Quotulatiousness

November 7, 2024

Kemi Badenoch portrayed by the left as “the most prominent member of white supremacy’s black collaborator class”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The left likes to think themselves the faction of racial equality, yet they often reveal themselves to be anything but when someone steps out of line (from their point of view) and chooses a different political worldview:

For centuries, Britain was ruled by an aristocracy. In recent decades, however, this concept has become rather passé, and we have been doing away with it — most recently with the vote to abolish hereditary peers in the House of Lords.

Yet, as the old guard fades, a new elite has taken its place. Inherited traits — particularly skin colour and sex — now grant special dispensations. Utterances that would be unthinkable for most are allowed, and positions incommensurate to talent are dispensed.

This is because the new aristocracy is flush, often through little toil of its own, with moral authority — a valuable currency wielded by what we might call the Patricians of Victimhood.

Their power rests on the idea that Britain is a fundamentally racist country, brimming with other nasty “isms” that can be contained only by them. To deny this is heresy — but to disprove it is a crime for which no punishment is too great.

This was evident when Kemi Badenoch, a black woman, was elected Saturday to lead the Conservative Party. This historic first for Britain might have been expected to please those preoccupied with combating racism, perhaps even chalked up as a win.

Instead, Badenoch was lambasted by politicians who have built careers campaigning about racism. Dawn Butler, a Labour MP, shared a post accusing Badenoch of representing “white supremacy in blackface” — an insult so improbable that it conjures only an image of a face-painted Justin Trudeau.

The post, now removed from Butler’s X account, read: “Today the most prominent member of white supremacy’s black collaborator class (in Britain) is likely to be made leader of the Conservative Party. Here are some handy tips for surviving the immediate surge of Badenochism (i.e. white supremacy in blackface).”

Another Labour MP, Zara Sultana, said Badenoch was “one of the most nasty & divisive figures in British politics”, for, among other things, “downplaying racism”.

Badenoch is opposed to identity politics. She believes in meritocracy and that Britain — as she told her children recently — “is the best country in the world to be black”. Badenoch’s optimism is well founded: a 2023 World Values Survey found that Britain is indeed one of the least racist countries in the world.

Forgotten War Ep4 – Rise of the Chindits

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

HardThrasher
Published 4 Nov 2024

Please consider donations of any size to the Burma Star Memorial Fund who aim to ensure remembrance of those who fought with, in and against 14th Army 1941–1945 — https://burmastarmemorial.org/
(more…)

Donald Trump II: The Trumpening

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I went to bed on Tuesday night with assurances from several sources that the election was still very close and that it might take many more hours to determine the winner — if any — of the 2024 US federal election. Roughly an hour later, it was apparently all over but the crying:

We’re sitting down to write this at 2 a.m., and by now it’s clear: Donald Trump is set to be the 47th president of the United States, and on track to win the electoral college and the popular vote. It is a stunning comeback.

The red wave that wasn’t in 2022 came crashing down tonight. Republicans have retaken control of the Senate. Control of Congress is still in the balance.

Going into tonight, Nate Silver ran 80,000 simulations of what could happen. In 40,012 of them, Kamala Harris won. Every pollster and pundit said the same: It was gonna be a squeaker. Too close to call. We wouldn’t know for days, maybe even weeks!

That’s not how it went down. Not at all.

Trump had won Pennsylvania before the night was out. And by 2:30 in the morning, he was onstage, surrounded by his family and Dana White, delivering his victory speech in West Palm Beach.

Tonight at our election party, the British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore said he hadn’t seen a comeback like this since Charles de Gaulle. But perhaps the only American echo of tonight is Richard Nixon. As Commentary editor John Podhoretz wrote on Twitter: “This is the most staggering political comeback in American history. Period. Nixon has held the comeback trophy for nearly 60 years. No longer.”

Why Trump won so convincingly — and why Kamala lost so fully — are themes we’ll cover over the coming weeks. But for now, enough from us.

In the same Front Page summary:

This race was the Democrats’ to lose. And they blew it. Badly. As of 2 a.m., there wasn’t a single county in the country in which Harris outperformed Joe Biden. What went wrong? Peter Savodnik has some ideas.

“They didn’t lose because they didn’t spend enough money,” writes Peter. “They didn’t lose because they failed to trot out enough celebrity influencers. They lost because they were consumed by their own self-flattery, their own sense of self-importance.”

And above all else, they lost because they lied. “They seemed to think that Americans wouldn’t mind that they had pretended Joe Biden was ‘sharp as a tack’, that they actually orchestrated a behind-the-scenes switcheroo, that the party that portrayed itself as the nation’s answer to fascism nominated its standard-bearer without consulting a single voter.”

Last night, the truth caught up with them.

Kamala Harris failed to retain Joe Biden’s record 81 million Democratic voters, falling back to about the same level of support (67 million) as Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama in 2012. Weird.

Freddie deBoer wonders what the Democrats will end up blaming this loss on:

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Jill Stein.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Putin and the Russians.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Bernie Sanders and his supporters.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Rogan.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Glenn Greenwald and The Young Turks.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the decision to run with Tim Walz.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the New York Times and its occasional Democrat-skeptical opinion pieces.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Biden for getting out of the race too late.

You can’t pull all the usual Democrat tricks. You have to actually figure out what’s wrong with your party, root and branch. Because you called the guy a fascist, again, and he walked right through that insult to the Oval Office, again. And the eternal question presents itself: what are you going to do about it?

Of course, some Trump supporters can’t help but get a little triumphal:

Donald J Trump has been elevated to the purple by the prince-electors at Aachen, and coronated in Rome by the Pope, so that he is now Imperator of the Holy Roman Empire, and of the Empire of Man, Rex Quondam et Rexque Futurum.

All Glory to God and to his anointed!

The Tribune Assembly of the Commoners in America, who retain a quaint custom of confirming the Electoral determination by local ballot, have also granted His Imperial Majesty the Mandate of the Commons.

[…]

JD Vance will be Executive-for-Life, and Elon the first Transhuman Immortal of the Noosphere. So far, so good.

Purple haired girls will no longer be allowed to twirk and grind in public, as show in the first scene, and modest dress codes will be decreed by the National Census Office. No more tattoos nor face piercings.

Also, involuntary concubinage will ensure a reverse of the demographic decline, the return to the fertility levels needed to colonize Mars.

Highlights of Herculaneum (Part I)

Filed under: History, Italy — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Scenic Routes to the Past
Published Jul 9, 2024

An introduction to Herculaneum, buried and preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. This video surveys the site and some of its public monuments. Part II explores Herculaneum’s incredibly well-preserved houses.

Check out my other channels, ‪@toldinstone‬ and ‪@toldinstonefootnotes‬

QotD: Fear of … freedom

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When Rousseau said you’d need to force men to be free, he wasn’t joking. It’s hard to admit the truth of that statement, especially as Rousseau, like all Leftists, quite obviously pleasured himself to the thought of forcing great masses of people to do things, but he’s right for all that. As Nikolai points out, so many people quite obviously enjoy the COVID madness, because it gives structure to their otherwise stressfully chaotic lives. Everyone, even the most rugged Marlboro Man individualist, has experienced “analysis paralysis”, that rising sense of near-panic that comes from having too many choices. Your developmentally normal person quickly snaps out of it — a mental slap upside the head in the form of “it’s just peanut butter, dummy!” usually does it — but a vast and increasing number of people never do.

Since this is my blog and it’s Friday and all that, I’ll go ahead and expand this into a nebulous Theory of Everything: What people really want, deep down, is drama within limits. Ideally, you have the sense that something better is possible — and that something worse is possible — but, most importantly, the sense that if you follow the rules, and make sure everyone else follows the rules, neither of them will happen.

If you reach what appears to be an end state — that is, there’s no realistic possibility of anyone going higher or lower — you see nasty Karen-ish behavior. From everyone, everywhere, always. The Z Man did a piece the other day on Sayre’s Law, which anyone who has ever dealt with eggheads instinctively understands: “The fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so small”. If you read the bios of the real lunatics — the insane-by-egghead-standards, I’m talking — you almost always see that they’re tenured at some second rate academy. They’re topped out, and they know it. Hang around the faculty lounge long enough, and you learn to spot it in their eyes — that precise moment when they realize that Harvard won’t be calling, so they’re stuck here at Flyover State. They can’t move up, and thanks to tenure there’s no realistic (in their minds) possibility of falling down. The only drama left, then, is interpersonal drama, which is why they’re such vicious, obnoxious bitches to everyone, everywhere, always.

It works outside the academy too, of course. The two main CRT loons, Robin De Angelo and that Ibram X. Kendi guy, are maxed out and they know it. They weep, because they’ve seen they have no more worlds to conquer. Ever-escalating lunacy is the only emotional escape hatch they have left. You saw the same deal with “the workers” under Communism. They’re stuck there, forever, and they know it. They can’t move up — wrong class background, comrade, plus you lack Party connections — but they can’t really move down, either, if for no other reason than the KGB, vast as it is, can’t bother with every moribund tractor factory in Krasnoyarsk. Can’t move up, can’t move down, so you drink yourself into oblivion and spend your still-conscious hours in petty backbiting.

Severian, “Mailbag Etc.”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-06.

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