creatures of pure energy and reason, rhetoric will be the more powerful tool for reaching them and convincing them. That is where the Left, despite its irrationality and logical incoherence, has an advantage. Being limited to the rhetorical level, it should be no surprise that they are generally more comfortable operating on the only level they know, whereas due to the Left’s limitations, the finest minds of the Right are forced to engage on ground that is not of their choosing and where they are often distinctly uncomfortable.

And yet, once the necessity of operating on the rhetorical level is fully understood, the Right has an advantage because dialectic ultimately trumps rhetoric, which is precisely why the Left so often, and so dishonestly, rhetorically proclaims its dialectic superiority while voicing its pseudo-dialectic. Dialectic is supremely useful in puncturing and exposing false dialectic, but it must be understood that this is primarily a rhetorical device and is best exploited on a rhetorical level.