Tag: politics

Election Day

I trust by now that anyone reading this blog has been sufficiently disabused of the notion that freedom has any causal relationship with voting. As the New York Times made clear today to even the slowest midwits, voting is not, and has never been, a Constitutional or human right. Women, like men, can be denied the privilege, it merely cannot be denied by “by the United States or by any State” on the sole basis of sex.

The 19th Amendment states “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied
or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

Which raises the question, what right of the citizens of the United States to vote? It is not numbered amongst the unalienable rights listed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. It does not appear in the Bill of Rights. The Constitution “left the boundaries of suffrage undefined” and the only directly elected body specified was the House of Representatives, for which “voter qualifications were explicitly delegated to the individual states.”

In any event, as millions of voters exercise their privilege across the USA today, it is very, very unlikely that the replacement of a Democratic majority in the Senate with a Republican one, and the strengthening of the Republican majority in the House is going to signify much in the grand scheme of things. The federal government will continue its deficit spending, the banks will continue to loan out credit money they create ex nihilo, Wall Street will continue to dictate policy to Washington, the U.S. military will continue to intervene in the affairs of sovereign nations around the world, and the flow of diverse and semicivilized immigrants will continue unabated.

So enjoy the show, but understand it is merely rote and ritual, a piece of kabuki theater to which we all know the steps and the lines.

Dems are getting worried

The checked-out president is beginning to make Democrats, both politicians and in the media, observably nervous and twitchy. Consider Frank Bruno at the New York Times:

Rationally or not, this is one of those rare moments when Americans who typically tune out so much of what leaders say are paying rapt attention, and Obama’s style of communication hasn’t risen fully to the occasion. Even as he canceled campaign appearances and created a position — Ebola czar — that we were previously told wasn’t necessary, he spoke with that odd dispassion of his, that maddening distance.

About the ban, he said, “I don’t have a philosophical objection necessarily.” About the czar, he said that it might be good to have a person “to make sure that we’re crossing all the T’s and dotting all the I’s going forward.” He’s talking theory and calligraphy while Americans are focused on blood, sweat and tears.

Ebola is his presidency in a petri dish. It’s an example already of his tendency to talk too loosely at the outset of things, so that his words come back to haunt him. There was the doctor you could keep under his health plan until, well, you couldn’t. There was the red line for Syria that he didn’t have to draw and later erased.

With Ebola, he said almost two weeks ago that “we’re doing everything that we can” with an “all-hands-on-deck approach.” But on Wednesday and Thursday he announced that there were additional hands to be put on deck and that we could and would do more. The shift fit his pattern: not getting worked up in the early stages, rallying in the later ones.

It’s more understandable in this case than in others, because when it comes to statements about public health, the line between adequately expressed concern and a license for hysteria is thin and not easily determined. Still, he has to make Americans feel that he understands their alarm, no matter how irrational he deems it, and that they’re being leveled with, not talked down to, not handled. And he has a ways to go.

“If you were his parent, you’d want to shake him,” said one Democratic strategist, who questioned where Obama’s passion was and whether, even this deep into his presidency, he appreciated one of the office’s most vital functions: deploying language, bearing, symbols and ceremony to endow Americans with confidence in who’s leading them and in how they’re being led.

Right now in this country there’s a crisis of confidence, and of competence, and that’s the fertile ground in which the Ebola terror flowers. That’s the backdrop for whatever steps Obama and Frieden take from here. With the right ones, they can go a long way toward calming people who are anxious not just about Ebola but about America. I don’t even want to think about the wrong ones.

That is not the writing of a happy rabbit. After all, it is pretty hard to argue for more government intervention as one watches an indifferent president lurch half-heartedly from one potential disaster into the next one.

Barack Obama, homosexual harasser?

Some old news about the current resident of the Oval Office comes out of the closet:

Barack Obama served as the president of the Harvard Law Review while in law school there, and during his tenure in that position, he was allegedly accused of sexual harassment. Two editors at the law review filed complaints with the university administration alleging that Obama had engaged in inappropriate sexual behavior. The university allegedly settled the cases and offered them agreements that allegedly included financial compensation and required them to remain silent about the nature of the settlements.

The story, based on one reported in The Kansas Citian, is reported here. The claim is that Barack Obama, while president of the Harvard Law Review, engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior with two male editors of the review.

Sodahead reported this about the allegations, “In a series of comments over the past 10 days, Obama and his administration repeatedly declined to respond directly about whether he ever faced allegations of sexual harassment at the journal. They have also declined to address questions about specific reporting confirming that there were financial settlements in two cases in which men leveled complaints. THE KANSAS CITIAN has confirmed the identities of the two male journal editors who complained about Obama but, for privacy concerns, is not publishing their names.”

The report also claims someone ask[ed] White House press secretary Jay Carney about the allegations, “White House spokesman Jay Carney told THE KANSAS CITIAN the president indicated to White House staff that he was “vaguely familiar” with the charges and that the university’s general counsel had resolved the matter.”

If this sort of completely unsurprising news about Obama’s predilections is finally surfacing, one can only conclude that the PTBs are very unhappy with his presidential performance. Is it the economy? Is it failing to pass or unilaterally declare the immigration amnesty? Or is it that even PTBs don’t want to find themselves bleeding from their eyeballs and they’re no happier about the lack of a travel ban than ordinary Americans?

Needless to say, one can expect that the mainstream media’s complete and determined lack of interest will be deafening. Their eyes will remain firmly averted unless and until a) the relevant documents surface or b) the two male journal editors speak out.

Once, twice, three times a failure

They’re not called The Stupid Party for nothing:

Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee and now the tacit head of the Republican Party, visited Iowa as part of a feverish nationwide tour designed to help the GOP take control of the Senate. He has insisted that he is not interested in running for president a third time. But his friends said a flurry of behind-the-scenes activity is nudging him to more seriously consider it.

Sometimes, people seriously ask me why I’m not a Republican. I usually just laugh. In part due to things like this. America has just staggered into its sixth year of the Obola-ridden Democratic administration, so naturally the Republicans are discussing whether to field a legacy, a loser, a lardass, or a legal immigrant.

Sex is a choice and age is just a number

If they think they’ve got problems now, just wait until the transagist freaks get into the act:

It had been a relatively quiet policy debate until the full-page ad appeared in the local newspaper. “A male wants to shower beside your 14-year-old daughter,” it said. “Are you OK with that?”

The ad, placed by a socially conservative group in Minnesota, was meant to snap attention to a proposal to allow transgender students to play on teams based on their preferred gender rather than the sex assigned to them at birth.

It appears to have worked. More than 100 community members flooded a meeting this week near Minneapolis, and thousands more sent e-mails. In response, the quasi-public body governing high school sports in Minnesota decided to delay a vote on a new policy covering sports participation by transgender students. Members of the board of directors said they needed more time to study the issue.

The policy, which they now plan to vote on in December, was an attempt to grapple with a question that has bedeviled many states: How do you deal with the growing number of children identifying as transgender who want to participate in the highly gender-specific worlds of high school sports and extracurricular activities?

The whole debate is blitheringly idiotic. There is no such thing as “transgender”. There are male psychological freaks pretending to be women and female psychological ruins pretending to be men. That’s it. Punto.

And to anyone who wants to argue otherwise, I will simply point out that I feel that I am 16 years old and fully eligible to play high school sports, and anyone who argues otherwise is transagist. After all, it should be obvious that the year of birth recorded on one’s birth certificate means no more than one’s sex recorded there, and “age” is nothing more than a social construct.

I know it’s hard to understand and there is a lot of controversy around
this, but to be misaged as a middle-aged man when you are actually a teenage boy
is incredibly offensive.

Other transaged feel that they are 65 and therefore legally eligible to collect Social Security. It would be outrageous to deny them their right to do so. The amusing thing about the Left is that they subscribe to all this ludicrous anti-definitional nonsense, and then turn around and call themselves “the reality-based community”. The truth is that their only connection to reality is their mass rejection of it combined with an enthusiastic embrace of perversion.

Superversivity

An important essay by Tom Simon:

For about a hundred years now, ever since the First World War broke the confidence of Western civilization, it has been fashionable to praise subversion. Art, music, and literature, as many of the critics tell us, are not supposed to go chasing after obsolete values like truth or beauty; they are supposed to shock, to wound, to épater les bourgeois – to subvert the values of society. Here is a fairly typical example, from the literary critic, John Grant: 

It must meddle with our thinking, it must delight in being controversial, it must hope to be condemned by authority (whatever authority one chooses to identify), it must be at the cutting edge of the imagination, it must flirt with madness, it must surprise.

Grant is prescribing goals for fantasy, but the same demand has been heard in every genre and every art form, much to the harm of the arts. Most people don’t share Grant’s ideological preoccupations; they see the arts not as vehicles of propaganda, but as entertainment. Trying to get yourself condemned by authority may be good sophomoric fun while you are doing it, but it makes a dull spectator sport. Considered as entertainment, it has no virtue except novelty; and it has not been novel since about the 1920s. This is one reason why the ‘serious’ arts see their audiences shrinking year after year, until they are only maintained in precarious existence by public subsidy.

Part of the trouble comes from that apparently blank cheque, ‘whatever authority one chooses to identify’. In practice, this always means the same authority: the ghost of Mrs. Grundy, the narrow-minded, puritanical, bourgeois authority that lost most of its power in 1914, and does not exist at all anymore. If you rebel against a different authority – the Chinese Communist Party, or the rulers of militant Islam – you will not find the critics so approving. They will call you reactionary or even neocon, and the hand of Buzzfeed will be raised against you.

For the world of art and literature is largely dominated by the Left, and the Left is dominated by people whose world-view is inherited from their great-grandfathers. In this view, we need labour unions to defend us against the peril of child labour, Big Government to defend us against Standard Oil. America is one false move away from theocracy and Jim Crow; Europe is one false move away from another World War. Nothing can save us except a wonderful new panacea called Socialism, which has never been tried before, and with which nothing can possibly go wrong. These, in the main, are the ideas of the Left even today; and the people who believe these things have the nerve to call themselves Progressives.

They call for progress; but they are still trying to progress from 1914 into 1915. They call for subversion; but the thing they are trying to subvert no longer exists.

Superversivity is an important concept. It is the philosophy of the builder rather the destroyer. It is the ideal of those opposed to the pinkshirts, to the SJWs, to the de facto Chantry Guild that infests every modern institution and organization and pasttime that seeks to disqualify, redirect, and destroy everyone and everything that is insufficiently supportive of their societal subversion.

It is our job to build Western civilization’s intellectual redoubt and ensure that the next generation is even more resistant to the poison than we are. Because eventually, the infestation will burn itself out and collapse due to its internal illogic and inconsistencies.

I have but one criticism of Mr. Simon’s piece. He implies that the neocons are the enemies of the Left. This is not true. Neoconservatism has always been of the Left and is, in itself, a form of subversion.

Systemic decay and the decline of democracy

Since History failed to end, Francis Fukuyama is writing new books. His latest one actually sounds pretty interesting:

Fukuyama’s most interesting section is his discussion of the United States, which is used to illustrate the interaction of democracy and state building. Up through the 19th century, he notes, the United States had a weak, corrupt and patrimonial state. From the end of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century, however, the American state was transformed into a strong and effective independent actor, first by the Progressives and then by the New Deal. This change was driven by “a social revolution brought about by industrialization, which mobilized a host of new political actors with no interest in the old clientelist system.” The American example shows that democracies can indeed build strong states, but that doing so, Fukuyama argues, requires a lot of effort over a long time by powerful players not tied to the older order.

Yet if the United States illustrates how democratic states can develop, it also illustrates how they can decline. Drawing on Huntington again, Fukuyama reminds us that “all political systems — past and present — are liable to decay,” as older institutional structures fail to evolve to meet the needs of a changing world. “The fact that a system once was a successful and stable liberal democracy does not mean that it will remain so in perpetuity,” and he warns that even the United States has no permanent immunity from institutional decline.

Over the past few decades, American political development has gone into reverse, Fukuyama says, as its state has become weaker, less efficient and more corrupt. One cause is growing economic inequality and concentration of wealth, which has allowed elites to purchase immense political power and manipulate the system to further their own interests. Another cause is the permeability of American political institutions to interest groups, allowing an array of factions that “are collectively unrepresentative of the public as a whole” to exercise disproportionate influence on government. The result is a vicious cycle in which the American state deals poorly with major challenges, which reinforces the public’s distrust of the state, which leads to the state’s being starved of resources and authority, which leads to even poorer performance.

Where this cycle leads even the vastly knowledgeable Fukuyama can’t predict, but suffice to say it is nowhere good. And he fears that America’s problems may increasingly come to characterize other liberal democracies as well, including those of Europe, where “the growth of the European Union and the shift of policy making away from national capitals to Brussels” has made “the European system as a whole . . . resemble that of the United States to an increasing degree.”

Fukuyama’s readers are thus left with a depressing paradox. Liberal democracy remains the best system for dealing with the challenges of modernity, and there is little reason to believe that Chinese, Russian or Islamist alternatives can provide the diverse range of economic, social and political goods that all humans crave. But unless liberal democracies can somehow manage to reform themselves and combat institutional decay, history will end not with a bang but with a resounding whimper.

The chart below may show the problem with Fukuyama’s thesis. Notice the big postwar spike in percentage of world GDP as measured in purchasing power from 1940 to 1950; that is the consequence of the USA having the only industrial base unharmed by WWII. Since then, it’s been all downhill, while China appears to be returning to its previous pre-18th century dominance. My sense is that by looking more at ideological systems than at the makeup of the people utilizing those systems, Fukuyama may be missing the more relevant points. But since I haven’t read his new book yet, I cannot say if that is actually the case or not.

The internal invasion

The parasites are fleeing their self-made hellholes and are busily engaged in recreating them in their new residences:

Californians have moved to Colorado and Nevada. Massachusetts natives have moved to New Hampshire. New Yorkers have moved to North Carolina and Virginia — and, of course, have continued moving to Florida.

Over the last few decades, residents of many traditionally liberal states have moved to states that were once more conservative. And this pattern has played an important role in helping the Democratic Party win the last two presidential elections and four of the last six. The growth of the Latino population and the social liberalism of the millennial generation may receive more attention, but the growing diaspora of blue-state America matters as well.

The blue diaspora has helped offset the fact that many of the nation’s fastest-growing states are traditionally Republican. You can think of it as a kind of race: Population growth in these Republican states is reducing the share of the Electoral College held by traditionally Democratic states. But Democratic migration has been fast enough, so far, to allow the party to overcome the fact that the Northeast and industrial Midwest contain a smaller portion of the country’s population than they once did….

Since 2000, the blue-born population in red states has grown by almost a quarter, to 11.5 million, or 12 percent of the states’ total population. These changes aren’t happening simply because the national population has grown over the same period, either. In fact, the red-born population in blue states shrank, to 7.3 million from 8.4 million, between 2000 and 2012.

And thus ends the grand experiment of the laboratories of democracy. This is why the right to free association, also known to its critics as segregation, is an absolute must for any democratic society that wishes to retain its character. In an age of mobility, any system that functions will be rapidly swamped by the invading denizens of those systems that don’t work.

It should never be forgotten that most of the 18th century political principles were developed prior to the age of mass global transportation. It should not be a surprise that not all of them are capable of surviving it.

Another purge?

There are claims there has been another purging of a tech organization, albeit this time with the full knowledge of the founder:

I need for this info to get out. Most of the mods on 4chan have only been in that position for a couple of weeks.

The day after the #ShutDown4CHAN thing happened in july, moot called a meeting with all the mods in a IRC. He said that a girl did atempt suicide and that she had connections and they wanted blood.

Moot demanded that we use everything we can to remove anything wanting to “fuck up sjw shit”. Needless to say alot of mod anons called out moot and were kicked from the chat.

Before one was kicked he told every mod agianst this shit to meet in a 4craft server. We all did and discussed how fucked up this was. Over the next few days our chats about it became emails wich became skype calls. In the end we agreed that the next big fuck up the sjws make then we will let whatever happens happen.

What came next was dashcon.

We let the discussion go on like normal. Some mods did moots bidding and banned. Others were in the threads bumping. What was left was nearly 2/3 of 4chan`s given the boot.

We we’re all purged and outed. We fell on eachother and to bitch and moan. I swear to god our chatlogs the day after must look like mr. meeseeks.

One ousted mod anon was also a mod for 420chan and wizardchan. He said that alot of the mods thier were also exiled.

He gave proof, in the form of a collection of perma banned notices for dozens of IPs. And a list of those same IPs in log records for mod services.

We flipped our shit and began looking for more chans that this had happened to. 7chan, mchan, getchan and even shrekchan had massive mod axeings on the same day as 4chan.u

The next day a mod who wasnt outed contacted us. To our horror he told us that the new mods are complete sjws and openly call for permabans for alot of 4chan “board culture”.

As we dug deeper we found out that the same thing was happening to alot of subreddits. Normally we would say fuck em. But they told us that tons of non sjw mods had thier accounts sieged and them ip banned.

Deeper we dug and found out that dozens of forum mods and website mods were either changed or became rabbid sjw over night.

Currently this is the deepiest we have dug. The girl who attempted suicide was kassie washington, niece of nick denton owner and publisher of gawker media

There is only one answer to this exclusionary behavior, of course. Start your own organization. Build it up. And then POLICE YOUR ORGANIZATION’S DECISION-MAKERS on a regular basis. Any sign of supporting “inclusion” or “outreach” or posturing for PC approval should be grounds for immediate removal from any decision-making responsibilities.

My purging from SFWA was, as I warned at the time, a small harbinger of much bigger things to come. Don’t think you’re safe simply because you’re not controversial. It’s not only the controversy they hate, or even the open resistance, it is the mere fact of failing to kowtow to their dogma.