Quotulatiousness

October 31, 2024

The US federal election goes into garbage time

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

Lauren Smith on the latest attempt by Joe Biden to suck the oxygen out of the room (Kamala Harris was also speaking while Biden’s “gaffe” grabbed the media’s full attention):

US president Joe Biden has re-emerged from wherever he was being hidden to hand Donald Trump an incredible, accidental boost. In a rare public appearance, he branded Trump’s supporters “garbage“.

For some reason, the president decided to wade into the row over a joke made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden last weekend. Hinchcliffe described Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”, sparking some confected outrage among those pretending not to know he was joking. In response, while speaking to Hispanic advocacy group Voto Latino, Biden said: “The only garbage I see floating out here is [Trump’s] supporters”.

The Republicans have understandably seized on the remark. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, slammed it as “disgusting”. Florida senator Marco Rubio repeated the smear to Trump supporters at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania last night, to furious boos from the crowd.

The White House then rushed to try to retract the comments. Today, in a statement on X, Biden claimed that he was actually talking about the “hateful rhetoric” being “spewed” at the rally, not about Trump’s supporters themselves. That, he says, is “all I meant to say”.

But that is plainly not what he said. And everyone can guess it’s probably not what he meant, either. As Trump pointed out at the Allentown rally yesterday, Biden’s “garbage” gaffe is highly reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s infamous “deplorables” outburst. During her 2016 presidential campaign, she described “half” of Trump’s supporters as “racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic”, saying they all belonged in a “basket of deplorables”. It was a blunder that many, including Clinton herself, believe cost her the election.

Jim Treacher investigates what he calls “the Case of the Planted Apostrophe” as the bulk of the legacy media rallied to try to cover up, mitigate, or explain away Biden’s “garbage” comment:

I think I heard something about MSNBC intercutting footage from the ’39 rally with the Trump rally? I haven’t watched that network since they fired Olbermann, but it sounds like something they’d do.

Little did they all know what a gift they were about to be handed. One of the speakers at the rally was comedian and Kill Tony podcast host Tony Hinchcliffe, and everybody lost their minds about this joke:

Perfect. The headline wrote itself: TRUMP RALLY BASHES PUERTO RICANS!!!

If Trump wanted to convince everyone he’s not a bigot, Hinchcliffe certainly didn’t do him any favors. Even though, as a few lonesome bloggers shouted into the wilderness, it was a joke.1

The entire journalism industry then spent 48 solid hours pouncing and seizing on Hinchcliffe’s unfortunate wisecrack. “See? Do you see how racist they are? They’re just so … so … racist!!”

Oh, they were so happy.

But they forgot one thing: Grandpa Joe is still around.

And he wants to help.

Emphasis mine:

    The Puerto Rican that I know, or Puerto Rico where I’m, in my home state of Delaware, they’re good, decent, honorable people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His, his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable.

Oops.

Yes, Joe Biden just called Trump supporters “garbage”. It’s the only clear sentence in that whole paragraph of gibberish.

There are maybe six million Puerto Ricans in America. In 2020, there were something like 75 million Trump voters. I’m no mathematician, but that’s a lot more. If alienating the first group is bad, then alienating the second group is much, much worse.

No matter how much Joe Scarborough hates them.

If a dumb joke by a podcast host matters, then so does the sitting president of the United States telling tens of millions of voters that they’re “garbage”.

    1. The journos are now digging into Hinchcliffe’s voting history. They’re investigating a comedian for telling a joke. And they wonder why we hate them.

Nine Types of Trick-or-Treat Houses

Filed under: Humour, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

It’s a Southern Thing
Published Oct 23, 2018

Halloween is coming. Which one will you be?

#SoTrueYall #itsasouthernthing

QotD: How to increase your Barbarism Quotient (BQ)

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

Naturally this all made me think of 4chan. The swirling chaos that dominates the more subaltern corners of online bears an eerie resemblance to the mutability of identity that [James C.] Scott chronicles as a form of resistance to domination. If the channers and the Twitter anons seem a little barbaric (in the less descriptive, more judgmental sense of the word), well, they are, but hill people frequently are too. “Self-barbarization” can be be a very effective conscious or unconscious strategy of resistance while simultaneously making a group unpleasant to be around (in fact these things are linked).

The digital barbarians have for now made themselves illegible to the hyper-surveillance, algorithmic discipline, and intrusive analytics that loom like the hundred-eyed Argos over all online interactions. In fact, insofar as a key technique of the cyber-panopticon is the construction of predictive models of user behavior, to be unpredictable is an important component of being ungovernable. The other option is to hide.

Hiding is a strategy that some people attempt offline as well, either by building a compound in the woods or by adopting protective coloration and hiding in plain sight. But as the bots grow ever more omniscient, hiding gets more expensive and less effective. Another classic barbarian-inspired strategy is to maximize mobility, and indeed contemporary economic and technological conditions seem ripe for a renaissance of nomadism. But the trouble with always being ready to pack your bags is it makes it hard for anybody to count on you.1 Is there anything that can be done for those of us who want to live marginally more barbarically, but still sip lattes and put down roots? Yes, because the ultimate lesson of Scott’s book is that barbarism is really more of a state of mind that can be practiced anywhere. Three brief examples of ways to increase your Barbarism Quotient (BQ), suitable for the discerning urban barbarian:

  • Keep your identity small. Paul Graham once said this, but we can go much further. An expansive identity implies its contrapositive: a similarly expansive set of ideas, behaviors, and lifestyles which we cannot adopt without incurring psychic damage. This limits our space for action, and makes us easier for the machines to predict and for the man to control. Better far to figure out what you really care about, figure out what the real red lines are, and convert everything else from a non-negotiable into a piece of the optimization frontier. The ethnic and cultural mutability of barbarous peoples is an example of this kind of suppleness, but there are other sorts of mutability that can be useful too.
  • The great Boston T. Party once declared: “it’s better to have $1,000 of ammunition in your garage than $1,000 in your bank account; but it’s even better to have only $100 of ammunition in your garage and $900 of practice.” A lot of would-be modern barbarians daydream about burying gold bars in the ground or sewing them into the lining of their clothes (like the barbarians of yore hiding their tubers in the ground), but Mr. Party’s insight generalizes well here. Physical gold is admittedly a less legible form of wealth than T-bills or CBDC; but skills, knowledge, and relationships are even harder to seize than bullion, and even easier to transport across borders. The wise barbarian judiciously transmutes a fixed percentage of his financial capital into human capital. Nothing improves your ultimate BATNA like having friends or being useful.
  • Barbarians have a deserved reputation for not taking too kindly to strangers, but this xenophobia and clannishness is tactical. For the hill dweller, most strangers are in one way or another the representatives of hostile alien entities that are out to conscript, tax, and subjugate. The situation for we cosmopolitan, urban, dare I say urbane barbarians is a little bit different. We’ve already reached an accommodation with centralized despotic states, having found the advantages they offer to be worth the tradeoffs. Be that as it may, states have a tendency to try to unilaterally change the terms of the deal. To protect ourselves from this form of encroachment, the correct attitude is not xenophobia, but rather paranoia. The toolkit of modern states is to direct all our enthusiasm towards the Current Thing whilst deadening our senses towards everything else. “We had no idea it could get this bad” is a recurring theme in testimonies given by survivors of oppression and genocide, to which a family culture of “they really are out to get us” is a salutary corrective. Every pinprick ought to raise an alarm, because it could be the prick that precedes the onset of anesthesia. Finally, the cultured barbarian remembers that states are not the only hostile, alien entities waiting for us in the night with drooling jaws.

I could come up with a dozen more such practices, inspired by the hill people Scott documents, and ready for incorporation into the family culture you’re creating. But barbarism is a state of mind, and reflecting on how to keep yourself distinct and aloof from the fat, decadent agriculturalists is part of it. So read this book, and then begin carving out your cultural mountain fastness or your ideological swamp hideout. The barbarians are within the gates, they live among us, and we welcome you to join our ranks.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-01-16.

    1. Unless, that is, you all move together. If somebody wants to pitch me on peripatetic cyber-gypsy life, I am all ears.

October 30, 2024

Less than a week of increasingly desperate measures left to go …

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

I’m referring to the antics of the major US political parties as the formal date of the US election heaves into sight. On the one hand, Theophilus Chilton characterizes the Democrats as “cornered animals”:

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

With just about a week left before Election Day, things have definitely been heating up. At this point, it’s pretty apparent that all of the indicators are in Trump’s favour — and this is driving the Democrats absolutely nuts (even more than they usually are). A month ago, one could have definitely made the case that Kamala Harris had a good chance of winning. Now, that seems pretty far-fetched outside of the Democrats figuring out a way to fraud the vote so hard that they can overcome their ever-worsening situation in basically every swing state. As we enter this final week, Trump definitely has the momentum and is conducting an upbeat, optimistic campaign. Meanwhile, Kamala and her surrogates seem palpably despondent, screaming at their microphones and rolling out one ill-conceived “October surprise” after another at an increasingly frenetic pace.

That this is the case seems to find a lot of varying data points to support it. Public-facing polling is always subject to a healthy dose of skepticism (“… gonna need to see some internals there, bub”), but even that seems to have moved in the direction of a possible outright Trumpian popular vote victory. It’s obvious where both campaigns’ internal polling is trending, as Trump heads to states like New Mexico and Virginia to expand the slate of contested states while Kamala does damage control in bright Blue urban centres where her party’s early voting numbers have collapsed. Republicans have been overperforming bigly in every swing state’s early voting. Newspapers like the Washington Post and techbros like Jeff Bezos (with access to tons of relevant Big Data) are starting to make nice with Trump because their information is pointing them in that direction. At a demotic level, Trump supporters appear loud and energised in all sorts of places where Trump support has not been traditionally robust, while Kamala’s supporters seem dejected and subdued — when they’re not angrily screaming at small children. On and on, the “non-traditional” indicators keep pointing in the same direction.

At this point, it’s pretty obvious that there is a preference cascade that is moving in Trump’s direction.

Now, if we were dealing with normal people, getting the kind of feedback that an electoral loss like this represents would cause the Left to step back and reassess what they’re doing. They’d take a moment to “look in the mirror”, so to speak. But understand that we are not dealing with normal people. Losing elections (or at least losing the actual voting, the “election” is a different matter altogether) does not send them the same message it sends to everyone else. Instead of introspection, it merely generates anger. It tells them that they need to screech harder, steal harder, and smash harder. After all, these people are on the Right Side of History and anyone who opposes them is a “fascist” and a Nazi (their actual closing argument this week, by the way). And as we all know, heroes like Indiana Jones punch Nazis. If the election is lost, it’s not because the Democrats ran an absolutely clueless, tone-deaf campaign that basically only appealed to wine aunts, gay men, and twenty-something sluts. It’s because Trump is a Russian asset and his supporters accessed a secret reservoir of racism, sexism, and transphobia like it was some kind of evil superpower that allowed them to scurrilously subvert the Good People in America. In other words, the Left will only double down on their own intrinsic madness.

I mean, this isn’t just a theory — we’re already starting to see this pattern of behaviour take place even though Harris hasn’t even lost yet. Celebrities are already starting up with their bidecadal threats to leave the country if their candidate loses. Keith Olbermann wants Elon Musk to be arrested and lose all of his government contracts for the crime of not suppressing oppositional speech on X like it used to be censored back in the old days. The ever-amusing Will Stancil is gloompilling and appears to be on the verge of either suicide or a murder spree. These people are not well. Not at all.

On the other hand, Trump is not only Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin re-incarnated with his red-hatted brownshirts terrorizing the land … he’s literally the Devil:

My current prediction — based on the average of the Trump v Harris opinion polls at Real Clear Politics — is that President Trump will win both the popular vote and the Electoral College in the 2024 election. This prediction is not only based on President Trump now effectively tying with Vice-President Harris in the average of polls, but even more on that VP Harris has never polled as well as Secretary Clinton did at the relevant points in the 2016 campaign.

What reading this Substack Note brought out very clearly was how very different this US Presidential election seems to folk on the two sides of a deeply politically polarised polity.

On the VP Harris side, the salient view is some version of “how can you even consider voting for That Man!?” This is usually attached to a whole list of sins and other claims, of varying accuracy. This is the Trump-The-Devil view. The election is all about Trump and how appalling he is, both as a person and as a political figure. Sure there are other issues (e.g. climate change, abortion) but the lead and focus is how awful Trump is.

To deal with the reality that President Trump has already been President, there is regularly extra focus on his personal Devilness plus various claims about how a second Trump Presidency would be so much worse, for whatever reasons.

Back in the 2016 campaign, it was noted that Trump’s supporters treated what he said seriously but not literally, while his opponents treated his words literally but not seriously. That is, his opponents focused on Trump’s erratic connection to accuracy in his statements but did not take the political pressure points he mobilised anywhere near as seriously. Those were simply ignored and/or dropped into “the bigotry, so ignore” box. Conversely, his supporters were being mobilised by precisely those political pressure points.

The focus on President Trump’s willingness to say things for their rhetorical effect rather than their accuracy loses some of its moral high ground, given how willing President Trump’s opponents have been willing to make statements about him for rhetorical effect, rather than accuracy.

The Korean War 019 – The Chinese Threat Revealed! – October 29, 1950

Filed under: China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 29 Oct 2024

Communist Chinese forces make themselves known on the battlefield in a big way, and openly engage UN troops for the first time. What was supposed to be a stroll to the Chinese border turns into a week-long nightmare. How do the South Koreans of ROK II Corps perform in battle against this new threat? And how will Douglas MacArthur and his staff respond?

Chapters
01:07 Reaching the Yalu
02:29 The Chinese Strike
06:16 The West
07:43 Eighth Army Response
14:26 Summary
(more…)

QotD: The right to bear arms

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

The Founding Fathers of the United States believed, and wrote, that the bearing of arms was essential to the character and dignity of a free people. For this reason, they wrote a Second Amendment in the Bill Of Rights which reads “the right to bear arms shall not be infringed”.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with it, the Second Amendment is usually interpreted in these latter days as an axiom of and about political character — an expression of republican political thought, a prescription for a equilibrium of power in which the armed people are at least equal in might to the organized forces of government.

It is all these things. But it is something more, because the Founders regarded political character and individual ethical character as inseparable. They had a clear notion of the individual virtues necessary collectively to a free people. They did not merely regard the habit of bearing arms as a political virtue, but as a direct promoter of personal virtue.

The Founders had been successful armed revolutionaries. Every one of them had had repeated confrontation with life-or-death choices, in grave knowledge of the consequences of failure. They desired that the people of their infant nation should always cultivate that kind of ethical maturity, the keen sense of individual moral responsibility that they had personally learned from using lethal force in defense of their liberty.

Accordingly, firearms were prohibited only to those intended to be kept powerless and infantilized. American gun prohibitions have their origins in racist legislation designed to disarm slaves and black freedmen. The wording of that legislation repays study; it was designed not merely to deny blacks the political power of arms but to prevent them from aspiring to the dignity of free men.

The dignity of free men (and, as we would properly add today, free women). That is a phrase that bears thinking on. As the twentieth century draws to a close, it sounds archaic. Our discourse has nearly lost the concept that the health of the res publica is founded on private virtue. Too many of us contemplate a president who preaches family values and responsibility to the nation while committing adultery and perjury, and don’t see a contradiction.

But Thomas Jefferson’s question, posed in his inaugural address of 1801, still stings. If a man cannot be trusted with the government of himself, how can he be trusted with the government of others? And this is where history and politics circle back to ethics and psychology: because “the dignity of a free (wo)man” consists in being competent to govern one’s self, and in knowing, down to the core of one’s self, that one is so competent

Eric S. Raymond, “Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun”.

October 28, 2024

QotD: Democracy as theatre

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

The world does not have much experience with democracy. What we know of it comes from the century or so the West been tinkering with it and, of course, what can be learned from the ancient Greek experiment with it. Unlike monarchy or various forms of despotism, democracy has had a relatively short run. We have more real world experience with various types of totalitarianism than we do democracy, so it stands to reason that we are just coming to understand its benefits and liabilities.

One thing we are learning about modern democracy is that it is a myth. The people are not in charge. They get to vote on things and select representatives, but those representative don’t actually represent the interests of the people, who voted them into their positions. The office holders in a modern democracy represent the interests of the money-men who sponsored them. Politicians in a democracy are like prize fighters, in that they are controlled by a management team.

Like a prize fighter, one of the demands placed upon a modern politician is that he must at all times seek the attention of the public. Much of what we see in our modern democracies is false drama, designed to gain attention. This is why women have proven to be so successful as politicians. Women are naturally gifted with the ability to get attention, especially through false drama. It turns out that democracy is a form of governance modelled on the beauty pageant.

This is the point of the impeachment fiasco. The Democrats are the party of girls and gay men, so they naturally seek drama. Trump’s great sin is that he is a great showman, so he gets all the attention. Impeachment allows the vagina party to one-up him and force him to pay attention to them. If you look at the people celebrating in the streets, it’s lesbians and middle-aged woman. They are not celebrating because they hate Trump. They are happy someone is noticing them.

The Z Man, “Impeaching Democracy”, The Z Blog, 2019-12-19.

October 27, 2024

The Great Demobilization: How the Allied Armies Were Sent Home

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 26 Oct 2024

After the war, the Allies face the new challenge how to bring home the tens of millions of troops they have deployed across the globe. Today Indy examines this massive logistical effort, looking at the American Operation Magic Carpet, the British government’s slow but steady approach, and the devastation that Soviet troops returned home to.
(more…)

Whittier College as a small-scale model of the decline of higher education

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

At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter returns to the state of higher education in the west, this time looking at the plight of Whittier College which appears to be well along in a death spiral:

Whittier College’s most famous graduate, Richard M. Nixon, 1 June 1972.
Official portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

While I like to jump around subject matter here, in order to keep myself – and you – from getting bored, one topic that I return to regularly (as a dog returns to his vomit, as a sow returns to her mire) is the ongoing polycrisis in higher ed. You may have noticed, as I just wrote about this a week ago. Academia Is Women’s Work created a bit of a buzz. It seems to have struck a nerve with a lot of people, both with those who have observed the same things that I’ve noticed, and who had the same “ah-hah!” moment that I did once the phenomenon of male flight was connected to the myriad symptoms of academic decay that we all know so well; and with those (mainly women, naturally) who reacted with sputtering outrage – misogynist! incel! – when my Xitter thread on the subject went viral and broke containment in the basedosphere. Despite quite a few hostile eyeballs on the thread, the only thing they could find to correct was a grammatical typo (*its!) in the opening tweet.

When writing about the DIEvory Tower I usually keep it very general, as the problems are systemic, affecting the entire sector, and the view from orbit avoids giving the impression that the issues are specific to any one institution. But a couple of stories recently came to my attention which are simply too perfect not to share with you. Each of them provides a sort of holographic totality of the academic polycrisis, illustrating all of the afflictions in specific, personalized detail.

[…]

The title of this article really says it all: “Plunging enrollment, financial woes, trustee exodus. Whittier College confronts crisis“. It’s a bit out of date now – it was published about a year and a half ago – but the subject matter remains timeless. It has everything: infrastructural decay, forced diversity, incompetent and corrupt administration, a terrified faculty, accusations of racism, collapsing enrolment, angry alumni, reduced donations, budgetary problems. It’s all there.

Whittier College is a small liberal arts school in California, founded in the 19th century by abolitionist Quakers, and known mainly for being President Richard Nixon’s alma mater. It has seen better days:

    [T]he once-bustling quad is often all but empty these days, students say, and inside the Wanberg Hall dormitory, carpets smell musty, the Wi-Fi is spotty, and 25 students share two restrooms with toilets that frequently break down and take ages to fix. The eerie quiet outside and fetid bathrooms inside are signs of the turmoil roiling one of California’s oldest liberal arts colleges.

Imagine spending $49,000 a year to use fetid bathrooms.

Enrolment and revenue have both collapsed over a very short timespan:

    Since 2018, enrollment has plummeted by about 35%, from 1,853 students to about 1,200, according to college figures. Annual revenue has plunged by 29% over roughly the same period, audited financial statements show. … This term, faculty report the number of undergraduates is just 1,027.

The athletics programs are being sacrificed:

    Partly to save money, Whittier cut football and three other sports programs last year.

One of the other teams that got shut down was lacrosse, which is a very white sport. Sheer coincidence, probably. “Partly to save money,” though, huh.

The president of Whittier College is one Linda Oubré. Oubré has an MBA from Harvard Business School, previously served as a dean at College of Business at San Francisco State University, has worked as a consultant, was president of a teeth-whitening spa, and is also – and this surely the most important line item on her curriculum vitae – professionally qualified as a black woman. Given these impeccable credentials, it will be no surprise to learn that Whittier’s problems commenced immediately upon Oubré taking the helm.

[…]

Oubré is very concerned about people doing racisms:

    For a decade, more than half of Whittier’s undergraduates have been people of color. But in an hour-long talk at a South by Southwest education conference earlier this month, Oubré told attendees she encountered attitudes at Whittier such as, “‘We can’t have too many Hispanics,’ whatever, fill in the blank, ‘because the white kids won’t be comfortable’.”

It seems very unlikely that any of the faculty at a contemporary liberal arts college would have dared to suggest that the potential discomfort of white students was something to be avoided – yes, I’m saying that I think Oubré just made that up – but it’s revealing that she thinks that saying that people saying that the white kids might be uncomfortable with too much diversity is an own. The white kids are supposed to be uncomfortable! Also: a greater-than-fifty-percent non-white student body, in a country that is (for now) majority white, is apparently an insufficient level of diversity. Sufficient diversity is zero white people. But we already knew that.

October 26, 2024

Thank goodness somebody finally had the courage to say that Trump is a fascist

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

I mean it’s been obvious since his supporters have been goose-stepping around the Reichstag the White House in their brown shirts, red armbands, and constant chanting of the “Horst Wessel Lied“. How have the mainstream media managed to avoid seeing the clear inspiration of Trump’s Kampf and reporting it to credulous flyover state cretins Americans?

This week Kamala Harris described Donald Trump as a “fascist” who seeks “unchecked power”. Conservative commentators have expressed outrage at this absurd strategy, one which will doubtless backfire. And yet they appear to have forgotten that Trump has repeatedly referred to Harris as a “fascist” and, one on occasion, called her a “Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist”.

We have grown accustomed to the tactics of social media, the online crèche where those who bawl the loudest are rewarded with treats. What has become known as “Godwin’s Law” states that the longer an online discussion continues, the higher the probability that a comparison with the Nazis or Hitler will take place. Even Godwin has succumb to Godwin’s Law, penning an article for the Washington Post last December with the headline: “Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you.”

If this election is going to be reduced to each candidate shouting “fascist” at the other, we may as well give up hope. I have never been more convinced of the growing infantilism of political discourse than in the last few weeks, or that the US is now divided – perhaps irreparably – between two groups who see the world in entirely incommensurable ways. With sensible discussion now seemingly impossible, the election has descended into a battle of memes.

Harris’s campaign team, for instance, gleefully embraced the “Brat” identity bestowed upon their candidate by Charli XCX. I must confess that I have no idea who Charli XCX might be. Her surname in Roman numerals means 100 – 10 + 10, so I can only assume she’s a classical scholar making a sardonic point about the philosophical principle of eternal recurrence.

Likewise, Trump’s now infamous reference to the eating of cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, has been remixed multiple times and shared more widely than any campaign statement. All of which is very funny, but one might be forgiven for yearning that the election of the leader of the free world should be a generally humourless affair. International conflicts are not best resolved through a series of “yo momma” jokes.

This week I wrote a piece for the Washington Post about George Orwell’s essays, and the lessons that might still be gleaned from them. Specifically, I pointed out that Orwell continually cautioned against tribal thinking, and is still despised today in certain left-wing circles for reminding his readers that authoritarianism can occur on both sides of the political aisle. I quoted Orwell’s essay “Notes on Nationalism” (1945), in which he identified “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” I also quoted his dismay that the word “fascist” is so commonly misused. The piece can be read here.

I don’t often read the comments under my articles (except for here on Substack, of course), but I was interested to see how the overwhelmingly Democrat-supporting readership of the Washington Post might react. The comments are extremely revealing, given that most of those wading in seem determined to prove my point. I have rarely seen such unthinking and flagrant tribalism on display. Apparently, Trump is a literal “fascist”, and Orwell would have been the first to identify him as such. Orwell, of course, took up arms against actual fascists in Spain and was shot in the throat for his troubles. Would these commentators argue that if Orwell were alive today he would have packed up his gun and headed for the US in the run-up to this election? If not, why not?

The coming Hundred Days (?)

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

In spite of everything, I still lean toward optimism, so I can’t say that I agree with Kulak’s take here:

January 6th, 2021 — A protest that got out of hand or the worst act of insurrection since 1861, depending on your political preference.

    There are decades when weeks happens, and weeks in which decades happen
    – Variously attributed to Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Robespierre, Napoleon, and Steve Bannon

As of writing it is 18 days to the election on Nov 5th, and 94 days to Inauguration Day on Jan 20th.

Maybe the most knowledgeable meta-historian/Commentator alive today, whatifalthist, has predicted a civil conflict in which over 1000 Americans die will begin in this period …

And I’d put the odds of “A Conflict” in which over 1 million die involving the US overlapping with this period at something like 70-80%. If it doesn’t happen then Biden will have somehow played the perfect drunken master and embodied the Trifecta of God favouring “fools, drunkards, and the United States of America”.

That is a major American conflict: beginning, continuing, or dramatically ending within this period.

Civil War or “Troubles” is still slightly below a 50% likelihood … But that’s because I think The Ukraine or Israel wars going nuclear, a hot war with Iran, A Chinese move towards Taiwan, or what’s increasingly looking like a possible foreign backed Cartel-War on US soil (see Aurora) … might suck the oxygen out of a final domestic reckoning between America’s two political factions (Trump and Swamp) … at least until 2028 or 2032.

However America’s domestic instability is what’s driving the risk of escalation, miscalculation and uncertainty everywhere else and that will be the focus of this piece …

I am unprepared for what I think is coming … I’ve maybe thought about such an outcome for a decade now, I lived through 2020 and the Canadian Lockdowns with outrage and totalitarian anxiety (remember Canada was the testing ground for what they wanted to everywhere else, we got what Alex Jones only prophesied), and I’ve been a amateur and semi-professional war and preparedness commentator for 2 and a half years now … and it’s hit me how unprepared I am.

I’m more prepared than most, but, setting aside the political implications, I would trade A LOT for another 4 year election cycle of 2023 conditions to make money, network, buy kit, develop skills, read books, write articles, prepare, plot …

I’m doubtful I’ll get it.

I’m also painfully aware that a very large percentage of people and institutions would not financially or morally survive a long Biden “normalcy” … and that that desperation is driving a lot of the instability.

But ya, I’m already starting to intuitively anticipate/feel that hard times — things moving too fast — reactive loss of initiative feeling that I’ve only really felt when a relationship was imploding, during that one very rough exam season in Uni, at the height of the 2020 election-2021 Canadian Lockdowns, or those months when the doctors discussed amputation as an possibility …

And depending on who you are and your personal situation, you’re either keenly feeling that as well or blissfully unaware.

October 25, 2024

The “party of youth” is led by decrepit, doddering wrecks and time-serving political hacks

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

You can tell a lot about a political party by looking not at its current leadership but at its “bench” … the next couple of generations of potential leaders. In the United States, the Republicans actually don’t look too bad for future leaders, but the Democrats are facing a bench of already-too-old and never-will-be-ready-for-primetime hacks, as the “groovy fossils” have been clinging on to power right to the bitter end and drive away competent potential successors:

Thirty years ago, Democratic politicians were people you disagreed with, but they were from and of the body of the people. They were us, our brothers and sisters who saw things differently. I lived in California when Jerry Brown was the governor, twice, and I liked him. He was a brilliant crank, colorful and interesting. Whatever else he was, he was never dumb. If you remember the 1992 Democratic primaries — yes, this is a deep reach — the campaign season was full of distinctly likeable people, with the exception of the one who prevailed. Paul Tsongas used to say, often, that he was socially liberal but absolutely certain that federal transfer payments were on an unsustainable trajectory. His best line in the primaries was, “I’m not Santa Claus.” He was an unorthodox Democrat, when it was still possible to be one of those.

The current cultural model of the Democratic Party has produced a generation of politicians who are nakedly stupid and empty.

I’ve compared the Biden years to the Brezhnev years, with the army of handlers covering up the decline of the old party hack who’s been elevated beyond his ability. What we’re seeing now is the generation of dismal, time-serving party hacks that comes after the old decaying party hack. Democrats have credentialed their leaders on their ability to fit themselves tightly to the ritual grooves carved into the discourse. When asked about transgender issues, they say, “Trans women are women”. They have the whole list of correct slogans available for the moments when the machine is expected to push those slogans through the slot. Hate has no home here! (applause) They above all do not say things that are not the slogans. It’s time for the billionaires to pay their fair share!

And so we get Kamala Harris, and holy cow please help me. This may be the first person in the history of the world who has never answered a question. She seems programmed in her core functions to turn away from the actual substance of anything that anyone might ever ask, like she was brainwashed after that one combat patrol that ended vaguely.

[…]

This isn’t an accident. A generation of Democratic politicians have been culturally trained into a deflective and hollow discourse. It’s fascinating to watch them sort JD Vance, who talks like a person, into the category of “weird”.

How a Soviet Clerk Took Down a Spy Network

Filed under: Cancon, History, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 24 Oct 2024

Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet cipher clerk in Canada, defected in 1945, bringing with him documents that revealed a massive Soviet espionage network in the West. His actions forced the world to confront Soviet infiltration, shifting global politics and igniting early Cold War tensions. This episode uncovers how one man’s bravery exposed a hidden war.
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QotD: The treason of the music critics

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

This is what I was saying above: everything in music criticism and music culture has changed, except music poptimist perceptions of music criticism and music culture. That is what refuses to mutate. And I think it’s ugly and toxic and has left us in this bizarre place where people who write about music for large audiences think their sacred duty is to affirm the legitimacy of what the audience already likes, instead of championing something entirely new and totally different. But then, that’s what happens when you tell a lot of mostly white and mostly male taste makers that a particular set of tastes is inherently sexist and racist — they sprint in the opposite direction as fast as they can. Because aging white men are almost as afraid of being called racist and sexist as they are of being old.

Freddie deBoer, “A Few Indisputable Points About Poptimism and Then I Give Up”, Freddie deBoer, 2024-07-22.

October 24, 2024

Did the Media Lose the Vietnam War?

Filed under: Asia, History, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published Jun 21, 2024

In late April 1975, dramatic images from Saigon are beamed across the world. North Vietnamese troops proclaimed final victory. Just how did the US lose the Vietnam War?
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