Tag: politics

Not so much alpha

A few folks asked me where I figured Carlos Danger ranked on the socio-sexual hierarchy.  For various reasons, I concluded that despite his ambition, fame, and political power, he was most likely a gamma male .  Now we have definitive photographic proof confirming my initial diagnosis, as to the left can be seen a picture of the “beautiful young lady” with whom Mr. Danger was texting risque images.

I, for one, had no idea that Lena Dunham was so interested in politics.  Or that Carlos Danger was so passionate about marine biology.

That’s reassuring

The USG declares it will not torture or kill Edward Snowden:

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder wrote a letter to the Russian minister of justice assuring the Russian government that the U.S. will not seek the death penalty for National Security Agency leak source Edward Snowden if he is returned to the U.S. Seeking to push back on assertions Snowden made in his request for temporary asylum in Russia, Holder also said in the letter that the U.S. will not torture Snowden.

Of course, this IS the same government that said it wasn’t spying on the entire world’s email and telephone calls. And Eric Holder isn’t exactly the most trustworthy member of that government.

The “necessity” of limiting free speech

Well, I did warn you this sort of thing wasn’t limited to the SFWA, after all.  What a pity it didn’t occur to conservatives a few decades ago that all the free speech they found unpalatable could simply be limited out of “necessity”.

For the past few years speech has moved online, leading to fierce
debates about its regulation. Most recently, feminists have led the
charge to purge Facebook of misogyny that clearly violates its hate
speech code. Facebook took a small step two weeks ago, creating a
feature that will remove ads from pages deemed “controversial.” But such
a move is half-hearted; Facebook and other social networking websites
should not tolerate hate speech and, in the absence of a government
mandate, adopt a European model of expunging offensive material.

Stricter regulation of Internet speech will not be popular with the
libertarian-minded citizens of the United States, but it’s necessary….

American free speech jurisprudence relies upon the assumption that
speech is merely the extension of a thought, and not an action. If we
consider it an action, then saying that we should combat hate speech
with more positive speech is an absurd proposition; the speech has
already done the harm, and no amount of support will defray the victim’s
impression that they are not truly secure in this society. We don’t
simply tell the victim of a robbery, “Hey, it’s okay, there are lots of
other people who aren’t going to rob you.” Similarly, it isn’t
incredibly useful to tell someone who has just had their
race/gender/sexuality defamed, “There are a lot of other nice people out
there.” 

Of course, under this logic, if the law simply considers being black, or Jewish, or homosexual an action, then such actions can be criminalized.  After all, “to be” is a verb, and verbs denote action, so therefore there is no justification for not criminalizing anyone who happens to be anything considered undesirable by the majority.  And since when is an “impression that [one is] truly secure in this society” the basis for Constitutional jurisprudence?

As this reasoning shows, progressives are not merely short-sighted, they are downright delusional.  This is pure rhetoric presented as dialectic; at absolutely no point does the argument hold up to even a cursory rational analysis.

Needless to say, if imposed impartially, such a standard would affect the groups claiming to need protection more than anyone, as many of them regularly engage in the group libel of men, whites, and the religious.  The assault on free speech is just another faux equalitarian stalking horse.

Dancing around the obvious

It’s interesting to see the mainstream press delicately dancing around something that all of them have heard about for years in their coverage of Weinergate II: Carlos Danger:

It’s also time to declare a moratorium on the line that Huma Abedin
is the smartest, shrewdest, most level-headed and glamorous asset the
Democratic Party has, and if she’s OK with Anthony, we should be, too.
Clearly, there is something very wrong with Abedin — whether it’s simply
that she shares her husband’s vaulting ambition or that she has a
pathological need to be publicly humiliated, something’s up. When The
New York Times is calling for you to take your sad assemblage of sexual
compulsions out the door, you should consider that a wake-up call. Silda
may have stood by Eliot, but even she never opened her mouth in his
defense.

Abedin took the good-wife act one step further at
Tuesday’s press conference, admitting her collusion in this new lie: “We
discussed all of this before Anthony decided to run for mayor,” she
said. So clearly, as Abedin sat for these joint interviews in which
Weiner claimed to be a changed man, she knew that wasn’t the truth, and
was happy to lie to a public that had been nothing but sympathetic
toward poor, brilliant Huma, saddled with such a dud. Perhaps they’re a
better match than we knew.

Something very wrong with Abedin… something’s up.  I wonder what that something might be that would cause a wife to be totally indifferent to her freakshow husband spending his evenings tweeting pictures of his genitalia to younger women.  Whatever could it possibly be?

I still recall the look of utter panic on Sean Hannity’s face when Gennifer Flowers came out and said something to the effect of “everyone in Little Rock knows Hilary is a lesbian” on his show.  If I recall correctly, they went right to commercials.

Carlos Danger for President

I have to say, I like the cut of his jib. We’ve already got the idiocracy, now all we need is the leader with the insane and unfounded confidence of Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.  And I say Carlos Danger, aka C. Anthony’s Weiner, may be just that man.

When the first texts were revealed two years ago, Mr. Weiner lied about
it, saying he had been the victim of hackers. Then he owned up,
tearfully abandoned his office and retreated into private life. Then he
was back, telling the world that therapy and his wife’s forgiveness had
turned him around and that he was ready to begin a new chapter. That
turned out to be the mayor’s race, which he entered in May. What he did
not say then, and what voters did not realize until Tuesday, was that
his resignation had not been the end of his sexual misconduct.

The timing here matters, as it would for any politician who violates the
public’s trust and then asks to have it back. Things are different now,
he insists. “This behavior is behind me,” he said again on Tuesday. He
suggested that people should have known that his sexting was an
unresolved problem well into 2012.

That’s ridiculous and speaks to a familiar but repellent pattern of misleading and evasion.

To the contrary, I say a ridiculous candidate is ideally suited for an American democracy that knowingly re-elected Bill Clinton, Bush the Younger, and Barry Soebarkah. Carlos Danger would be the perfect president to lead America into its final collapse.  As the economy contracts and interracial violence erupts from Florida to California, the citizenry would be cheered and inspired by frequent press conferences featuring the presidential weiner. 

Why should the New York Times be perturbed by what Carlos Danger does with his dongle?  After all, his wife clearly doesn’t care what he does with it so long as he keeps it away from her.

Carlos Danger in 2016!

Boehner prepares his latest betrayal

It amazes me that John Boehner is still the head of the House Republicans after single-handedly saving the Obama administration by raising the debt ceiling.  Now it looks as if he is preparing to mortally wound the Republican Party in the short term and permanently segregate the American two-party system in the long term:

While House Speaker John Boehner is keeping a tight lid on his personal position on immigration reform, conservative activists and lawmakers fear the Republican leader may rubber-stamp Democrats’ controversial legislation in a backroom deal with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Boehner declined to answer whether he supports what many on the left have come to term a “pathway to citizenship” for illegal immigrants during his appearance on CBS News’ Face The Nation on Sunday morning. For conservative lawmakers, that does not assuage fears that he and his deputies House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Whip Kevin McCarthy, and Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan could be working behind the scenes cut a deal with Reid and President Barack Obama to achieve amnesty for illegal immigrants in America.

“We are scared to death of what we figure is already Boehner’s end game,” a senior congressional GOP aide told Breitbart News. “There are so many forces within the GOP establishment pushing for their interests that it’s hard to conceive that Boehner will not cave to them.”

By adding tens of millions of new Democratic voters who are, for the most part, to the left of the Democratic Party’s center, more whites are going to gravitate towards the Republican Party than has been seen since Nixon first successfully launched his Southern Strategy.

Few “anti-racist” white liberals tend to remain that way once they are surrounded by  vibrant neighbors and find themselves living in the diversity they once supported so enthusiastically from afar.  Remember, “white flight” is mostly an urban liberal phenomenon.

Where is the Left?

I find it fascinating how the ideological Left is far more concerned about slavery that ended nearly 150 years ago than slavery that is taking place today.  It appears that if they can’t blame something on white people, they’re just not interested in it:

From the West Coast of Africa to the deserts of Sinai, Bedouin tribes
are conducting a human trafficking trade on a massive scale… This man is just one victim of this widespread modern-day slavery,
kidnapping, and torture trade in the Sinai desert. There are many
pictures and videos of this horrible practice on the Internet. For this story, this Christian man from the African country of
Eritrea is going by “Philip,” but that’s not his real name. CBN News
covered his identity for his protection.

“In some cases, we were tortured simply because we were Christians,” he told us, his chest trembling slightly as he spoke. “Sinai was always a place for human smuggling, but since around two
years ago — even a bit more — it started also to be a place of human
torture,” Shahar Shoham, director of Physicians for Human Rights, told CBN News.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it is readily apparent that everything, including the truth, is nothing more than a useful weapon to the Left.  With a few noble exceptions, for whom I harbor an amount of respect, they just don’t appear to have any genuine principles beyond whatever they find useful at the moment. 

This is true of some who are nominally on the right, of course.  You don’t need to remind me, I was acquainted with Ken Lay and some members of Bush the Elder’s “Houston Mafia”.  But it appears to be true of nearly everyone, especially at the grass roots, on the Left.

Tories favor UKIP

The UK’s nationalist party is on the rise:

Polls conducted in the run-up to Ukip’s local election surge suggested that some 60 per cent of its supporters voted Conservative in 2010, while a survey released by the Tory peer Lord Ashcroft at the end of June indicated that almost a quarter of those who picked David Cameron’s party at the last election would today plump for what he once branded a bunch of “fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists”. More recent research, however, reveals something even more alarming for the Prime Minister: it’s not just Tory voters who are tempted by Ukip; it’s also his own grassroots members.

At the beginning of June, and with the help of YouGov and the McDougall Trust, we surveyed 852 Conservative Party members – enough to ensure that we can be 95 per cent confident that their responses are a true reflection of the membership as a whole, plus or minus 4 per cent. What we found is that at least a fifth and very possibly even just over a quarter of the Tory grassroots would seriously consider voting for Ukip in a general election. Asked whether they’d think about it at a European election, the figures are even more worrying for the Conservative high command: in that case, over a third of its grassroots members are wondering whether to give Ukip a go next year.

Note that these aren’t Tory voters, these are the card-carrying Conservative Party members. They are migrating to UKIP because there is no point in voting Tory due to better policy positions than Labour; a vote for either the Tories or Labour is a vote for Brussels.  Every British voter, regardless of his ideology, who believes in national sovereignty has no choice but to vote UKIP. And that’s why no one should be surprised if an unexpectedly high percentage of Labour party members also go UKIP.

The British have UKIP. The Scots have the Scottish National Party. The Italians have Movimento 5 Stelle. The Greeks have Golden Dawn. The Hungarians have Jobbik. The French have Front National. The Finns have the True Finns. The Swiss have the Schweizerische Volkspartei. Even the Germans have Alternative für Deutschland.

Who do the Americans have?

Deen proves Hoyt right

Prof. Stephen Clark writes in to Instapundit:

The cancellation of Paula Deen’s book at this time is about avoiding
being seen as enabling what appears to be an evolving protest as
expressed through the advance orders, coupled with a desire to flip off
the protesters. Just another page in the ongoing cultural aggression
being waged by the bicoastal elite. It does, however, neatly illustrate
the inherent viciousness of the class.

Taken in
combination with the complete inactivity concerning Alec Baldwin’s
recent comments on Twitter, it also shows the utter hypocrisy of that
class.  By the elite’s standard metric, Baldwin’s speech was every bit
as hateful and unforgivable as Deen’s theatrics, if not more so, but he
hasn’t been fired from his show or lost any endorsement contracts.

Now,
I certainly don’t pity Mrs. Deen in the slightest, as like James
Frenkel, she is simply reaping the harvest that she helped sow with her
active support of progressives and the establishment of today’s
political elite.  And there are worse fates than being paid millions of dollars to not write a book or two. But she does serve as what should be an educational
example to all the Scalzis and Hineses and Goulds of the world; no
amount of goodthink, political posturing, or progressive flag-waving is
going to save you when the pinkshirts and/or savages you have championed
turn on you and tear you apart without warning.

John
Scalzi was very fortunate that his inept political satire last year was
accepted as such. That didn’t have to be the case; it was far more
potentially offensive than the “lady editor” comment that sparked
Bulletingate. If it had served the whims of the pinkshirts to destroy
him, (for example, if they had had a candidate for SFWA president they
wished to push), he would have found himself the bewildered recipient of
the same sort of ideological hysteria to which Messrs. Resnick and
Malzberg were inflicted.  As readers here have probably noted,
pinkshirts tend to fall silent and run away as soon as they meet with
direct opposition willing to openly confront them; the only thing even
the most abject apologizing accomplishes is to inspire them to go into a
feeding frenzy.

In fact, because he has shown obvious Scalzi-like weakness in his obvious desire to appease the pinkshirts, I think it
quite likely that Steven Gould, the incoming president, will soon come
under attack from the organizational left for one reason or another.

To return to Mrs. Deen, the cancellation of her book, which at the time was Amazon’s #1
bestseller prior to its release, also shows that Sarah Hoyt was
absolutely right and that “business reasons” have absolutely nothing to
do with the ideologically driven decisions of the publishing
gatekeepers.  That defense, which was never the least bit convincing to
anyone with actual experience of mainstream publishing, has now been
exploded in a very public and undeniable manner.

And it also demonstrates the importance of building distribution channels that circumnavigate the attempts of the gatekeepers to control what is made available to the public.

Amend or go home

Remember when all the progressives and moderates were saying that a Defense of Marriage Amendment was unnecessary because Congress passed a law?  Yeah, well, they lied:

A divided U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal law that defines
marriage as a heterosexual union, saying it violates the rights of
married gay couples by denying them government benefits.

Between legalizing abortion and the government dismantling of marriage, the USA has now officially entered Sodom and Gomorrah territory.   I wouldn’t put too much confidence in that “God bless America” notion.  The best-case scenario is that He’s not paying attention. Following American politics these days feels like watching Gibbon on fast-forward; an imperial decline and fall measured in years rather than centuries.

I find it remarkable that Republicans still bother passing this sort of law when it has been clear since at least 1973 that the Supreme Court will simply overturn anything that is effectively conservative. Amend or don’t bother.

UPDATE: And they effectively overturned Proposition 8 in California by refusing to hear it.  Taken together, these two “rulings” make it official: American democracy is entirely dead.

The court avoided a ruling on the merits in a second gay-marriage case
involving California’s Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage, saying that
both the Supreme Court and a federal appeals court lacked jurisdiction
to hear the case. That means a federal district court’s ruling striking
down Proposition 8 stands, which could clear the way for same-sex
marriage to resume in California.

Notice how the Supreme Court will jump in and wave the Constitution whenever it wants to override something, but turn around and claim it has no jurisdiction whenever it wants to leave a lower court decision intact.  Pass a law, pass a referendum, it doesn’t matter.  The black robes now rule.