Quotulatiousness

November 13, 2022

Corruption in US politics? Where’s the fainting couch?

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

Elizabeth Nickson looks at several recent books covering political corruption in US politics:

Whitney Webb’s One Nation under Blackmail published late last month, explains in exhaustive detail how the American government was taken over by well-dressed thieves. Webb writes from the left, but she is dispassionate. In 1,000 pages, she explains the history of the turning of democracy, starting post WW2 with the heinous Dulles brothers, moving through Reagan with country club thugs calling themselves The Enterprise, to Jeffrey Epstein’s seduction of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Promising riches beyond their imaginings, the seduction led the couple, by increments, to sell out the country to China and Wall Street.

Webb explains how Epstein set up the Clinton and Gates Foundations promising a new iteration in “charity”, one that made profits, and pushed forward the founders as Saviours. Clinton in her years as Sec State, flew around the world eating brownies and demanding tithes for herself, in return for every beneficence she gave courtesy of the American taxpayer. The ’08 crisis was brought to us by the same crooks, and the same methods, chipping away at regulation. The head Fannie and Freddie Mae bureaucrat, James A Johnson walked away with $100 million leaving the world in crisis. Tens of millions lost everything.

Add this to [Profiles in Corruption] Peter Schweizer’s extraordinary detailing of how Pelosi etc. made their hundreds of millions using taxpayer money, pinpointed deregulation and insider trading.

Schweizer describes how the mega-criminal dealing of the Bidens with China and the Ukraine has walked us into a potential nuclear conflict with both Russia and China. The Lords of Easy Money shows how Wall Street and all the pension funds, all the index funds, have been rolling over corporate debt and taking profits, then borrowing more, selling, borrowing more, selling, and repeat. Which means that every American enterprise that is traded and somehow functional, is laden with corporate debt it cannot possibly pay the interest on, as interest rates rise. Jay Powell made his $50 million that way.

Webb shows how Epstein coached Gates through invading and then purchasing public health both at home and through the UN. Add in the Covid mess, and another bunch of corporate and government thieves walked away with $3 Trillion, in the US alone.

Do you really think they’d allow the endless prosecutions they deserve? Do you really think they want to give back the money they stole?

November 10, 2022

The headscratcher that was the American midterms outcome

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

As the voters went to the polls on Tuesday, it was easy to find doom-and-gloom-mongering among Democratic stalwarts and most of the mainstream media (BIRM), and chest-thumping triumphalism on the right. Both sides seemed to agree that the outcome was going to be somewhere between a red landslide and a red wipeout. So … how do we square the expectations of both sides with what actually happened? Chris Bray makes an attempt:

Eight percent uptake of the much-touted bivalent booster, 75% wrong track sentiment, pretty good night for the party in power. Multiple signs of a total loss of trust and respect for the existing order equals a decision to more or less stay the course.

Tribalism is the first explanation, sure. If you shat on a sidewalk and ran it for office with a D behind its name, Democrats would vote for it; if you shat on a sidewalk and ran it for office with an R behind its name, Republicans would vote for it. John Fetterman is headed for the United States Senate. Go ‘way, I’m ‘batin’.

And I agree with the argument that Republicans didn’t offer much of a plan or a vision, a premise you can check by reading Kevin McCarthy’s Commitment to America. More mush from the wimp.

But the other thing, and you can argue with me about this, is that the society of the spectacle madness of messaging without regard to reality actually achieves its purpose, no matter how absurd it is. We have to add $3 trillion in extra debt-funded spending to the economy to reduce inflation! If you vote Republican, they’ll kill our children!

Amazingly, this turns out to work pretty well. The available evidence suggests that we have a sizable population that cannot assess fact claims. I propose that we test this with sample messages to voters: If you vote for bubblegum trees, the sky bees will give you a diamond-crusted ribeye! (Ohh, I have to vote for bubblegum trees!) If you’re out in public, look to your left; then look to your right. At least one of those people thinks Karine Jean-Pierre makes some pretty good points.

Sarah Hoyt strongly believes that the busy midnight vote-finders of 2020 were just as busy on Tuesday night:

As I write this late on the 8th, the tsunami is resolving itself into a wavelet.

Or rather, the tsunami has been overfrauded into a wavelet. And it might be frauded away to a Dem win before I wake tomorrow.
This shouldn’t be a surprise to any of us who were awake and remember this:

And we know damn well it was a Trump landslide before that.

So for the Republicans to have picked up any seat, this was the tsunami to end all tsunamis.

I know the usual idiots are out there, already saying “It was abortion: the Womyns came out in force to vote dem.”

Are there women who are single ticket abortion voters. Sure. Most are older than I and are determined to make sure their actions and choices are validated a posteriori. They’re an ever dwindling minority. Married women vote more and more for the right every time. Single women? Who knows? But I suspect there’s been a shift in that too after the last too years. And most of them don’t see that career path ahead they once did.

Then there’s the other bs which is of course “The people don’t want to be free.” That’s bs. The people, every time they can express their displeasure do so. But having the vote taken away from them via fraud means THEY each individual thinks he or she is alone.

Things like “Let’s go Brandon” sweep the nation, but there’s no major legal or financial movement to protest the fraud, because each person thinks “I guess all these idiots are so beaten down they like beaten down, and I’m the only one who is angry.”

Meanwhile the perpetrators know what the people think, and erect barricades in DC to protect themselves from the anger they sense but can’t seem to bring out into the open.

Yes, we’re getting the house, and probably not the senate. Which means a good five/six seats fraud. I’m in a group right now with people crunching numbers, and the fraud is evident. The races the democrats cared out got flipped by turning just those votes for the dems. That’s the flexibility of Dominion at work, and the way they can turn a vote into the other.

At Founding Questions, Severian is appropriately sanguine about the notion of “adjusted” or “fortified” ballot counts in disputed races:

So the “elections” were fun, eh? By far the best “news” from the Dissident perspective is that they did, in fact, pull out all the stops for S-s-s-Strokey. As I think it was Based 5.0 who quipped below, it looks like dual-passport-holding Muslim carny barkers aren’t going to be making America great again. Here’s hoping they’re stupid enough to fall for the “Dr. Jill” trap twice — now they’re stuck with Strokey the way they’re stuck with Tapioca Joe, because Giselle is Dr. Jill on steroids (perhaps literally). Eh, Dr. Jill had 40 years in [Washington, DC] to get a taste of the finer things; Giselle’s price is probably far lower. But until Strokey resigns for health reasons and is replaced […] the image of a tatted-out, brain-damaged hobo in a hoodie shuffling around the Senate floor is so on the nose, no novelist would dare use it.

[…]

I bet if we look back on it, we’ll see the state (lowercase s) Media freaking out first, dragging the Official State (capital S) Media with them. It makes sense, given the perverse incentive structure of the Media. Stick with me here:

Joe Schmoe (D) is running for Congress in Flyover State. Obviously The Media wants him to win, because (D). And they’re sure he’s going to, because his opponent is some “ultra-MAGA” yahoo. But Reality is what it is, and suddenly the yahoo is getting closer and closer …

At that point, The Media’s perverted incentive structure kicks in. The “reporters” at the biggest local rag in Flyover State, the Toad Suck Times-Picayune, only care about one thing: Getting the fuck out of Toad Suck, trading the Times-Picayune for a slot somewhere higher up the chain. Now, there are only two ways to do that: Be a hard-hitting, straight-shooting newshoun …

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Oh Jesus, I’m sorry, I thought I could type that with a straight face, but I can’t. Give me a minute …

… ok, there’s only one way to move up in The Media, and that’s by proving yourself a more zealous cultist than the next guy. So our Heroic Journalist starts doing what he thinks the Inner Party wants, which is of course “propping up Joe Schmoe for all he’s worth”. But here’s the rub: He’s not privy to what the Inner Party actually wants. Of course he’s not; after all, he’s riding a desk at the Toad Suck Times-Picayune. And of course everybody in a similar position, nationwide, is doing the same thing …

… but they’re all at least kinda sorta privy to the real polls that come down from the big organizations (recall that there are maybe three companies that control all the newspapers in the US), and so he knows things are looking grim for Joe Schmoe. More importantly, he sees that Tapioca Joe himself is out stumping for Democrats, and not in battleground states — they’re putting Brandon out there in supposedly safe Democratic districts.

So our man at the Toad Suck Times-Picayune consults his own personal political tea leaves, and he concludes: We’re gonna lose. The “red wave” is real. So again, he starts doing what he thinks his masters want, the thing he thinks will get him noticed at the higher levels: He admits the truth, or as much as he personally can stomach, and starts laying in the groundwork for #TheResistance, same as in 2020. Oh, Kari Lake is ahead 8% over Abortion Mouse there in AZ (give Ace of Normies this, he coins a good nickname), well obviously that’s because of bigotry MAGA yadda yadda and don’t forget the Russian hacking!

But here’s the problem with that: It does get him noticed by the Big League club, but in the exact opposite way. So long as everyone stays on point, you can brazen it out through the inevitable “fortification”. Had everyone stayed on point, a “worryingly tight race” — they’ll admit that much, for verisimilitude — can easily be turned into one of those 3am miracles the Dems are famous for. Hey, whaddaya know, all the mail in ballots were for Joe Schmoe. What a surprise.

But now that the Toad Suck Times-Picayune is running stories about the challenger being ahead, the Big League clubs have to at least acknowledge it, the school of fish effect takes over, and pretty soon you’ve got the entire Media in panic mode. Which has the further effect of making the freelance riggers even crazier, so that the regularly scheduled 3am ballot drop is being disrupted by mysterious “hiccups” at key locations — you know, “cyberattacks” and whatnot (why the fuck is a voting machine connected to the internet in the first place?), and so on, plus all the mailmen and so forth dumping a whole bunch of ballots from red districts into the nearest streams, culverts, and landfills. Jimmy Hoffa is probably up to his eye sockets in Republican ballots out there in the foundations of Giants’ Stadium…

And so the weird shit we see above, and the odd “had a Narrative all ready” vs. “are clearly scrambling” coverage of different contests.

I can’t think of a better way to really shore up the idea that ALL elections are rigged than that. Wait a minute, the “red wave” was on last week. You guys admitted it. Early Tuesday afternoon, every talking head on tv looked like he was weaving a noose under the “news” desk; you’d expect “journalists” hanging from the rafters by 7pm.

But … ooops! Short of actually being caught on camera throwing Republican ballots in a bonfire, or openly xeroxing Democrat ones — and it’s only mid-morning of the day after, give it time — I can’t think of a clearer way of announcing that it’s ALL rigged than that.

November 9, 2022

Liberal political fortunes ride “especially women in the suburbs of the Greater Toronto Area” … and those women are angry right now

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Ashley Csanady has some advice for Justin Trudeau in the lead-up to the next federal election that he really needs to pay attention to:

Poll after poll has told us the Liberals lost white male voters a long time ago, and their electoral fortunes, especially in Quebec and suburban Ontario, rely on women, especially women in the suburbs of the Greater Toronto Area. This isn’t to say dads and other caregivers aren’t angry. Families take many shapes and anyone with small people at home has faced the same indignities over the past nearly three years. However, politically and demographically, it’s the Ontario moms who are going to make or break the next election. And when folks are angry, it doesn’t matter who the incumbent is, they are wont to vote them out.

Nor is it not just about the children’s pain meds.

It’s about the fact we can’t find antibiotic eye drops over-the-counter either (a shortage one pharmacist told me is even worse than the one for pain and fever meds for the wee ones). Another shortage that means we must then turn to an already over-burdened health-care system to get a prescription for a medicine that may or may not be in stock.

Oh, and if that respiratory virus going around turns nasty, we aren’t even certain there will be a hospital bed for our babies when they need it most.

Then there is the infuriatingly slow roll-out of affordable childcare in this province. Parents once again caught between the feds and the province in a battle that may drag out the process so long that many expecting relief will see their kids off to junior kindergarten before it arrives.

Grocery bills are skyrocketing, and while I admit I’m privileged enough to absorb the eye-popping increases, so many families simply cannot. Imagine telling a picky toddler they can’t have their favourite snack because you can’t afford the crackers.

Now, Ontario moms had to deal with yet another disruption to their kids’ schooling, which threw their work lives into chaos once again. More disruptions are possible should bargaining fail again. This just after many women who left the workforce or took a step back from their careers during the pandemic were just getting back into the swing of things.

I made this point — that Ontario moms are angry and much of that anger is directed at political leaders, but I don’t expect it to fall on Ontario Doug Ford — on Twitter a couple weeks back. For this, I was “reminded” — more like chided — that many of these challenges are Mr. Ford’s fault. Or global challenges no logical person could blame the prime minister for. The partisans in my mentions were right on both counts. But here’s what they got wrong:

It doesn’t matter if I’m being “unfair” to Mr. Trudeau, because politics is unfair.

And as for Mr. Ford’s share of the blame, voters punish who’s up next at the ballot box, especially in a crisis. They had a chance to take out their rage on the PCs in June. They didn’t. So who does that leave up next?

November 8, 2022

“Just Stop Oil” and other nihilistic doomsday cults

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Spiked, Tom Slater says we have to accurately label groups like the Extinction Rebellion spin-off “Just Stop Oil” rather than giving them the rather anodyne label of “protest groups”:

We need to stop calling Just Stop Oil a protest group. Protesters is far too positive a word to describe this strange assemblage of middle-class agitators, with their cut-glass accents and self-parodying bohemian names (shouts out to Indigo Rumbelow), who have been gluing themselves to roads and throwing soup at great works of art in an attempt to end oil and gas production. This thing is a doomsday cult, masquerading as a political campaign. There’s really no denying it any longer.

Take the case of that 24-year-old woman who climbed up one of the gantries over the M25 this morning, in order to bring all the ignorant, carbon-spewing plebs to a standstill. She posted an unnerving video online. In it, she is fighting back tears. She gives vent to a seemingly sincere apocalyptic terror. “I’m here because I don’t have a future!”, she says, in between sobs. She accuses the government of murder, of fuelling a “climate crisis” she seems to be convinced is killing millions, for having the temerity to exploit oil and gas to keep the UK’s lights on.

That what she’s saying is alarmist nonsense should be obvious to anyone. The truth is almost the inverse of what she is saying. Thanks to economic development, fuelled by cheap and reliable energy, annual deaths worldwide from climate-related disasters have plunged by more than 95 per cent over the past century. She also implies that the floods in Pakistan are the fault of fossil fuels, even though those feted IPCC reports say there is insufficient evidence to show that climate change is making floods more frequent, lengthy or intense. What would be considerably more murderous would be for our government to shun reliable oil and gas supplies as the nation’s pensioners head into a harsh winter, amid sky-high energy prices and talk of blackouts.

Such blithe disregard for the details reminds us that these people don’t really care about climate change. They’re hysterical about climate change. They’re apocalyptic about climate change. They aren’t taking to the streets, motorways and art galleries because they are convinced of a particular scientific view with regards to the environment and think something really ought to be done about it. They are in the grip of a fact-lite and doom-laden narrative that insists literally billions will die in short order, that the twentysomethings of today might not live to see their dotage, because of our damnable desire to live comfortable and free lives.

All of this is why environmental protest – with Just Stop Oil and the various other Extinction Rebellion offshoots to the fore – has become so much weirder in recent years. And that’s saying something. Beyond all the crying and talk of having no future, there’s also the setting of arms on fire, the pouring of human shit over memorials to Captain Sir Tom Moore, the throwing of soup over great works of art … it’s all become rather visceral, iconoclastic, scatological. In a word, it’s all become rather creepy. These are the acts not of future-oriented protesters keen to shape and change the world, but of cultists convinced that doomsday is almost upon us.

As someone else pointed out recently, there’s more than a bit of a resemblance between the kind of actions taken by protest groups like “Just Stop Oil” and the tantrums of very small children.

November 6, 2022

How bad do the midterm elections look for the Democrats? Even Andrew Sullivan is voting Republican this time

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

From the free-to-cheapskates excerpt of Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

The day I received my absentee ballot from the DC government, there was a story in the Washington Post about the DC Council’s imminent vote:

    The bill would eliminate most mandatory minimum sentences, allow for jury trials in almost all misdemeanor cases and reduce the maximum penalties for offenses such as burglaries, carjackings and robberies.

Over the past few years, violent crime in DC has been rising fast. Last year the murder rate was the highest since 2003, and this year the death toll is slightly higher so far. Carjackings are up 36 percent and robberies are up 57 percent. Almost all this hideous violence is inflicted on African-Americans, including many children. It permeates outward, creating a deeper public sense of insecurity and out-of-control crime. Tent cities are now all over the city. People suffering from mental illness patrol the streets. You feel the decline in law and order, the slow fraying of the city, every day.

And yet the Council has decided that now is the time to make it harder to prosecute and easier to defend violent criminals, partly in the name of “equity”. Yes, it’s part of a longstanding “modernization” of the criminal code, but they had to include these provisions and now? And this isn’t new. Just before the crime explosion took off, the DC mayor had “Black Lives Matter” painted on the street in letters so large you could read them from a plane, and allowed “Defund the Police” to remain next to it. That summer, woke mobs were allowed to harass anyone in their vicinity, yelling slogans that vilified all police — and the MSM took the side of the bullies. After the summer of 2020, the DC police force dropped to its lowest level in two decades.

So guess what? I’m going to vote for the Republican and the most conservative Independent I can find next Tuesday. And I can’t be the only Biden and Clinton and Obama voter who’s feeling something like this, after the past two years.

There was no choice in 2020, given Trump. I understand that. If he runs again, we’ll have no choice one more time. And, more than most, I am aware of the profound threat to democratic legitimacy that the election-denying GOP core now represents. But that’s precisely why we need to send the Dems a message this week, before it really is too late.

By “we”, I mean anyone not committed to the hard-left agenda Biden has relentlessly pursued since taking office. In my view, he and his media mouthpieces have tragically enabled the far right over the past two years far more than they’ve hurt them. I hoped in 2020 that after a clear but modest win, with simultaneous gains for the GOP in the House and a fluke tie in the Senate, Biden would grasp a chance to capture the sane middle, isolating the far right. After the horror of January 6, the opportunity beckoned ever more directly.

And yet Biden instantly threw it away. In return for centrists’ and moderates’ support, Biden effectively told us to get lost. He championed the entire far-left agenda: the biggest expansion in government since LBJ; a massive stimulus that, in a period of supply constraints, fueled durable inflation; a second welfare stimulus was also planned — which would have made inflation even worse; record rates of mass migration, and no end in sight; a policy of almost no legal restrictions on abortion (with public funding as well!); the replacement of biological sex with postmodern “genders”; the imposition of critical race theory in high schools and critical queer theory in kindergarten; an attack on welfare reform; “equity” hiring across the federal government; plans to regulate media “disinformation”; fast-track sex-changes for minors; next-to-no due process in college sex-harassment proceedings; and on and on it went. Even the policy most popular with the center — the infrastructure bill — was instantly conditioned on an attempt to massively expand the welfare state. What on earth in this agenda was there for anyone in the center?

November 5, 2022

Psyops in theory and practice

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

Theophilus Chilton on the development of psyops and some examples of their use in US civilian contexts in recent years:

I trust that most readers are familiar with the concept of a “psyop”, a psychological operation designed to sway its targets in certain desired directions. Many of the mechanics of psyops were pioneered by the CIA and other intelligence agencies during the Cold War but have now been turned against civilian populations in the USA and elsewhere in an effort by the Regime to maintain control and minimise opposition to its various agendas. However, I’d like to make the point that psyops qualitatively differ from standard, run-of-the-mill propaganda such as governments have used for millennia.

The difference is primarily that of the time preferences involved. Whether it’s designed to whip up a population against an enemy or to try to obfuscate the truth about some particular event that has occurred, propaganda tends to operate on a shorter timescale and with more limited and simple policy goals in mind. It’s not surprising that modern propaganda techniques share a lot in common with commercial advertising designed to induce an “impulse buy” response in potential customers. Propaganda generally operates the same way — create a monodirectional response to a particular stimulus.

Psyops, on the other hand, are quite a bit more complex and generally involve the building of a narrative memeplex over the course of months, years, or even decades. Psyops are, of course, also fake but theirs is a fakeness that builds upon constant, repetitious narrative-building that lays out a foundational lens through which any individual incident or act can be systematically interpreted, adding them to the overall saga being told.

With conventional propaganda, the aim is to communicate Regime diktat to the average citizen. However, it does not necessarily expect the recipients to believe the propaganda, but merely comply with the goals. The Powers That Be in such cases don’t care why Havel’s greengrocer puts the sign up in his window, but merely that he does so. The primary purpose of psyops, on the other hand, is to ensure compliance by convincing the target to self-comply, rather than it having to be done by outside force or persuasion. It’s always touch and go when you’re making someone outwardly comply but inwardly they’re dissident. When the mark can be convinced to willingly self-police, this makes the government’s job easier since they don’t have to worry about this closet dissidence. The true believer is the best believer.

In essence, propaganda aims for immediate reactive persuasion while psyops seek long-term groundlaying that gives more all-inclusive means of maintaining overarching narrative control.

Now, a lot of people out there like to think they’re immune to psyops because “hurr durr I don’t beleeb da media!!” But they’re not. Indeed, a lot of these boomercon types are just as susceptible to psyops as anyone else when the right buttons are pushed. This is because they’ve been primed for it by the systematic, society-wide preparation of the psychological battle space without their ever realising it. In many cases, the foundations for a psyop are so culturally systematic that people don’t even realise what is happening.

For example, there are a ton of people out there who would pride themselves on being independent thinkers who nevertheless believed everything that was peddled during the covid and vaccine psyops. The reason for this is because they want to think of themselves as smart, knowledgeable about science, etc. Smart People believe the Right Things, after all. That, in turn, is the result of decades of psyops that have ensconced “science” as the arbiter of morality and truth in post-Christian America. So even when the science is fake or wrong, it is still accorded a moral authority that it does not deserve.

November 4, 2022

Amnesty “literally means a pardon, i.e. the absence of punishment … for a crime committed in the past“

Filed under: Government, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sarah Reynolds considers the implications of what Emily Oster wrote in her Atlantic article suggesting a Covid-19 amnesty:

Now “amnesty” is a very specific word. It doesn’t mean forgiveness, it literally means a pardon, i.e. the absence of punishment … for a crime committed in the past.

It is a stark and loaded word indeed when used to refer to anything Covid-related because it establishes two parties: victims and perpetrators. Group 1: Those who committed crimes and could be in the legal sense pardoned of the criminal behavior they engaged in; and Group 2: those who will consequently not get justice.

The implication of such a dichotomy (if one were to appear) is horrifying.

The author alludes to the appeal and inevitability of forgiveness; I posit in contrast that forgiveness is a spiritual concept, one that may be inextricably linked to a religious belief for some, so she’s jumping the gun here because Forgiveness would be the stage after Justice, and only for those whose religion, faith, or spiritual practice also inspires or compels it.

Use of the word amnesty is terribly concerning to me because it insinuates that grave injustice has been committed. And if some horrible truth is coming out soon, her piece in the Atlantic serves as a way to beta test our/society’s future reaction to it — acting as the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

In other words, if we’re this outraged now knowing only what we know so far, how outraged will we be then, after this (speculated by me) coming newsflash triggers national indignation from coast to coast?

The most revealing part of the Professor’s piece in the Atlantic is this statement:

    The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

No, vacuums are complicated. All those attachments.

Tyranny is quite straight-forward, in contrast.

Years ago, I read a book that taught the reader that people are often confessing and how to detect it. If you look at and listen to their word choices, you can sometimes find what it is they did in the past, what they fear will happen in the future, and clues about whether or not they are capable of remorse. Many of you who have watched my youtube or read my blog before I got on substack know how I like to do a communication analysis, and delineate a) what’s literally being said, b) what the person really meant, and c) the third and most important/revealing part, what’s being left unsaid. And I rarely hear people say, “it’s complicated”, unless they are feeling profound regret, fear of the consequences of those “complicated choices”, and plenty of denial of the emotional origin of that particular word choice. They don’t even know why they were compelled unconsciously to use that word … but we do. The stark truth would likely be anything but complicated and possibly horrifying. (For example, what if Oster got on twitter tomorrow and tweeted out, “I don’t think I feel regret or remorse like other people. Intellectually, I get it: the Pandemic response caused human beings unbearable pain and society irrevocable damage but it doesn’t really bother me per se and sometimes I even feel gratified by it, especially when I witness overt force (mandates) replace emotional manipulation (shame).” Now I’m sure Oster is a wonderful person with a fully intact moral compass who’s 100% able to empathetically relate to others!! But … IF … on the off chance it were a true statement so she did declare it on twitter, it might seem complicated to her, but to us it would be the simplest most logical explanation for her actions. We’d go, oh! She’s a sociopath! Oh my God, now it all makes perfect sense! Hahahahaha I get it now hahahahaha because we live in hell!!)

H/T to Chris Bray for the link.

QotD: History while it’s happening

Filed under: History, Humour, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the historian’s unique frustrations is: You find some guy’s papers in the archives, and he looks perfect. He’s a nobody — perfect for the man-on-the-street social history we all wish we could do — but he’s a sharp observer, very quotable, has nice handwriting (a real godsend). He’s a compulsive letter-writer, and you see that his papers cover the date of some big event — Ft. Sumter, Pearl Harbor, the Stock Market Crash, whatever. So you eagerly flip to it, and … nothing. The whole world’s going up in flames, and this guy’s talking about baseball or his horse throwing a shoe or something.

Well, future historian, since I know how much that sucks, I’ll spare you. If you’re plowing through my papers (you’re welcome for all the Slave Leia pictures, by the way) and you get to the “Impeachment of Donald Trump” section, you’ll have something. Maybe nothing interesting, or particularly coherent, but at least it’s something. Professional courtesy.

If nothing else, this impeachment fiasco confirms that we’re ruled by fools. No earth-shattering insight, that, I realize, but there it is. Really it’s just math — since most people in all times and places have been fools, it stands to reason that nearly every human who has ever lived has had a large part of his fate decided by an idiot. This is true even of those blessed to have seen good leadership in action, as even the best men are fools about lots of things. Up to and including the things that make their reputations. George Washington, for instance, was indisputably a great leader, but a terrible general — with Cornwallis trapped on the Yorktown peninsula in Virginia, he had to be talked out of moving the Continental Army north, to reconquer New York. He was one of history’s great captains, but I bet I could take him in a game of Risk.

Severian, “Impeachment Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-12-19.

November 3, 2022

Amnesty? How about “no”.

Filed under: Government, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tom Knighton on the recent trial balloons being sent up by certain media folks to test the willingness of us proles to “forgive and forget” their authoritarian cheerleading over the last two+ years:

Recently, a story over at The Atlantic proposed an amnesty over what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea was that we just let bygones be bygones and no one holds anyone else accountable for what happened.

Lives were ruined, people died alone and miserable — and in some cases, because they were alone and miserable — but we’re supposed to ignore all of that.

At Spiked, Lauren Smith says that the nasty authoritarian tendencies of those in power during the pandemic should absolutely not be forgotten:

As the Covid-19 pandemic fades from view, some may be tempted to forget those miserable two years of lockdowns, social distancing and other restrictions on our liberties. This is certainly the view of a widely shared article in the Atlantic, which calls for a “pandemic amnesty”. American economist Emily Oster asks us to “forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about Covid”. It quickly becomes clear why Oster would prefer us to move on.

During 2020 and 2021, Oster was very much on the side of lockdown. And she supported vaccine mandates in universities and for workers. In fairness to Oster, she did not support every Covid measure. She did, for instance, criticise how long it took for schools to re-open in the US back in the summer of 2020. Yet ultimately, she belonged to the side that was happy to criminalise meeting a friend for coffee or to separate people from their dying loved ones.

Now, with hindsight, Oster regrets some of her positions. The crux of her argument is that the people baying for more lockdowns, harsher restrictions and vaccine mandates couldn’t possibly have known any different at the time. She says that they couldn’t have known that outdoor transmission of Covid was rare, that schoolchildren were always a low-risk group and that cloth masks were virtually useless in preventing viral spread.

Many, however, did know these facts, including back in the spring of 2020. But those who said them out loud were quickly turned into pariahs.

Although Oster admits that those on the anti-lockdown side got many things right, she says this was merely a question of “luck”. But it should not have taken any great foresight to see the danger of lockdowns. They were responsible for the most significant loss of liberty in the history of the democratic world. Their impact on economic output was as profound as that of any war. Not since the days before universal education had so many kids been shut out of school. Worse still, those who did warn of these inevitable and dangerous consequences were met with derision and censorship.

This is a pretty representative viewpoint of the lockdown mindset:

Twitter’s evolution from protecting celebrities to shaping “the narrative”

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

At Common Sense, Walter Kirn recounts his own recognition of how Twitter has changed since he first opened an account in 2009 (incidentally, the same year I did … but unlike Walter, I still have about the same number of followers there as I did in my first year):

The platform belonged to celebrities back then, who hawked their movies, albums, and TV shows in words that were their own, supposedly, fostering in fans a dubious intimacy with figures they knew only from interviews. One of these stars, an investor in the platform, was Ashton Kutcher, the prankish, grinning actor who became omnipresent for a spell and then, stupendously enriched, largely vanished from public consciousness. It seemed that Twitter had sped-up fame such that it bloomed and died in record time.

The power of the new platform struck me first in 2012. Two incidents. The first one, a small one, occurred in Indianapolis, where I’d gone to watch the Super Bowl. I attended a party the night before the game at which many Hollywood folk were present, including an actor on a cable TV show who played a roguish businessman. The actor was extremely drunk, lurching about and hitting on young women, and it happened that my wife, back home, whom I’d texted about the scene, was able to read real-time tweets about his antics from other partygoers. A few hours afterward she noticed that these tweets had disappeared. Instant reality-editing. Impressive.

I concluded that Twitter was in the business not only of promoting reputations, but of protecting them. It offered special deals for special people. Until then, I’d thought of it as a neutral broker.

[…]

My own habits on Twitter changed around that time. Observational humor had been my mainstay mode, but I realized that Twitter had become an engine of serious opinions on current affairs. On election night in 2016, while working at another journal, Harper’s, I was given control of the magazine’s Twitter feed and asked to think out loud about events while following them on cable news. I saw early that Trump was on his way to victory — or at least he was doing much better than predicted — and I offered a series of tart remarks about the crestfallen manners of various pundits who couldn’t hide their mounting disappointment.

The official election results were still unknown — Clinton retained a chance to win, in theory — but before the tale was told, my editors yanked my credentials for the account and gave them to someone else. The new person swerved from the storyline I’d set (which reflected reality) and adopted a mocking tone about Trump’s chances, even posting a picture of a campaign hat sitting glumly on a folding chair at his headquarters in New York City.

It struck me at first as pure denial. Later I decided that it was far more intentional — that my left-leaning magazine wished to preserve the illusion for its readers that the election’s outcome was unforeseeable, possibly to maintain suspense or so it could later act startled and disturbed in concert with its TV peers. Its Twitter feed, as a record of its reactions, had to align with this narrative.

I grew convinced that night that Twitter meant trouble for me. It had become an opinion-sculpting instrument, an oracle of the establishment, and I knew I would end up out of step with it, if only because I’m of a temperament which habitually goes against the flow to challenge and test the flow, to keep it honest. Mass agreement, in my experience, both as a person and a journalist, is typically achieved at a cost to reality and truth.

QotD: Why reading the news became less informative and more didactic

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

One of the small, pervasive changes that makes news stories seem both patronizing and politicized is the increasingly common practice of inserting judgmental adjectives into otherwise descriptive sentences. Telling readers that a statement is “false” while repeating it may be justified, if intrusive, but in other cases it’s an unnecessary tic.

Gone is the assumption that readers are intelligent people who can draw their own conclusions from a compelling presentation of the facts. Journalists now seem to live in fear that their readers won’t think correctly. Take this sentence from an interesting article on the evolution of American Sign Language: “For a portion of the 20th century, many schools for the deaf were more inclined to try to teach their students spoken English, rather than ASL, based on harmful beliefs that signing was inferior to spoken language.” (Emphasis added.)

If you read the article, you are highly unlikely to come to the conclusion that signing is anything less than a full-blown language, not inferior to spoken English. But the article never gives evidence that this incorrect 20th-century belief was harmful. It doesn’t discuss the pluses and minuses of signing, or why one belief was succeeded by another. That’s a different story. In the context of this story, the adjective is unnecessary, distracting, and insulting to the reader’s intelligence.

Virginia Postrel, “Shrinkflation, Disqualiflation, and Depression and more”, Virginia’s Newsletter, 2022-07-28.

November 1, 2022

If it wasn’t for double standards, the legacy media wouldn’t have any standards at all

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

At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill calls out the US mainstream media for their blatant double standards on political violence after the as-yet still mystery-shrouded attack on the husband of the Speaker of the House of Representatives over the weekend:

Paul and Nancy Pelosi, 16 February, 2022.
Detail of a photo by Amos Ben Gershom via Wikimedia Commons.

It was the mention of zip ties that got me thinking. Apparently the man who allegedly broke into the San Francisco home of Nancy and Paul Pelosi on Friday was carrying zip ties. A possibly crazed individual approaching the home of a powerful politician with plastic fasteners that can be used to bind a person’s hands – it was both a nightmarish prospect and a familiar one, too. Wasn’t another public figure in the US recently targeted by someone who had zip ties? And a gun, a knife, pepper spray and a crowbar? Yes. It was Brett Kavanaugh. But many don’t remember that. Because thanks to the media, certain acts of political hate get less traction than others.

People are rightly horrified by what happened to Paul Pelosi on Friday. David DePape allegedly broke into the Pelosi home and yelled “Where is Nancy?”. She wasn’t there. DePape then allegedly attacked Mr Pelosi, who is 82, with a hammer. Pelosi suffered a skull fracture and is still in hospital, though he is expected to make a full recovery. This was a horrific assault on an elderly person, as well as seeming to have been motivated by a deep political animus. Sadly, it was not a one-off. There was a creepily similar incident at the home of Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh in Maryland in June.

A 26-year-old man from California travelled to Maryland allegedly with the intention of murdering Kavanaugh. That’s what he is charged with – attempted murder. He was armed with a tactical knife, a Glock 17 pistol, zip ties and other murderous paraphernalia. The difference between Kavanaugh’s alleged tormentor and the man who allegedly broke into the Pelosi home is that the former failed to gain entry. He spied two US marshals close to Kavanaugh’s home and called off his deadly mission. Kavanaugh was luckier than Paul Pelosi.

It is unquestionable that the assault on the Pelosi home has caused more waves and fury among the media elites than the mercifully thwarted attempted assassination of Kavanaugh did. The Kavanaugh incident swiftly faded from public consciousness. One observer wrote of the media’s “eerie silence” on Kavanaugh. It was pointed out that the “attempted assassination of Brett Kavanaugh” was being downplayed by the New York Times the very day after it happened. On the NYT‘s homepage, the Kavanaugh story was 16th in order of importance, behind stories about the new Jurassic Park movie and Kelly Clarkson’s singing skills. In that day’s paper, it was on page 20. Nate Silver said it was “crazy” that the targeting of Kavanaugh was not “treated as a bigger story”. “There’s often more bias in which stories are deemed to be salient than how they’re written about it”, he said.

That is well said. Media bias is apparent not only in the information and takes that the media publish but also in what the media decree to be important in the first place. And it would appear that the targeting of a right-wing, pro-life justice is less important – a lot less important – than the targeting of the home of a Democratic, pro-choice politician. Politics is clearly at play here. Kavanaugh’s moral outlook runs counter to that of the liberal media and coastal elites, and thus he makes for an unsympathetic character. Nancy Pelosi, on the other hand – she’s the crusading Democrat the chattering classes love. An assault on her home moves the liberal elites profoundly.

On the rapidly changing reported details of the attack on Paul Pelosi, Jim Treacher has some salient questions:

First things first: Paul Pelosi is currently in the hospital recovering from his attack, and here’s wishing him a speedy recovery. It sounds horrible and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. Crime in America is spiraling out of control.

Now …

The Pelosis are worth somewhere north of $100 million. Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and second in the line of presidential succession. You’re telling me her husband Paul was alone in a house with no security or surveillance cameras? This lunatic David DePape just walked right up to the house and broke in?

I’ve got other questions. The initial report was that DePape was in his underwear when the police caught him beating Pelosi with a hammer. Now we’re told that’s not true.

Wait, what? How do you get that detail wrong? Did it come from the police? I can understand misremembering the color of his pants. But the cops couldn’t tell whether he was wearing any?

And then there’s this:

Okay, I’m just trying to picture the scene that the two responding officers saw: They entered the Pelosi home, found DePape attacking Pelosi, and stopped him.

How did they get into the house? Did they break down the door? Was it unlocked, or already open? Did DePape or Pelosi open it?

The story is that the police encountered DePape in the middle of beating Pelosi. So if DePape opened the door for them … why? Or if Pelosi opened the door for them … how?

I see a lot of people speculating that this was some sort of lovers’ quarrel, or a Grindr date gone wrong, or something along those lines. Doesn’t seem likely to me, but is it really outside the realm of possibility? Are you a homophobe? I thought we were supposed to accept all genders and preferences and whatnot. It’s 2022.

October 31, 2022

“If The Regime doesn’t have their canned narrative ready to go, it’s real news”

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

At Founding Questions, Severian offers some preliminary thoughts on the new field of “Brandonology”, specifically how to determine whether what’s in the legacy media is news or propaganda:

I’m throwing this out there now, because it’s shaping up to be a long-term project and I think we can all contribute to it as needed. But as Brandonology / FNGology is such a new discipline, it’ll help to lay in the foundations.

The first step in analyzing the “news” is determining whether or not it is, in fact, news. “News” here being defined as “an unplanned event — or catastrophic fuckup of a planned event — to which The Regime is forced to react in more or less real time”. Lot of that going around recently, such that we’re spoiled for choice. Pick pretty much any of the shenanigans in Ukraine: The botched assassination of Alexander Dugin; the Nordstream sabotage; the Ukrainian dirty bomb false flag. Those clearly fall into the “catastrophic fuckup of a planned event” category …

… or do they? Because as Z Man pointed out in great detail on his last podcast, all of that stuff seemed to catch The Regime flatfooted. Yeah, somebody planned those things, but that somebody wasn’t Brandon, or anyone close to Brandon, or anyone in position to prop up Brandon. Which is the surest tell for actual news (as defined above) right there: If The Regime doesn’t have their canned narrative ready to go, it’s real news.

The necessity of the canned narrative also allows the keen Brandonologist to anticipate the “news”. For instance, it has obviously started to dawn on The Regime that they’re going to get walloped in the midterms, so they’re trying out narratives as we speak. Z Man identified one I hadn’t seen, something about Brandon “inadvertently” saying something about the debt ceiling that’s supposed to give the Republicans all kinds of ammunition against him. I’m not so sure. I’ll have to look into it, but the fact that it squarely blames Brandon — who The Regime still insists is the very picture of mental acuity and vigor — pings my radar a bit. I think the stuff Her Nibs is rolling out is much likelier the Narrative being developed — she’s outright stating that “the Republicans” are going to engage in massive voter fraud.

Which to normal people is chutzpah beyond belief, but that’s how The Regime rolls. The 2016 election was, of course, full of Russian Hacking™. The 2020 election, by contrast, was the cleanest canvass in human history, and you’re an insurrectionist, a domestic extremist, and of course a racist if you dare to suggest the mere possibility of an American election being tampered with. But wouldn’t you know it, those dastardly Russians are going to rally here in 2022, because you can’t keep a Russian Hacker™ down. They might even hire a few prostitutes to pee on a bed for good measure; that’s how evil they are.

Further complicating the task, though, is that “botched op” thing. We’ve got Brandon et al. on record threatening Nordstream, so you know that was an American caper gone bad … but gone real, real bad, because if The Regime had been fully in the know, there’d have been a whole bunch of Tier Four Stoyak about lousy maintenance on the pipelines for months in advance.

Why aren’t you as angry and afraid as the media wants you to be?

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

Chris Bray on the unrelenting din of fear porn you get if you pay any attention to the legacy media:

It’s like a magic act where the door to the secret compartment moves slowly and has a spotlight pointed at it, and the audience sees the illusion every time, because it’s literally not an illusion, being right out there in the open, but the magician still pretends that everyone watching is shocked and baffled by the trick.

So. Via Nellie Bowles, writing at Common Sense, this summary of findings from a recent study of the American news media:

Today’s Standard-Issue Explanatory Line™ on Paul Pelosi being attacked in his home is that TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP, toxic far-right rhetoric!!!!! Ten minutes after the shabby break-in at the Katie Hobbs for Governor office was omfg literally Watergate before it evaporated into nothing much, a uniquely strange Berkeley nudist is a far-right puppet with an opening at the bottom for Donald Trump’s hand, steered by hateful rhetoric that incites violence:

[…]

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if the news media focused on a clear description of what happened before they got to the blame and politicization?

There are a dozen obvious things to say about all of this, even if you aren’t Steve Scalise — the double standard, the depiction of ordinary political criticism as “demonization”, the discarding of contradictory evidence to make round pegs fit square holes — and I’m mostly not going to bother saying them in any detail.

But the thing that has to be said is that the people who increasingly hold the attention of their audiences with hyperemotional clickbait, with the obvious manipulation of negative emotions, are warning us about the dangerous effects of hyperemotional rhetorical manipulation in the public sphere.

Ohhhhh, we’re about to LOSE OUR VERY DEMOCRACY! We tremble on the edge of a FASCIST TAKEOVER! And also, toxic rhetoric is bad.

QotD: The True Believer

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

A cult claimed that a flood would destroy the Earth on December 21, 1954. Only the faithful would be saved, because they’d be evacuated by a flying saucer. 12/21/54 passed without incident, of course, but what you’d expect to happen to the cult, didn’t — instead of everyone dropping out and moving on with their lives, most stayed, and their commitment to the cult’s leader actually increased.

Why? From the Wiki summary, believers will persist in the face of overwhelming disconfirmation if:

  • A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he or she behaves.
  • The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual’s commitment to the belief.
  • The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
  • Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.
  • The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence that has been specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, the belief may be maintained and the believers may attempt to proselytize or persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.

This is Leftism in a nutshell, and it explains why SJWs are impervious to factual, rational argument. Boiled down as far as it will go: Group identity is so important to the Leftist that, faced with the choice between continued group membership and the evidence of xzhyr own lying eyes, xzhey will pick group membership, every time. This sets up its own feedback mechanism, such that disconfirmations of their dogmas actually increase their commitment — only the truest, holiest believers would keep believing in the face of the facts.

Severian, “What Happens if the UFO Actually Comes?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-25.

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