Nineteen Eighty-Four remains widely read today — and ubiquitously quoted and cited. In fact, during the spring of 2017, in the wake of the inauguration of President Donald Trump — and controversies about the “alternative facts” that his aides marshaled as evidence of record attendance figures at the event — the book achieved the remarkable, unprecedented feat of skyrocketing to number one on fiction bestseller lists. This occurred an astonishing 67 years after its original date of release. Nothing of this kind had ever happened to another book in publishing history. And, in the case of Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was the fourth time that it had topped the bestseller lists: first in 1954, in the U.K., after a BBC-TV adaptation sent sales soaring; second, throughout the English-speaking world during the so-called countdown to 1984 between October 1983 and April 1984; and third, in 2003, as the centennial commemorations of Orwell’s birth dominated the headlines and airwaves on both sides of the Atlantic.
In fact, it is fair to say that Nineteen Eighty-Four has never not been a bestseller and a publishing phenomenon. According to the website Ranker.com, the work has sold more than 25 million copies since 1949. More than a half century later, Manchester Guardian readers voted Nineteen Eighty-Four the most influential book of the 20th century. Waterstone’s, a British bookstore chain, has ranked Orwell’s dystopia as the second most popular book of the 20th century (behind J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings). That is an amazing feat in its own right, given that most people understandably do not particularly enjoy reading (let alone rereading) nightmarish stories of torture, betrayal, and brainwashing. The book’s ascent to the top of fiction bestseller lists in 2016 and 2017, along with the ceaseless invocation of Orwell’s catchwords to characterize the Trump administration, induced Signet, Orwell’s American publisher, to rush out a new print run of 500,000 copies. Expectations are that total sales will pass 30 million by the time of the 2020 election in the United States.
John Rodden and John Rossi, “George Orwell Warned Us, But Was Anyone Listening?”, The American Conservative, 2019-10-02.
October 13, 2023
QotD: Sales of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
October 12, 2023
It’s not mere “activism”, it’s “AAAAAH-ctivism”!
In The Critic, Charlotte Gill outlines the changes in activist tactics down to today’s utter hysterics on Every. Single. Issue.
“Just Stop Oil Activists Walking Up Whitehall” by Alisdare Hickson is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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“How many kids have to die?” were the apocalyptic words of a Just Stop Oil activist on Sky News last week. She grimaced and flung her hands out as she asked presenter Anna Jones, and others in the studio, what it would take for them to get involved in the fight against climate change. Would it be “until the water’s lapping at your ankles? Until your own kids haven’t got food?” Forget the British mantra to “keep calm and carry on”. Anyone watching would get the impression that the advice is now firmly to “PANIC!!”
Far from jumping on the nearest piece of furniture to protect myself from rising tides and who knows what else — sharks with Leave-Means-Leave-branded laser beams shooting from their heads, for example — I felt strangely immune to someone telling me the world’s going to end. Like the “boy who cried wolf”, there’s no shortage of middle-aged people ready to cry apocalypse. It’s no surprise one’s sensory reactions have resultantly dialled down a notch or two.
I only really noticed the rise of AAAAAH-ctivism this year, after covering the war on cars. Whenever I have defended the petrol proletariat — those punished every time they drive a car — I am struck by the increasing number of people telling me I don’t care about “CHILDREN’S LUNGS!!” or “PEOPLE DYING!!” Last month Wales introduced 20mph speed limits, which vast amounts of voters have objected to. The counterargument to any perfectly pragmatic concerns is always “SO YOU THINK SPEED IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN LIVES?!” It is quite an effective way to close down debate, portraying it as a matter of being for or against death.
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when AAAAAH-ctivism began. After all, fear mongering is nothing new in politics — one of the most disastrous examples being Tony Blair and George W. Bush’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction” claims that led the West into the Iraq War.
Following some quiet(ish) years in Blighty, the hyperbole ramped up around Brexit, when Labour MP David Lammy compared the pro-Leave European Research Group to the Nazis, as well as advocates of South African apartheid. Elsewhere, militant Remainers repeatedly warned of the Hard and Far Right being on the march. Writing for The Guardian in 2018, Michael Chessum set the tone when he warned, “We are living through a moment of encroaching darkness and nationalist resurgence.” Nowadays, you could say that the “darkness” looks more like a £6 salmon sandwich at Pret.
QotD: America before identity politics
Pick even minor items of their catechism (if so all-encompassing a creed as Leftism can be said to have “minor” items). It’s an article of the One True Faith, for instance, that seven out of every five college girls are raped the minute they set foot on campus. And yet … free college! Yeah, Bernie, let’s march a whole bunch of new rape victims straight into the frat house, on the taxpayer’s dime. Makes sense. And speaking of free college, y’all know how you love to wave your degrees around, because that’s how you win at Internet? How’s that going to work, now that everyone has a Gender Studies degree?
Yeah, ok, I know, if they could see the obvious consequences of their actions, they wouldn’t be Liberals in the first place. But still — all of this is so obvious, so determinedly cattywampus to reality, that it has to be by design. T.S. Eliot was right — it’s “gesture without motion”, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how they pull that off. Which is why I suspect it’s actual, neurological changes in their brains, brought about by too much soy.
Severian, “The Hollow Men”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-19.
1. Gosh, wasn’t The America That Was a hoot? If you’re under 35 you’ll just have to trust me on this, but there was a point in American history when homosexuals didn’t have to be 1000% gay all the time, to the exclusion of everything else. I know, I know, and it gets weirder – back then, you could even be friends with a homosexual and not have homosexuality come up for days, weeks, even months at a time! You and Steve went to different bars on Saturday night, but other than that, you pretty much just carried on treating each other like, you know, people. And I know this sounds crazy, but even when talking about relationships it wasn’t a big deal. “Hey, Sev, how are things with Becky?” “Pretty good, man, how’s it going with Todd?” And … that was pretty much it. Sounds like life on Mars now, but I swear to you, it happened.
October 11, 2023
In their attacks on southern Israel, Hamas is “making a dead zone, and they intend to make a dead zone”
Chris Bray explains the otherwise insane tactics employed by Hamas terrorists:
The border area between the Gaza Strip and the State of Israel, 9 October 2023.
Map by Ecrusized via Wikimedia Commons.
Hamas broke through a fortified border, had unchallenged freedom of movement inside Israel for a shockingly long time, and attacked … a dance music festival and some kibbutzim. Not airfields, not fuel depots, not power stations, not army motor pools to deny mobility to the enemy. They went after soft targets first, and focused especially on women and children. Eyewitness reports and footage of female hostages are telling us that Hamas engaged in sustained sexual violence, and took care to make it known. A subhed in Tablet: “Scenes of young women raped next to the dead bodies of their friends.”
And I think we know what this means.
But first, look at the proposed explanations offered in the news:
It seems that Hamas, also, is trying to force Israel into negotiations. In 2018, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar sent a note in Hebrew to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, suggesting he take a “calculated risk” by agreeing a long-term truce. While Netanyahu agreed to some easing of pressure on Gaza, he was unwilling to accept Hamas’s long-term demands, including a large-scale prisoner swap, lifting the siege by opening the international border crossing, and establishing a port and airport in Gaza. After 16 years of siege and several catastrophic rounds of war, in which thousands of Gaza residents have been killed, Hamas may be hoping to break the deadlock.
That’s not it. Here’s another try:
Hamas could well be trying to torpedo the Saudi deal and even try undo the existing Abraham Accords. Indeed, a Hamas spokesperson said that the attack was “a message” to Arab countries, calling on them to cut on ties with Israel …
To be clear: Saying it makes strategic sense for Hamas to engage in atrocities is not to justify their killing civilians. There is a difference between explanation and justification: The reasoning behind Hamas’s attack may be explicable even as it is morally indefensible.
So the much-repeated claim is that Hamas in engaging in diplomatic maneuvering, sending messages to nation-states. They used mass rape at a dance festival to gain leverage in negotiations over a possible new port.
That’s absolutely not it, and I strongly suspect that the presence of widespread and carefully displayed attacks on 1.) families with children and 2.) the sexually traumatized bodies of women represent an extremely deliberate and calculated adoption, explicitly planned for months or years, of the familiar tools of ethnic cleansing.
Hamas is dirtying the memory of the Jewish spaces bordering on the Gaza Strip. They’re marking southern Israel in the memory of future families, and especially women of childbearing age, with the deliberately cultivated images of murdered children and the mass rape of young women, so that young women regard the place with dread and don’t return to have children there. They’re making a dead zone, and they intend to make a dead zone.
Mass rape by armies is not a mystery; it has been studied carefully.
Group X, as a group and deliberately, rapes women from Group Y in Neighborhood Z so women from Group Y never feel that they can safely return to Neighborhood Z, in a tribal memory passed down to later generations. Now the space belongs to Group X.
Hamas is making sites of trauma. To empty them, and to keep them empty.
Their military objective is to use the witnessed mass rape of women, the documented hunting and torture of families, and the videotaped murder of children in front of their parents to keep Jews out of southern Israel in the future. Their military target is site-specific Jewish fertility.
In the comments, Chris also points out the military insanity of how Hamas is implementing the propaganda aspects of their plan:
It’s insane for infantry to carry cellphones into combat, because cellphone locations can be tracked. But Hamas seems to be recording everything they do, and they’re stopping to upload new footage as they capture it. They’re taking the risk of carrying trackable devices in combat for the intended benefit of the display. I’d be very curious to hear if they’re all carrying standardized, organization-issued cellphones, and I’d be very curious to see a detailed analysis of where all of the footage is appearing first. This is a deliberate information operation.
Hamas has clearly calculated that the risk is worth the propaganda bonanza they are reaping from the atrocities being beamed almost in real time to the outside world.
October 10, 2023
“… I think her face captures well the moment history returned to Israel”
CDR Salamander on the terrorist attacks this weekend that inflicted casualties on Israel proportionally nearly ten times the 9/11 attacks on the United States:
“Terrorists” is perhaps too much of an honorable word to describe the death squads that set out from the Gaza Strip this weekend hunting civilians.
I started to do this post about the failure of intelligence, imagination, and the seduction of modernism to see the nature of man — and perhaps that will be my post for tomorrow — but I want to make sure we establish an understanding, a baseline, to what has happened.
[…]
We are already seeing in the West the useful idiots in the externalized self-loathing left, and the imported Jew hatred already his the streets in support of death squads, rape, and the kidnapping of women and children.
We have also seen the defenders of the fruit of faculty-lounge-foreign-policy that we’ll discuss in Part II start to tut-tut Israel’s budding response and what “smart policy” recommendations they have on offer to layer on top of their already failed world view’s prior policy recommendations that got us here — but again, I’m getting ahead of myself, we’ll get to that tomorrow.
Today we need to make sure we have our mind right.
Considering America’s vast population and geography, we may not really understand the scale. There is also so much coming out of Israel, it is hard to focus, so I’ll pick just one event and two families to set the mind, then we’re going to help establish a perspective in a broader context.
One part of the attack that sticks in most people’s mind is the attack on the music festival. Exceptional reporting from Liel Liebovitz at Tablet;
I’ve spent the last 12 hours speaking to Israelis who were at the Supernova music festival. Their testimonies, as you would imagine, are very emotional. At least one broke down mid-conversation and wasn’t able to continue his recollection.
The attack on the festival outside of Re’im began around 7 a.m. The party was at its peak by then — which meant that by then most people were inebriated. At first, partygoers heard a loud explosion, which they took to be another sporadic rocket attack on southern Israel. But then the explosions grew louder and constant, and kept going for about five minutes. The music stopped, and the police protecting the 4,000 or 5,000 ravers began pushing everyone to leave.
As is always helpful in such situations, we should go to the map.
Re’im. It is just 3.5 miles as the rocket flies from the Gaza border. The difference is so stark, all you need is an overhead;
That isn’t a difference in soil or terrain. That is simply culture based on a dividing line put on a map 73 years ago, back when the Gaza Strip had a population of about 120,000. Today, it has a population of about 2.3 million.
Problems do not get better with time.
By then, the terrorists were approaching in pickup trucks bearing Hamas military markings.
Shooting began. Many were executed on the spot. 260 bodies have been found, so far, on the site of the rave.
Many of the young men and women started running in the flat expanse of the western Negev desert. Faced with the spectacle of kids fleeing for their lives on a largely flat surface, the terrorists began rounding up the rest of their victims.
Others were captured and bound and kidnapped. “I saw videos with a male getting held by a group of Arab kids. Like, they’re like 16, 17,” one survivor recalled. “They’re kids, but they’re they’re young men already, and they’re holding this guy, and he looks as his girlfriend is being mounted on a bike and driven away from him. God knows what she’s going to experience … Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends bodies, dead bodies.”
Her name is Noa Argamani, 25. A little younger than my oldest daughter
You can see the video here, but I think her face captures well the moment history returned to Israel.
Sarah Hoyt – “Shut your Kumbaya”
Sarah Hoyt isn’t normally one to mince her words or conceal her true feelings, and she certainly doesn’t do that here:
The world is full of pretty lies. And normally, I’m able to scroll past them and go “oh, idiocy, more idiocy”.
Today is not that day. No, listen to me. Today is not that day.
I was scrolling through twitter looking for an update on the war in Israel, and I came across this:
And I stopped. And I read that post. Every single word of it is a lie. A lot of it are pernicious lies. And they’re told by well-intentioned people who can’t or won’t look at the world without the rose-colored glasses.
It’s not just these things are lies. It’s “they’ve been proven to be lies, over and over again”. But a lot of, perhaps the majority of “educated” people in the west piously believe them. Because they want them to be true.
Start therefore with that “Education” — education can be many things, but some of the best educated people in the world at the time led World War I. And while on that, do you realize the cultures fighting knew each other very, very well. Heck, most of the nobility was related to each other across Europe. Which did not stand in the way of turning Europe into one vast abattoir.
In fact, most of the vicious wars were civil, or between neighboring countries that knew each other’s cultures intimately. So this “Get to know the other culture better” is utter and complete poppycock. Or as the British say “Bollocks”. And smelly bollocks, at that.
As for all cultures, all systems, all value systems being equally worthy of respect?
Oh, really? So, a culture that enslaves women is the same as one that values women? A culture that protects and takes care of the weak is the same as one that tortures and kills them? A culture that welcomes difference is the same as one that pounds down the nail that sticks up? A system where — as in all communist systems — a small elite lives very well while others starve is the same as one where private property allows even the poor to suffer from obesity? And a culture that doesn’t believe it has to exterminate its neighbors is the same as one that does?
Don’t be ridiculous.
And as for not stigmatizing, dividing, etc? Pernicious bullshit. Pernicious bullshit on stilts. The horrible savages who kidnapped innocent people at a rave and raped women to death are not the same as people who are breaking themselves trying to spare the innocent. There is no comparison.
October 9, 2023
Janice Fiamengo finds a reason to watch the Barbie movie
I generally don’t watch movies these days, so I was never in the target audience for Barbie, but Janice Fiamengo has changed her mind about whether you should watch it:
I have changed my mind about Barbie. When I discussed it last week with my good friend Tom Golden (you can see our conversation here), I advised against viewing it.
I now recommend giving it a watch, not for pleasure or even ideological interest — it is too dull and humorless for that, with a senseless plot, wooden dialogue, and a coy voice-over — but for clarification. The high-grossing movie offers a vivid encapsulation of our culture’s view of men and women, complete with its own inadvertent self-subversion. Watching it is a leaden but useful reminder that feminists really are this self-destructively stupid, and really do want to destroy “patriarchy”, by which they mean masculine freedom, self-respect, and leadership. They no longer even pretend to value equality.
Men and boys (and the women who love them), take a good look.
In Barbie, men are at best second-class citizens who by movie’s end, in an improvement over their former nullity, are content to follow banal female directives about their attitudes and identity. In a jaw-droppingly condescending scene after the failed Ken Rebellion, Ken is counseled on how to find himself. He is told that it’s okay to cry (as he bawls like a baby) and is admonished to “figure out who you are without [Barbie/woman]”. He and the other Kens seem grateful for the puerile admonition and willing to be male on Barbie terms: sexless, rudderless, effeminate. They certainly can’t be equal, the film makes clear, because they make a mess when they’re in charge.
Keeping men in check means shielding them even from images of patriarchal (meaning competent, self-directed, masculine) men: Ken runs amok only after seeing a world (the “real world”) in which men are allegedly respected merely for being men, one of the more risible feminist lies in the movie. Feminists have never understood that men earn respect. But in the feminist vision, any possibility that men may perceive themselves as essential to their society — and as owed acknowledgement for the goods they bring — must be suppressed. Only women are essential.
Perhaps the feminist director of Barbie intended the portrayal of the Kens to reflect the situation of women under patriarchy (one searches in vain for a coherent analytical perspective). In Barbie Land, Kens are objects (not sex objects since there is no sex or even heterosexual desire) who exist only to compete, fruitlessly, for Barbies’ attention.
In the real patriarchal past, of course, women were never so reduced precisely because of male sexual longing, love, familial affection, chivalry, religious ideals, empathy, reasoning about justice, and the desire for procreation. All such longings or allegiances are absent from Barbie life. If the Barbies desire children and family — never made clear in the movie, though perhaps gestured to in the final scene when Barbie, now human, visits her gynecologist — theirs will likely be families without Kens. Whether in the real world or in Barbie Land, men are peripheral at best, dangerous at worst, and often mildly contemptible and tiresome with their “egos and petty jealousies”. The only good thing about Kens is that they are easy to manipulate.
The disdain is fathoms deep.
Women, in contrast, are complete in themselves, sufficient for each other in a world in which all positions of power — from President to CEO, doctor, pilot, astronaut, ambulance worker, professional athlete, and Nobel Prize-winning journalist — are occupied by women (and a few trans people, it seems), and in which neighborhoods function without any dirty, dangerous jobs, external threats, heavy machinery, complex repairs, or strenuous labor.
This aspect of the movie, by the way, is a striking illustration of the inability of the feminist mind to remember or even understand what men actually do: the risky, body-wearying and ingenuity-demanding work that feminists only rarely, if ever, advocate for women and which they are frequently hard-pressed even to name. One of the many magic tricks of feminism is its continual disappearing of distinctive male inventiveness, skill, adaptability, and heavy-lifting.
“Wildly popular public sentiment is disorder, and has to be restrained”
Chris Bray outlines one of the many (many) ways that elected officials are insulating themselves from the voters who elected them to ensure that they only hear what they want to hear from the public … and as little of it as they can get away with:
Wildly popular public sentiment is disorder, and has to be restrained. So here, let’s start with something vital and interesting, and then work our way through the process a local government is using to kill it. As always, the point about this local story isn’t just the local story, since versions of this are happening all over the country (and with federal assistance).
Early last year, an angry Virginia mom spoke to the Prince William County school board, blasting mask mandates in schools. Her fiery three-minute speech went viral, until YouTube, which now seems to mostly exist to prevent discussion, killed it:
It’s back, in a less-watched version that YouTube hasn’t gotten around to cancelling yet:
Here’s a version on Rumble, if you’d rather watch it there, but Substack doesn’t embed Rumble video.
The second thing to notice in that video, after you notice the clarity and strength of Merianne Jensen’s comments, is the response: an enormous audience of parents shouting and cheering in support as another parent sharply criticizes school district policy. The public is present for a government meeting, and the public is engaged. Citizens are participating, enthusiastically and in large numbers, which is supposed to be a thing we regard as an ideal.
[…]
Public comment is limited to one hour, full stop, no matter how many people wish to speak, and no matter how urgent a controversy before the board might be. The public — the entire public — gets an hour. But, second, that hour is alloted through an application process in which people who wish to speak to the school board fill out an online form that a clerk then evaluates and processes, deciding whether or not a request to speak will be granted. Detailed contact information is required before the school district will consider your request to speak, and national organizations and other outsiders have no right to speak at all, since public comment is limited to verified residents of the county. The form is a masterpiece of passive-aggressive nudging, communicating with great clarity that your desire to offer public comment is merely being tolerated. Read this carefully, because in a few minutes we’re going to get to the pernicious way this system is now being gamed:
This form does NOT confirm your request to be added to the list of speakers for Citizen Comment Time. You will receive a separate email indicating the status of your request. As a reminder, speakers are signed up to speak on a first-come, first-served basis.
Thank you again for your interest.
Citizens may sign up to be placed on the list of speakers for the citizen comment period starting at 8:00 a.m. on the Saturday immediately preceding the School Board meeting at which the citizen wishes to speak. Requests received prior to 8:00 a.m. on the Saturday immediately preceding the School Board meeting will not be honored. Speakers will be signed up on a first-come, first-served basis, ending at noon on the day of the meeting. The sign-up list will close once the number of total speakers who have signed up reaches twenty and there will be no sign-up thereafter, nor at the meeting.
That last sentence will become important: twenty commenters are signed up in advance, in the order in which they apply, and then the list for public comment is closed, the end. Can you see where this is going?
Before we get there, I’ll just note that a more detailed board policy on comments, available here, adds that the board chairman can end a public comment session, and ask school district security to remove speakers, if a commenter wanders into “inappropriate topics” or a tone the board regards as uncivil. You can feel the spontaneity and openness being drained.
October 8, 2023
Can we get back to de mortuis nil nisi bonum any time soon?
The Latin phrase refers to speaking nothing but good of the (recently) deceased, but as partisan passions rise, the urge to wave the bloody shirt and denigrate the dead overwhelms decency and common sense:
Of all the vices that can contribute to the collapse of civil society, a special place of honor surely needs to be reserved for mocking the newly murdered.
I don’t mean mocking the newly dead. The somewhat mawkish view that no ill should be spoken of the recently departed has always seemed rather priggish to me. It would, in fact, be absurd if we decided that in the wake of, say, Mitch McConnell’s or Noam Chomsky’s death, we couldn’t criticize their lives, careers, and beliefs. “If they’d given him an enema, they could have buried him in a matchbox” was my old friend Christopher Hitchens’ comment on the passing of Jerry Falwell. Rude, surely. Too soon, sure. But a swipe, not a gloat. And on Fox News. To Ralph Reed.
What crosses the line of what Orwell prized as “common decency” is using the occasion of someone’s untimely death to say they deserved it. “The homosexuals have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution” was Pat Buchanan’s charming response to the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic. In the same vein today, on the other side as it were, there’s a “Herman Cain Award” subreddit with half a million members, devoted to naming and mocking vaccine skeptics who subsequently died of Covid. A giant, unified chorus of “ha-ha”s across the decades.
Social media and CCTV cameras have made the schadenfreude more visceral. This past week, a young “social justice” activist, Ryan Carson, was knifed to death on the street by a deranged 18-year-old assailant, as Carson’s girlfriend, paralyzed with shock, looked on. We might once have just heard of or read about this attack. Now we see it as it happens. Its reach might once have been limited by media gatekeepers. Now it can reach millions in a matter of hours on social media. And if you’re Elon Musk and your strategy for Twitter is to make it a more visual, visceral, sticky site, it’s gold. Within hours of Carson’s death, his last, terrifying moments were accessible to millions: a snuff video in all but name, now available to be monetized by gawkers.
And indecent gawkers. “It’s good to make fun of people who support criminals when they get murdered by criminals,” commented one on Twitter. “Ryan Carson took the phrase ‘bleeding heart liberal’ way too literally,” said another. (Carson’s actual heart was pierced by the murder weapon.) Other virtual tricoteuses went after the traumatized bystander: “Ryan Carson’s girlfriend is the Douche of the Week. 1. Showed almost no concern as her guy was murdered. 2. Expressed zero concern as he lay on the ground dying. Didn’t even bend down. 3. Refused to give police the murderer’s description. Soulless Marxist.” Another: “WHAT??? Ryan Carson’s girlfriend … started a GoFundMe page to make money off his death. I would tell her to eat trash but that’s cannibalism.” Or this: “She didn’t react when he was stabbed but she sure didn’t hesitate to raise $50k on go fund me. Makes you wonder.”
Makes you wonder what exactly? Twitter reminds me of Trump: you can’t believe it can go lower — until it always does.
I should stipulate, I suppose, that I doubt I would have been one of Ryan Carson’s favorite writers. His views on crime and policing were, to my mind, hopelessly naive and deeply counter-productive for real social justice. He also once tweeted upon news of Rush Limbaugh’s death — “lmao hell yeah” — and called himself, presumably with a wink, “COO of Antifa.” But many of us have lost our moral bearings in this cold civil war. And Carson was a human being, son of a mother and father, murdered senselessly, traumatizing a whole host of others. In that context, nothing else matters but his humanity. Lambaste his views; but don’t delight in his death even as millions can see his final, deeply vulnerable moments of panic and fear.
The same should be said to the online trolls who went after Josh Kruger, a lefty Philly journalist (and Dish reader) killed in his home this week, and Pava LaPere, a BLM-touting entrepreneur in Baltimore murdered brutally the week before. (I’ll spare you the Twitter comments.) The impulse to use anything to advance a narrative: this is how far we’ve sunk into bitter, vicious tribalism.
And is it me or is Musk’s Twitter obviously making all this worse, putting out more and more videos of street crime, bar fights, robberies, and brawls, often with racial tension fueling them? In our collective psyche there is the problem of mentally ill people committing crimes on the streets, and there is also the problem of everyone constantly seeing videos of mentally ill people committing crimes on the streets. It distorts our judgment; it privileges the vivid and violent over the lucid and peaceful. It normalizes and numbs us to violence and can incentivize it. And this emotive tribal priming makes us more likely to react to the deaths of our political opponents with glee.
October 7, 2023
“Many people who hold ‘luxury beliefs’ … are oblivious to the consequences of their views”
Rob Henderson, guest-posting at The Free Press, illustrates several recent examples of well-connected people holding what he coined as “luxury beliefs” being suddenly introduced to the real-world consequences of their beliefs:
Recently, two high-profile supporters of “justice reform” were murdered.
At 4 a.m. on Monday, Ryan Carson, a 32-year-old social justice and climate change activist, was walking with his girlfriend in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, when he was stabbed to death by a stranger. Only a few hours earlier in Philadelphia, activist and journalist Josh Kruger was shot and killed in his home.
And two Democratic lawmakers who voted to “redirect funding to community-based policing reforms” have been recent victims of violent crime.
On Monday night, blocks away from the Capitol in Washington, D.C., Congressman Henry Cuellar was carjacked by three armed men. (The lawmaker survived the incident unscathed.) In February, Angie Craig was attacked in an elevator at her apartment building in Capitol Hill. A homeless man demanded she allow him into her home to use the restroom, then he punched her and grabbed her around the neck. She escaped after throwing hot coffee on him.
Of course, these people did not deserve harm because of their support for soft-on-crime policies. But I’ve long argued that many people who hold “luxury beliefs” — ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes — are oblivious to the consequences of their views. Support for defunding the police is a classic example.
Luxury beliefs can stem from malice, good intentions, or outright naivete.
But the individuals who hold those beliefs, the people who wield the most influence in policy and culture, are often sheltered when their preferences are implemented.
Some online commenters have said that my luxury beliefs thesis is undermined by these tragic events, because the victims were affluent and influential — and they still suffered the consequences of their beliefs.
But the fact remains that poor people are far more likely to be victims of violent crime. For every upper-middle-class person killed, 20 poor people you never hear about are assaulted and murdered. You just never hear about them. They don’t get identified by name in the media. Their stories don’t get told.
Wab Kinew, Manitoba’s incoming Premier
Colby Cosh profiles the first Canadian provincial premier of First Nations heritage, Wab Kinew of Manitoba:
Wab Kinew, Manitoba NDP leader, 27 October 2015.
Photo by Dwight Williams via Wikimedia Commons.
My colleague Michael Higgins has an excellent column in Friday’s Post about incoming Manitoba premier Wab Kinew and the remarkable victory speech he gave late Tuesday after his New Democrats won the provincial election. Kinew tackled the usual priorities of the moment, giving love to his own partisans and talking about how his party’s victory means a brighter future for Manitobans. But he also added an unusual personal message with an obvious specific audience, knowing that Canadians ordinarily don’t notice most anything that happens in Manitoba and that he may never again be watched by so many eyeballs.
Kinew is the first-ever First Nations premier of a Canadian province, and that’s a “first” that we dare not dismiss as the usual box-checking diversity exercise. Twenty years ago, as a young and aimless alcoholic, Kinew amassed a brief track record of violence that would probably disqualify a white politician for high office forever. But he pulled himself together while there was still time, became a celebrated broadcaster and found his way into an unlikely political career, becoming leader of the Manitoba NDP in 2017.
So, yeah, Kinew’s diversity bona fides helped make this possible … and the incumbent Manitoba Conservatives did their bit to help, running a re-election campaign characterized by comically daft creepiness. Kinew has made a point of not underplaying his troubled background, although when it was brought up by Conservatives on social media during the campaign, the favourite NDP counter-tactic seems to have been to point out the killer premier next door in Saskatchewan. Yes, us western voters sure have to do a lot of forgiving.
As it turned out, however, all this ugliness led to Kinew’s victory address — which, in turn, became what can only be called a fine and hopeful small-c conservative moment. He told troubled youths still in his old predicament — “the party lifestyle” — to stop “making excuses” and join the wider community.
“To young people out there who want to change your life for the better: you can do it,” the premier-designate said. “But here’s the thing: you have to want it … If you want to join the workforce, get a new career, it has to be you that takes the first step. And if you are dealing with some kind of illness, and want to find healing, it has to be you to decide to move forward.
October 5, 2023
“Canada, where truck drivers are Nazis and Nazis are war heroes”
Donna LaFramboise on the “Coutts Four” — bona fide political prisoners of the Canadian state:
Gord Magill has a lengthy article over at Newsweek titled Meet the Four Men Being Held as Political Prisoners in Canada. These individuals are jointly accused of conspiring to murder police officers during a protest in Coutts, Alberta around the same time that the Freedom Convoy truckers were in Ottawa.
That’s a very serious charge, of course, but evidence appears scarce. I’ve not personally investigated this matter, but a former Toronto police detective named Donald Best has. In July, he outlined a long list of concerns, in addition to pointing out that “Everybody makes bail in Canada” — including the man “currently accused of the first degree murder of Toronto Police officer Jeffrey Northrup”.
Yet the Coutts men — three of whom have no criminal record — have been held without bail for nearly 600 days. Since they are legally innocent until proven guilty, this is horrifying.
As Gord writes in Newsweek, we are a country in which hard-working Canadians are called Nazis by the same Prime Minister whose government recently recognized an actual Nazi with a standing ovation in the House of Commons. What a strange state of affairs.
After speaking to each of the Coutts four, Gord provides a wealth of new info about them. These are working class guys — a power lineman, the owner of a small construction company, a master electrician, and a contractor. Three of them have children as young as 9, 10, and 11. Gord says only two of them “knew each other prior to their arrest”. It’s difficult to imagine a more unlikely group of cop-murder conspiracists.
QotD: The Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic was a “propaganda masterpiece”
Dr. Miller goes on to say, “I know a lot about propaganda, and this is unprecedented in the history of mass persuasion. There has never been anything like this because this is global. This has never happened before. We had Stalin’s crimes … We had Hitler’s aggression and the Holocaust. We had 911 and the ‘War on Terror’. None of those actually begin to compare to what we have now because what we have now is planetary. It’s worldwide.”
Dr. Miller does not call the CV19 bioweapon/vax a genocide. He says it is really a global democide. Meaning everyone and anyone is being murdered with the CV19 bioweapon/vax. Dr. Miller says, “My Substack is called ‘Died Suddenly’. I started it in February of 2022 when I noticed many, many people were dying suddenly for no given reason. In the history of obituaries, certainly in the United States, that is unprecedented. Obituaries always tell you why somebody died. Even if the person is very, very old, you have a cause of death. Now, all kinds of people are dropping dead for no reason and often very young … We do a weekly overview with as many pictures of these people as possible. This is the point. There are many statistical claims of the numbers of people who are dying … But as Stalin said, ‘One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic’. This is brutal, cynical wisdom, and he was absolutely right. If you read 1 million people starved in Ukraine, you say that’s too bad. If you look at page after page after page of people’s faces and names with the names of their survivors, it’s not so easy to shrug off.”
Greg Hunter, “CV19 – A Propaganda Masterpiece – Mark Crispin Miller”, USAWatchdog, 2023-06-10.
October 4, 2023
“John Adams said that a republican constitutional structure didn’t guarantee republican virtue in government”
Chris Bray reflects on the 17th amendment to the US Constitution in light of the appointment of California’s new senator:
California Governor Gavin Newsom speaking at the 2019 California Democratic Party State Convention in San Francisco, California on 1 June, 2019.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
… the Senate was supposed to be the national storehouse of wisdom, restraint, discipline, and worldly experience. You may already be seeing that we wandered away from this idea at some point.
The 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, gave voters the power to directly elect senators, reducing the influence of state legislatures and opening the upper house to mass media popularity contests. The 16th Amendment — “Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes” — was ratified the same year, a one-two punch of Progressive centralization of power.
The democratizing and centralizing character of the 17th Amendment gave us a parade of powerful idiots that culminated in John Fetterman, passing through Mazie Hirono and the professional Ted Baxter impersonator Sheldon Whitehouse, so it looks like a failure. But we’ve just run an experiment, thanks to Dianne Feinstein’s white-knuckled grip on her personal status, and the results are … interesting.
The California legislature, in its infinite wisdom, has given the governor the unilateral authority to appoint Feinstein’s replacement, so we’re not quite seeing the exact duplicate of the original constitutional design for the Senate. But we’re seeing something like it: a senator chosen by something other than the popular vote, elevated to the Senate after selection by a longtime state official who has deep personal familiarity with the pool of people who might do the job. You know, a statesman.
Newsom’s choice for Feinstein’s seat is almost miraculous in its awfulness, an appointment distinguished by cravenness and sleazy insiderism. Naming a new senator from a state with 39 million people in it, he has chosen the Maryland resident Laphonza Butler — who has never held any elected office anywhere.
Butler is a career activist and party hack, an SEIU official who went on to run the abortion PAC EMILYs List. She is, in other words, one of the people whose function in life has been to raise money for the Democratic Party. She’s an ATM, and she’s never been anything else. She’s being appointed to the United States Senate without having ever convinced any voters anywhere to elect her to anything, and she’s rising to the upper house of the national legislature with no experience of any kind in any relevant field. Advice and consent on foreign policy? Confirmation of judicial nominees? Well, she has experience raising money for candidates, so. It’s a straight payoff: generate cash for the party for twenty years, get a free high-status ride in the Senate.
Here’s how Newsom explains the choice:
She’s a black lesbian who gives us money, end of statement. California’s idiot politicians find the choice exciting.
Douglas Murray – “Canada today looks like a nation of ignoramuses”
Writing in the National Post, Douglas Murray flays the Canadian Parliament for their shameful ignorance put on display by publicly honouring a former Waffen SS officer:
Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler (in the foreground) visiting the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS “Galizien” in May 1943.
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Perhaps I should say straight away that I love Canada. Some of my best friends are Canadian. That minimal throat-clearing aside, let me say — as a friendly outsider — that Canada today looks like a nation of ignoramuses.
The incident in Parliament the other week is just one case in point. Standing ovations are very rare things. They should be very special things. When a whole House stands to applaud someone they had better be very sure who they are applauding.
I know that Speaker Anthony Rota has now resigned. But here is the thing. Anybody who knows anything about the Second World War knows that if you were fighting the Soviets in Ukraine in the 1940s you were most likely fighting with the Nazis. It does not require a fine-tuned expert in the era to know this. Almost anybody could have guessed this. If almost anyone knew anything.
It seemed to be the assumption not just of Speaker Rota but of the whole Canadian Parliament that there existed in the 1940s some proto-anti-Putin fighting force and that the great cause of this moment has some direct lineage back to the fight of the 1940s. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy almost certainly guessed this. But it was the Canadian Parliament who was hosting him, the Canadian Parliament who embarrassed him and the Canadian Parliament who have handed the most magnificent propaganda victory to the Kremlin. In a war which Putin pretended to start in order to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, how much help has Canada given by your entire Parliament standing to applaud an actual Nazi?
What makes this worse is that this all comes after a period in which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been perfectly happy to call decent, ordinary Canadians Nazis. To use measures like the de-banking of his critics in moves that have horrified most of the other democracies in the West. When a bank in my country of birth — Britain — was recently found to have de-banked a politician (Nigel Farage) for what turned out to be political reasons not only did the head of the bank resign, but politicians in Britain from across the political system condemned the bank. Such moves are unlikely to be taken by another bank in Britain again. But in Canada it seems to be perfectly acceptable, because at any time the Canadian prime minister and deputy prime minister can claim that their critics are homophobes, xenophobes, racists, Nazis, misogynists and all of the rest.
The world — especially America — has looked on in horror as the Canadian government has tried to curtail speech in the country, and looked on with ever-more horror as Canadians seem willing to go along with this. It seems to be the view of the Canadian authorities that they are capable of deciding at the merest glance who is and is not allowed to speak, what is and is not acceptable speech, what any Canadians can and cannot read and who is and who is not a “Nazi”. These being the same authorities who apparently cannot even perform the most basic Google searches on their guests.
I know that Canadians often like to look down on Americans. But as someone who spends most of his time in America I can tell you that it is the American public who now wonder at what on earth is happening with our neighbour in the north.
