Quotulatiousness

July 27, 2024

More Kamalamentum

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

At Spiked, Fraser Myers examines what he calls “Kamala’s Ministry of Truth”:

“Kamala Harris” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Did I just fall out of a coconut tree? How else to explain the dizziness so many of us are feeling at the speed of Kamala Harris’s coronation – and at the contortions now being performed to present her as the saviour of the beleaguered Democrats, if not of American democracy itself.

Within 48 hours of Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential race on Sunday, Vice-President Harris had clinched enough delegates, donors and Democratic power-brokers to ensure her an unchallenged, uncontested path to becoming the Democratic nominee to face Donald Trump this autumn. The last dominos to fall, Barack and Michelle Obama, today offered a full-throated endorsement of Harris, claiming she has the “vision, the character, and the strength that this critical moment demands”.

Since Harris emerged as the frontrunner, the Democrats’ media cheerleaders appear to have been gripped by a nasty bout of Kamalamania. “Kamala Harris will be the 47th President of the United States. Democracy will survive”, declared one Hollywood celeb. She brings the “political power of joy” and “effervescent vibes” to US politics, according to a New York Times columnist. CNN reporters have been gushing over her choice of hoodie and sneakers. As Jenny Holland wrote on spiked earlier this week, the media are eager to present Harris as “Martin Luther King, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, all rolled into one”.

We need to remember who we’re talking about here. The newly anointed Democratic nominee was someone few believed could win the presidency, only a few weeks ago. Indeed, this is widely understood to be behind the Obamas’ hesitancy to back her – and Biden’s own reluctance to hand over the baton to his veep.

It’s not hard to see why. Harris is a politician who exudes negative charisma. She speaks like a cross between a Calfornian self-help guru – her favoured aphorism is “What can be, unburdened by what has been” – and a primary-school teacher who enjoys a few too many glasses of wine at lunchtime. She laughs and cackles at inopportune moments, often to herself. At times, her speech is as incoherent as the mentally frail Joe Biden’s. Who could forget her nonsensical remarks last year at a White House function in which she asked: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Good luck translating that into English for swing voters in Pennsylvania.

We know that Harris is unpopular with the public, because she has been tested before. Her campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2020 had to be suspended two months before the first primary vote in order to avoid total humiliation at the ballot box. Nationally, Harris was polling at just three per cent. Even in her home state of California, she could only muster eight per cent. Yet now she is about to become the Democratic contender for the White House, with zero input from the public or the party grassroots.

At Founding Questions, Severian responds to a few questions from readers about the Kamala Harris candidacy and what it might indicate about what is happening behind the scenes among the Democratic movers and shakers:

My read is that 2024 is going to be Fortified to hell and back — that’s a certainty — but the extent of the Fortification, and probably its eventual outcome, is tied to the Robber Barons. I agree with William Briggs or whoever it is who suggests a “Thermidorian faction” (I prefer “competent fraction”) of Juggs within the Apparat who are trying desperately to slam on the brakes. IF they can do it — and I’m honestly not sure they can, not at this late date — it’ll be because the Robber Barons put the resources behind it.

I get a sense that there are more than a few Robber Barons making their peace with the BOM. There are, of course, a lot more Robber Barons who hate him and will never reconcile themselves to him … but that doesn’t mean they want Kamala Harris as President. As I wrote in the comments yesterday, if they’d wanted Harris as President, she’d be President by now. Pretty much all the Uniparty’s current problems go away if Biden resigns the Presidency, and if they can force him to drop his reelection bid, they can certainly force his resignation — he’s out in five months no matter what, so why not pass the reins to Harris? She’d be in a far, far stronger position going into 2024 as the incumbent.

No, really. I know that sounds badly wrong to people in contact with Reality, but look at it from the dumbass perspective. The Media has been telling us for four years that the Biden Administration is the greatest ever. Despite your lying eyes, there’s no inflation, no border crisis, no crime problem, and so forth. Harris is going to try to take credit for that on the campaign trail, of course, but it rings a weensy bit hollow coming from a Vice-President. From Madam President xzyrzelf, though? Different story. At least, that’s how the dumbfucks out there in Normie-land would see it, and those are the stupid bastards who will be voting in the fall.

As Vice-President, she gets no credit for the Biden Administration’s accomplishments (I know, I know, stop laughing) … but she gets tarred with all their failures, plus her fuckups as “border czar” (that’s gonna be fun), plus her role in the very obvious and ongoing coverup of Dementia Joe’s galloping dementia.

Make her President, and all that shit goes away. For her first official act, she appoints someone, anyone, as the new “border czar”, and tells that persyn to fall on xzheyr sword. Or, better yet, just never mention the border again. Tell the Media to blast nothing but Historic First Female President!! shit from now until Fortification Day. They will be happy to comply, and it’ll drive most of the bad news off the front page.

This is such a no-brainer that there are only two possible explanations for why they haven’t done it: Either they’re even more terrifyingly stupid than they seem, and so it never occurred to them; or it did occur to them, but Kamala Harris is such a repulsive retard that they can’t risk it — despite it all, Chomo Joe and his galloping dementia are still, somehow, the safer bet.

My guess is that, as Pickle Rick posited the other day, they all give her a pro-forma endorsement, then quietly pull the funding plug. They all pretty much have to endorse her at this point, if for no other reason than the Spiteful Mutants are already going to go apeshit in Chicago; an actual primary fight might burn the city to the ground.

But who knows? These are Juggs. Plus, as I’ve written, this is their moment — every grievance group in AINO will be going for it, as the Uniparty in general, and Harris in particular, will have to promise them the earth and stars to keep them onside. Consider that she has to get both the Bagels and their shekels, and the Pali-bros, in order to make the whole thing go. That would test the political skill of a Metternich, to say nothing of a woman who literally slept her way to the top. She can’t blow ’em all, so she’s going to have to deliver the goods in some other way.

It’ll be a hoot, that’s for sure. Keeping an eye on the funding is probably the best indicator we have.

And in an answer to a different reader:

Welcome to Late Soviet America. Expect a lot more of this, as obvious, ham-handed repression is SOP for flailing, collapsing regimes. We’ve entered the Andropov / Chernenko phase of the festivities, when the phrase “decrepit old man” refers to both the “leader” and his nation. And yeah, I realize that makes Kamala Harris the fake and gay Gorbachev, but that’s actually pretty close — Gorby, too, destroyed what was left of his country because he really believed in all that “openness” and “democracy” bullshit they taught him at the Higher Party Academies. Harris is a far worse moonbat race-baiter than even Bathhouse Barry ever dreamed of being; we’ll get the whole Gorby-Yeltsin-we’re fucked decade in about six weeks once she’s Fortified into office.

And on the power politics uncertainties for both America’s allies and adversaries when it’s not clear exactly who is in charge in Washington DC, the temptation to press a temporary advantage may become overwhelming:

Had Brandon resigned, it wouldn’t be ideal for the Juggs — Harris is still largely holding the bag for Chomo’s failures — but it’d be a hell of a lot better than this, because at least there is someone nominally in charge. Putin or Xi or whoever can pick up the phone and demand to speak to President Harris, and at the very least, he can be assured that President Harris will remember their discussion a few hours later. She might decide to do some incredibly stupid shit, of course — in fact that’s almost guaranteed — but at least Xi, Putin, whoever will know that it’s a bad decision …

… and not just some random drooling lunacy by a guy who thinks it’s 1971 and he’s sticking it to Corn Pop. If anything, the problem just got worse, because they’ve all but openly admitted what everybody already knew: We’re under the Do Long Bridge. There ain’t no fuckin’ CO. But now, instead of just ignoring Harris as per usual when decisions have to be made by … well, by whomever, now they pretty much have to loop her stupid ass in, even though she has no official power to make anything happen. They’ve added yet another layer of retarded dysfunction to an already FUBAR process.

And at The Free Press, Suzy Weiss explains a few Kamalamemes that her campaign has decided to “lean into” (note that the rest is behind a paywall):

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way — and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant — that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—”You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened by what has been” — as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool”.

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-Eleven. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe … well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story”. The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

July 22, 2024

Kamalamentum

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

On Sunday, Joe Biden announced that he won’t be seeking the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination after all and that he supported Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s best chance to win in November. Mark Steyn comments:

So Biden gets served the Ultimate Anyway, and we are now supposed to get excited about which white-male governors in the Democrat Party are willing to challenge the first female … first black … first “Asian-American” … first Montreal schoolgirl … first Canadian since Chester Arthur to be nominated for president.

Oh, no, wait — he wasn’t nominated; he succeeded after the incumbent was assassinated. Hmm.

If anyone thinks this is the last plot twist, you’re forgetting we’re in the final seasons of Dynasty here — the Fallon-abducted-by-space-aliens Moldavian-massacre phase.

[…]

There are a lot of voters who like the Higher Bollocks Kamala can slough off so effortlessly. The stuff about working together to understand where we are can, in the right hands, be an appealing simulacrum of profundity. Particularly when sluiced through the court eunuchs of the Washington press corps — the same guys who’ve been telling us these last couple of weeks that the Democrat bigshots are at war with each other and have no consensus on the way forward, rather than merely doing a bit of dime-store melodrama while implementing the plan predicted way back at the dawn of the Biden Era by Diane Calabrese.

There seems to be a lot of coordinating for a Sunday afternoon. The Clintons have already endorsed Kamala, and the Biden campaign finance chair has already moved on:

    Please give what you can today (money given here will be used 100% to elect Kamala Harris President).

And, just to put this in a global context, Joe’s farewell message sounded a lot to me like a demented version of Liz Truss, British prime minister for twenty minutes. You can’t tell the palace coups without a scorecard: Liz, weeks after winning the Tory leadership, was taken out by “the markets”; Biden, weeks after winning the Democrat nomination, was taken out by the donors (“No more dough until no more Joe“). There’s a lot of it about, don’t you think? You’d almost get the impression “elections” are just boob bait for the rubes …

Still, let us shed a tear for the latest guy to be written out of the soap. It’s only a few weeks since MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough was hailing the alleged commander-in-chief as “intellectually, analytically … the best Biden ever“. Then, tragically, the analytical genius came down with Sudden Overnight Dementia Syndrome. Because that’s the world we live in: Long Covid, drive-thru dementia.

Biden now assures us that he’s going to finish his term — which would be a novelty as, in terms of putting in a full day’s work, he’s never really started it. But we shall see. I’ve said before that it would be greatly to Kamala’s advantage to run as the incumbent.

That’s still the way to bet.

July 11, 2024

On immigration, progressives are following Brecht’s advice to “dissolve the people and elect another”

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

In the US, Canada, Britain, and most of western Europe the tide of immigration (legal and illegal) never seems to ebb, despite clear indications from the electorates that they’ve had enough. But perhaps progressives in each country are merely taking Bertolt Brecht’s advice for times when the people have forfeited the government’s confidence:

The problem extends far, far beyond merely glutting the labor market and lowering our wage scale, however. See, I’ve explained above why many Republicans go along with the Amnesty Express. But what about the Democrats? What’s in it for them, especially since Big Labor – whose members stand to lose a great deal because of the depression of wage levels – makes up such a prominent part of the Democrat coalition?

What the Democrats stand to win is permanent political power.

See, unlike previous waves of immigration, we are making no effort whatsoever to assimilate current immigrants to our culture and society. Instead, immigrants tend to cluster in indigestible lumps, maintaining their own cultures, languages, and ways from “the old country”. This is doubly true of illegal immigrants, who have managed to turn large swathes of many of our cities into small-scale replicas of Mexico and Morocco. This is even more troublesome because practically all of these immigrants come from places whose histories and traditions are grossly incompatible with our own. These folks don’t know about the idea of protecting life, liberty, and property through a rule of law system, so consequently they don’t CARE about such a system. They’re just here to get jobs or get welfare, for the most part.

In essence, when you import millions of people from socialistic and/or primitive Global South countries, you will end up with a socialistic, primitive Global South country of your own. And that’s what the Democrats are counting on. This is essentially what has been happening with the millions of people coming across our southern border from all over the world.

If the Democrats can get all of the 30-60 million illegals in America amnestied so that they can stay here and start their “path to citizenship”, and can bring in millions more through the various visa processes, then the Democrats are setting themselves up to be able to gain total control in about two decades – which is how long it will take for the children of all these immigrants to join the pool of voters with their parents. Further, they don’t seem to even want to have to wait that long, considering how they are opposing a bill currently before the Congress that would crack down on voting by illegal immigrants. Essentially, the Democrats – who have been unable to convince the current set of American voters to consistently elect them – want to replace us with a new set of voters, one which will vote overwhelmingly for the Democrats every election, up until we reach the point where there aren’t any more elections.

This is why I say that immigration is more important even than abortion or these other issues that people on the Right are so concerned about. Think about it. With 100 million newly-minted Democrat voters, the Democrats will be able to gain permanent control of all branches of government, at all levels, in nearly all of the states. What that means is that they will get to push through their policies at will. That means no more pro-life restrictions on infanticide. No more gun rights. No more religious liberty. No more rollback of the gay agenda. No more tax cuts or spending rollbacks. No more economic liberty. Kiss private property goodbye. THAT’S what the Democrats want – and the only way for them to get it to convince enough idiots in this country to give it to them via immigration, both legal and illegal.

So while conservatives are clawing each other’s eyes out because one candidate or the other isn’t as pro-life as they want them to be, the Democrats are setting up the playing field to replace the current American electorate with a new one from the Third World, complete with all the third world values of corruption and socialism that come with them.

Of course, for “Democrats”, read “Liberals” in Canada, “Labour” in the UK, and so on. The party labels change, but the basic beliefs are remarkably consistent across the western world (and Rishi Sunak’s just-ousted Conservatives were just as committed to open borders and mass immigration as Keir Starmer’s new Labour government).

July 8, 2024

“See, Trump’s plan is … Christofascist ethnic cleansing. It’s all so obvious now, isn’t it?”

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

Chris Bray finds the stupid so painful that it hurts:

I was worried, a year ago, about an election-year decline into hysteria and evil. What I didn’t see was the descent into grinding moronization.

“They want to dismantle the administrative state and give more power to the executive branch.” I … can’t. I just can’t. It’s like somebody made a special kind of rice cereal for infants that replaces the rice with shit. It’s sewage gruel for toothless adult babies. It’s like saying “they want to take power away from judges and transfer it to the judicial branch”, but that doesn’t really begin to do justice to the stupidity of these statements.

Similarly, this segment on MSNBC warns that Trump is planning to “bring the agencies under the umbrella of the executive branch”.

Imagine living in a world where the Department of Commerce was part of the executive branch. And on and on and on. […]

See, Trump’s plan is … Christofascist ethnic cleansing. It’s all so obvious now, isn’t it?

June 29, 2024

“No sane person can possibly believe that this man is capable of being president now, let alone for another four years”

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

Joe Biden’s performance in the first Presidential debate on Thursday night was so bad that even his strongest supporters in the media have turned on a dime and are now contemplating his replacement:

This is not a hard column to write. In fact, I wrote it twice already! But last night’s debate performance by Joe Biden is the end of his campaign. It’s over. Done. No sane person can possibly believe that this man is capable of being president now, let alone for another four years. No sane person can vote for him.

And watching him barely capable of finishing a sentence, staring vacantly into the middle distance, unable to deliver a single coherent message even when handed an ideal question, incapable of any serious rebuttals to Trump’s increasingly deranged lies … well, the first thing I felt was intense sadness. This was elder abuse — inflicted, in part, by his wife.

The second thing I felt was rage. His own people chose to do this. That alone reveals a campaign so divorced from reality, so devoid of a rationale or a message, so strategically incompetent, it too has no chance of winning. It is an insult to all of us that a mature political party would offer someone in this physical and mental state as president for the next four years. And it has always been an insult. That the Democrats would offer him as the only alternative to what they regard as the end of liberal democracy under Trump is proof that they are either lying about what they claim are the stakes or are utterly delusional. If Trump is that dangerous, why on earth are you putting forward a man clearly in the early stages of dementia against him? Have you decided to let Trump win by default because you’re too scared to tell an elderly man the truth?

And if they have not told him the truth on this, what else are they afraid to tell him?

The mainstream media also bears responsibility for once again being an arm of the DNC establishment, running countless stories about Biden’s acuity and sharpness from inside sources, while attacking the few journalists who actually dared write the most obvious truth about this election: Biden has deteriorated rapidly in the last four years, he is unrecognizable from the man who ran in 2020, and we’ll be lucky if he is able to function as president for the next six months, let alone four years.

I watched MSNBC after the debate. It was like watching State TV in Russia. It took them an hour to acknowledge what the world had just seen, as they danced pathetically around what was staring them in the face. They are literally administration spokespeople — Jen Psaki has the exact same job she always had — waiting for instructions on what to say out loud. And they have all lied through their teeth for months about Biden’s fitness, only to refuse any accountability. Joe Scarborough recently declared on his show:

    Start the tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth: and F— you if you cannot handle the truth. This version of Biden — intellectually, analytically — is the best Biden ever.

To which the only response is: No, F— you, Mr Scarborough. And fuck all the lies you have told.

But there is a huge, gleaming, hopeful silver lining, as I’ve noted many times before. For the first time this year, we have a chance of keeping Trump out of the Oval Office with a new nominee from a younger generation. No, I don’t know who — except it obviously cannot be Kamala Harris, who would lose by an even bigger margin than the ambling cadaver. But that is what politics is for! There is time for a campaign before a convention that could now be must-see television. A future campaign already has a simple message that vibes with the moment and instantly puts Trump on defense: it’s time for the next generation to lead. We are choosing between the past (Trump) and the future, between the old and the young, between the insane versus the coherent.

All it takes is a credible Democrat of stature to say they are running against Biden. Then all the bets are off. He or she need not criticize Biden, and, in fact, should lionize his service. But they can say they’re running because beating Trump is the first and most important objective, and, at this point, it is obvious that Biden simply cannot beat Trump.

Does anyone have that courage? The person who shows it will instantly become the front-runner. Go for it.

In The Free Press, Bari Weiss points the finger at all of the American media and the apparatchiks of the Biden administration who have been loudly and consistently proclaiming that Biden was in great mental shape, running rings around his advisors, and fit, rested and ready to debate Trump:

Rarely are so many lies dispelled in a single moment. Rarely are so many people exposed as liars and sycophants. Last night’s debate was a watershed on both counts.

The debate was not just a catastrophe for President Biden. And boy—oy—was it ever.

But it was more than that. It was a catastrophe for an entire class of experts, journalists, and pundits, who have, since 2020, insisted that Biden was sharp as a tack, on top of his game, basically doing handstands while peppering his staff with tough questions about care for migrant children and aid to Ukraine.

Anyone who committed the sin of using their own eyes on the 46th president was accused, variously, of being Trumpers; MAGA cult members who don’t want American democracy to survive; ageists; or just dummies easily duped by “disinformation”, “misinformation”, “fake news”, and, most recently, “cheapfakes”.

Cast your mind back to February, when Robert Hur, the special counsel appointed by the Department of Justice to look into Biden’s handling of classified documents, came out with his report that included details about Biden’s health, which explained why he would not prosecute the president.

“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

Can anyone doubt that characterization after watching Biden’s debate performance?

Yet Eric Holder told us that Hur’s remarks were “gratuitous”. The former attorney general tweeted: “Had this report been subject to a normal DOJ review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised”. Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama adviser, said Hur’s report was a “partisan hit job”. Vice President Kamala Harris argued: “The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts, and clearly politically motivated, gratuitous”. The report does not “live in reality”, said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, stressing that the president was “sharp” and “on top of things”.

June 27, 2024

California’s Trudeau

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

In the New English Review, Bruce Bawer reviews Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power by Ellie Gardey Holmes, a biography of California’s own Justin Trudeau:

I’ve been appalled by Gavin Newsom for years, but to read Ellie Gardey Holmes’s powerful and unflinching new book Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power is to find one’s contempt for this hideous creature skyrocketing. If he has any redeeming qualities, any special gifts, any attributes that might illuminate an admirable and recognizably human side, there’s no sign of them here. This is a man who, despite having no discernible talent for governance or anything else, was lucky enough to be born into one well-off family – his great-grandfather co-founded the Bank of Italy, which later became the Bank of America – and to be, from earliest childhood, a sort of honorary member of an even richer family, the Gettys, his father being best friends with oil magnate Gordon Getty, who was like a second father to young Gavin.

Both men, his biological father and his second father, used their considerable influence from the beginning to help Gavin rise to power. Indeed, as surely as any Kennedy or Bush, Gavin Newsom was born into a political machine and bred to be a politician. After he and Getty played a big role in helping Willie Brown to get elected mayor of San Francisco, Brown named Newsom to the city’s Parking and Traffic Commission. Soon he was promoted to the Board of Supervisors, a post he held from 1997 to 2004. “Because of his lack of qualifications,” writes Gardey Holmes, “Newsom entered office entirely indebted to Willie Brown”. Observers referred to him, in fact, as “an appendage of Willie Brown”. Quick sidebar in the midst of this tale of political advancement: when his mother was dying, Gavin was pretty much AWOL, although he was present when she underwent assisted suicide – which, at the time, was illegal in California. Others had been prosecuted for their participation in such actions; Gavin was not, a foreshadowing of many other occasions on which he would be treated as exempt from the rules governing the behavior of ordinary mortals.

In 2003 he was elected mayor. One of his first acts was to authorize the issuing of marriage licenses for same-sex couples, even though he had no power to do any such thing. He even performed some of the marriages himself. This cynical move (which even California’s two Democratic Senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, opposed) was a cheap stunt, carried out at the expense of gullible gays, whose marriages were soon enough ruled invalid by the state Supreme Court – but it had the desired effect. It made him a national figure and it won him the esteem of the mainstream media. Bob Simon told him on 60 Minutes that he might well have “set a record for instant fame in this country”.

From the beginning of his life in “public service” – that laughable term – Newsom’s vanity and ambition were flagrantly palpable. Although the New York Times described him during his mayoralty as the subject of “local adoration”, some San Francisco insiders resented his brazen focus “on self-aggrandizement and personal publicity” and his relative indifference to the city’s growing problems on a variety of fronts. Routinely, he stole credit for other people’s initiatives and acted as if he were exempt from the rules. A police officer drove him to his wedding in Montana in his official SUV – a definite no-no.

After two terms as mayor he had his eye, naturally, on the Governor’s Mansion – but polls convinced him to run for Lieutenant Governor instead. He spent two terms in that job, too, but hated it: he had no real power, no real staff, no real budget, and he felt disrespected by his boss, Jerry Brown. The initiatives he did support were destructive “progressive” bilge of the first water: for example, he was the only statewide elected official to support Proposition 47, which converted many felonies to misdemeanors, helping to set off the still ongoing rash of shoplifting that has made San Francisco, particularly, an international joke. For the most part, however, instead of addressing the state’s problems he put his energies into enhancing his national profile. He became a fixture on shows like Real Time with Bill Maher. He also wrote – or at least signed his name to – a book calling for the transformation of government by means of “digital technology”; the book’s argument didn’t make much sense, and even Stephen Colbert, usually a reliable left-wing shill, dismissed it as “bullshit”.

And then, inevitably, in 2019, Newsom became governor, thanks in no small part to massive donations from the Gettys and Pritzkers and his role as “the darling of the upper class”. California was already on the skids, but Newsom accelerated the process. He pulled National Guard troops from the southern border, saying that “[t]he border ’emergency’ is a manufactured crisis and California will not be part of this political theater”. He even had the state sue President Trump over his border emergency declaration, which according to Newsom was nothing but an expression of “division, xenophobia, [and] racism”. Instead of canceling one of the state’s notorious boondoggles – the program to build a staggeringly expensive high-speed rail line from San Francisco to San Diego – he shortened the planned route, so that the trains would run only between Merced and Bakersfield. This made the rail line an even more ridiculous proposition, but Newsom’s priority was not to provide a useful means of public transportation but to keep the state from having to return the federal money appropriated for the project to a government run by Donald Trump, who from the beginning of his governorship Newsom singled out as his personal enemy – an action that profoundly enhanced his popularity among California Democrats. Indeed, instead of seriously dealing with California’s jobs and education crises, Newsom focused relentlessly on attacking Trump. A hundred days into his governorship, he bragged childishly that California was “the most un-Trump state”.

QotD: Televised debates

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

As televised liberal-conservative dust-ups go, this one doesn’t quite hold a candle to the celebrated Bill Buckley vs. Gore Vidal cat fight during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. After wordsmith Vidal insisted that, no, really, the author of God and Man at Yale was a “pro-crypto-Nazi”, Buckley (who famously signs his letters in National Review, “Cordially …”) stopped speaking in his native Latin and declaimed: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in you goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered”. That’s good stuff — and it was on broadcast TV for god’s sake.

Nick Gillespie, “Bob Novak: ‘That’s Bullshit … Goodnight, Everybody!'”, Hit and Run, 2005-08-05.

June 23, 2024

California has “a governing class that wants you to give them power, then shut up and go away”

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

Chris Bray illustrates some of the many ways that California’s elected politicians are working to ensure that mere voters won’t interrupt their urgent and necessary work:

The Taxpayer Protection Act, a proposed referendum that got enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot, would have required voter approval for all new state and local taxes. State election officials agreed that it met the qualification threshold, and planned to put it before the voters. Democratic officeholders sued, with considerable support from public employee unions and interest groups, and the California Supreme Court ruled this week that the measure may not be placed on the ballot — because it improperly proposes to revise the state constitution, rather than merely amending it. You can watch them try to parse that distinction here, for seventy murky pages. You can change the state constitution through the referendum process, but you can’t change the state constitution through the referendum process. See, totally clear.

At the same time, California Governor Patrick Bateman is telling the organizers of a ballot measure that would increase penalties for drug and theft crimes — after a decade of sharply reduced penalties — that he’ll punish them by blocking criminal justice reform measures in the legislature unless they pull their measure from the ballot. The intended message is a very clear threat: If you insist on your ballot measure and lose at the polls, you’ll be punished with a complete blockade on your agenda through legislative means, for as long as we can manage it.

And a parental rights proposition that aimed for a place on the November ballot — falling short in its efforts to gather enough signatures — ran into a wall when the attorney general’s office assigned it a misleading label that would have described it to voters as a repressive measure that was intended to hurt children.

So a Progressive reform, the great 20th-century transition to direct democracy, is running into a progressive wall of resistance in the 21st century. California Democrats are fighting to limit the likelihood that voters will interfere with their agenda.

People outside California often shrug at the decline of the state, because Californians are just getting what they voted for. But that view misses a bunch of strangeness and ambiguity in a place that has tended to put Democrats in office, then limit their efforts with an ideologically inconsistent hodgepodge of conservative and libertarian ballot measures. The governor and the state legislature just sued to prevent their own voters, the people who sent them to public office, from voting on the new taxes they create. Democrats against direct democracy — a governing class that wants you to give them power, then shut up and go away.

This is not merely a California problem. I wrote a few days ago about the scumbag Robert Kagan and his idiotic book warning that America is facing a rebellion. Here’s the back cover of the book, and I’ve used sophisticated media software to circle the important part:

“The problem is and has always been the people and their beliefs.” This is what the American governing class believes, now. See also the pro-democracy warrior Tom Nichols and his recurring theme about the repulsive people of an ignorant country. We need to protect democracy by getting all the trash that makes up the population to somehow go away and stop bothering their wise and benevolent betters.

The great point of cognitive slippage in American governance has been the degree to which Americans have been willing to vote for officeholders whose agendas they then try to block through lawsuits, referendums, and popular resistance. We’ve voted for shit sandwich over and over again, then declined to eat the whole sandwich. The governing class is now announcing that we’re no longer allowed to refuse the complete meal. You may not have a ballot measure on that.

In the near term, and in the medium term, that pivot leads to greater friction and accelerated decline. In the longer term, preventing people from limiting the aggressive failure of the governing class can only make that failure more apparent. Geological faults that have a lot of small movements release tension in a series of minor earthquakes; faults that can’t release tension through small movements eventually have one big one. We’ll eventually recognize the California Supreme Court’s decision this week as a Pyrrhic victory. There will be more of these, in a political system of increasing brittleness.

March 11, 2024

The ever-increasing risk that they’ll destroy the US political system to “save our democracy”

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

David Friedman outlines not only the threat of a re-elected Donald Trump, but the threat of what his opponents are clearly willing to do to stop him:

    I’ve run into a surprising number of progressives who apparently genuinely believe that if Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, that will be the last free and fair election that America ever has. These people believe that if Trump wins, then by the 2026 midterms, if not by the 2025 gubernatorial elections, Trump and his acolytes will have figured out a way to rig the elections, or disenfranchise large number of Democrats, or hack the voting machines, or some other nefarious plot that will end self-government. The irony is that these people are the mirror image of the Trump fans who insist that the 2020 election was stolen, and that Democrats (or the Deep State, or whomever) rigged the elections, hacked the voting machines, etc. (Jim Geraghty in National Review, “A Reality Check on the Trump-as-Dictator Prophecies“)

Trump is a competent demagogue but an incompetent administrator. Having won the election and become president, he did very little with his power. The most important thing he accomplished was getting three conservatives onto the Supreme Court, something that a more conventional Republican could probably have done as well.

He did, however, succeed in scaring the center left establishment, parts of the conservative establishment as well. He had no respect for the political, academic, media elite, for Hilary Clinton, Harvard professors, the New York Times or National Review. He was an outsider in a sense in which previous Republican presidents were not, with enough political support to raise the frightening possibility of a government, nation, world no longer going in what they saw as the right direction.

Responses included:

Russiagate, the attempt to claim that Trump was a Russian asset.

The attempt to discredit the information in Hunter Biden’s laptop, which included a bunch of former intelligence leaders implying, on no evidence, that it was a Russian plant, Twitter blocking links to the New York Post‘s article on the laptop.

After the 2020 election, with the federal government back in Democratic hands, attacks have mostly involved weaponizing the legal system to punish Trump and his supporters. The strongest of the cases against him, for deliberately holding classified documents after the end of his term, clearly illegal, looked less unbiased after it became clear that Biden had knowingly retained classified documents from his time as Vice President and knowingly revealed them (although, unlike Trump, he returned the documents once his retention of them became public) and was not being prosecuted. The weakest of the cases was a prosecution for an offense, falsifying business records, on which the statute of limitations had run — on the grounds that the expenditure being concealed had been intended to protect his image and so counted as a falsified campaign expenditure on which the statute had not run. That and prosecuting him for optimistic claims for the value of properties used as collateral for loans — all of which were repaid in full — and finding him liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages were based not on legal necessity but on the predictable bias of a judge or jury in New York City, where the 2020 electorate voted against Trump by more than three to one.

My previous post described a tactic by which, if Trump won the 2024 election, Democrats might have tried to prevent him from taking office. The recent Supreme Court decision makes that particular tactic unworkable but it is clear from the Atlantic article published before that decision that some Democratic politicians were willing to take the idea seriously. Arguable the three liberal justices took it seriously enough to object to the majority preventing it, although there are other possible explanations of their dissent from that part of the decision. The Colorado Supreme Court took seriously, indeed endorsed, the idea of defeating Trump by keeping him off the ballot. It is far from clear that if there is another opportunity to defeat Trump’s campaign in the courts instead of the voting booth it will not be taken. If, after all, the survival of American democracy is at stake …

Trump has been charged with both federal and state offenses. If he wins the election he can use the pardon power to free himself from conviction for a federal offense but not a state offence. James Curley spent five months of his term as mayor of Boston in prison for mail fraud, until President Truman commuted his sentence. Georgia’s Republican governor does not have the power to give pardons even if he wanted to; the State Board of Pardons and Paroles does but only after a convicted felon has served five years of his term. The governor of New York has the pardon power but is a Democrat unlikely to use it on Trump’s behalf. If Trump wins the election but loses at least one of the state criminal cases, does the state get to lock up the President?

Suppose that, despite any legal tactics of the opposition, Trump ends up in the White House, in control of both the federal legal apparatus and, through his supporters, those of multiple states. After the repeated use of lawfare against him by his opponents it is hard to imagine Trump refraining from responding in kind or his supporters expecting him to.

February 11, 2024

To “protect our democracy”, we’re only going to have one name on the ballots

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

Chris Bray chronicles the efforts of the brave men, women, and the other 57 genders to protect our democracy by keeping would-be dictators, wreckers, and looters off the ballot in as many states as possible (perhaps all 57 if things go well):

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

As Democrats try to force Donald Trump off the ballot, and Democratic prosecutors charge him with crimes, they’ve also just opened an effort to keep Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. off the ballot with a complaint that could lead to civil penalties, an injunction against signature-gathering activity for ballot access, and criminal charges. You see where this is going.

The Democratic National Committee has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) against Kennedy., alleging violations of federal campaign finance law. The complaint also names the Kennedy campaign and a PAC, American Values 2024, alleging that the PAC and the campaign are illegally coordinating campaign activities. You can read that complaint by clicking here, or by opening the PDF file below:

The heart of the complaint is on pg. 2 (footnotes removed, but available at the link or in the PDF):

    American Values 2024 has stated it will spend approximately $15 million to assist Mr. Kennedy’s efforts to earn a place on the ballot in the states in which it is most difficult for Mr. Kennedy to achieve that goal, including Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Colorado, Nevada, Indiana, West Virginia, South Carolina, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Texas. American Values 2024 will do this by collecting signature petitions in each state to assist Mr. Kennedy’s efforts to qualify for a place on the ballot.

    In all the states in which American Values 2024 has announced it will assist Mr. Kennedy’s efforts to get on the ballot, state law presumes – and in most states requires – that the candidate or the campaign committee will take the steps necessary to qualify for the ballot…Put simply, to qualify for the ballot under state law, American Values 2024 must coordinate its activity with Mr. Kennedy and his campaign in a way that violates federal campaign finance laws.

The FEC has civil enforcement authority, and the DNC complaint asks the FEC to “seek such monetary, declaratory or injunctive relief as necessary to remedy these violations.”

January 28, 2024

We had to destroy the democracy to save it

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

Matt Taibi asks if there’s already an “electoral fix” in place, as we see more and more evidence that Joe Biden and the Democrats will stop at nothing to keep Trump — and would-be Democratic challengers — off the ballot completely:

The fix is in. To “protect democracy”, democracy is already being canceled. We just haven’t admitted the implications of this to ourselves yet.

On Sunday, January 14th, NBC News ran an eye-catching story: “Fears grow that Trump will use the military in ‘dictatorial ways’ if he returns to the White House”. It described “a loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers” that is “quietly” making plans to “foil any efforts to expand presidential power” on the part of Donald Trump.

The piece quoted an array of former high-ranking officials, all insisting Trump will misuse the Department of Defense to execute civilian political aims. Since Joe Biden’s team “leaked” a strategy memo in late December listing “Trump is an existential threat to democracy” as Campaign 2024’s central talking point, surrogates have worked overtime to insert existential or democracy in quotes. This was no different:

“We’re about 30 seconds away from the Armageddon clock when it comes to democracy,” said Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, adding that Trump is “a clear and present danger to our democracy”. Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward, one of the advocacy groups organizing the “loose” coalition, said, “We believe this is an existential moment for American democracy”. Declared former CIA and defense chief Leon Panetta: “Like any good dictator, he’s going to try to use the military to basically perform his will”.

Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice and current visiting Georgetown law professor Mary McCord was one of the few coalition participants quoted by name. She said:

    We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to.

The group was formed by at least two organizations that have been hyperactive in filing lawsuits against Trump and Trump-related figures over the years: the aforementioned Democracy Forward, chaired by former Perkins Coie and Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias, and Protect Democracy, a ubiquitous non-profit run by a phalanx of former Obama administration lawyers like Ian Bassin, and funded at least in part by LinkedIn magnate Reid Hoffman.

The article implied a future Trump presidency will necessitate new forms of external control over the military. It cited Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal’s bill to “clarify” the Insurrection Act, a 1792 law that empowers the president to deploy the military to quell domestic rebellion. Blumenthal’s act would add a requirement that Congress or courts ratify presidential decisions to deploy the military at home, seeking essentially to attach a congressional breathalyzer to the presidential steering wheel.

NBC’s quotes from former high-ranking defense and intelligence officials about possible preemptive mutiny were interesting on their own. However, the really striking twist was that we’d read the story before.

Summer, 2020. The TIP media blitz.

For over a year, the Biden administration and its surrogates have dropped hint after hint that the plan for winning in 2024 — against Donald Trump or anyone else — might involve something other than voting. Lawsuits in multiple states have been filed to remove Trump from the ballot; primaries have been canceled or invalidated; an ominous Washington Post editorial by Robert Kagan, husband to senior State official Victoria Nuland, read like an APB to assassins to head off an “inevitable” Trump dictatorship; and on January 11th of this year, leaders of a third party group called “No Labels” sent an amazing letter to the Department of Justice, complaining of a “conspiracy” to stop alternative votes.

October 16, 2023

In ?praise? of the “spoils system”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Glenn Reynolds on the way the US government’s structure changed from the “spoils system” of the early republic to the modern “professional” civil service of today:

Andrew Jackson sitting on a hog on top of a tomb with the inscription “To the victors belong the spoils”.
Political cartoon by Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly, 28 April, 1877.

America’s institutions need structural reform. We need it in academia, we need it in the corporate world, and we need it in government. In all of these fields, the structures, incentives, and institutions that have grown up over time have been destructive, and need to be fundamentally transformed.

I’ll be writing about all of these things down the line, but for now let’s start with government. Though you don’t hear a lot about it on the right, the left is all bent out of shape over the prospect that a Republican administration elected in 2024 might partially deconstruct the existing protected civil service. I, on the other hand, am excited about that prospect, and only wish they’d go farther.

Prior to the adoption of the Pendleton Act in 1883, government employment operated according to the “spoils system”, which meant that hiring in the executive branch was controlled by the Executive. When a new administration came in, everyone’s job was up for grabs, at least potentially. This “rotation in office” had several advantages, which were widely appreciated at the time, and propounded by presidents from Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln.

    Jackson argued that one serving in government for too long would inevitably lose sight of the public interest and come to use office for personal gain. He also maintained that government was or could be made simple enough for men of ordinary ability and experience, so ‘more is lost by the long continuance of men in office than is generally to be gained by their experience’.1

Contrary to popular belief, though, the arrival of a new president didn’t mean that everyone left. Even Andrew Jackson, upon taking office, replaced only about 10% of the federal work force with his own people. Every president understood the value of continuity, and hiring new people is hard work.

But under the spoils system, the fact that the president could replace anyone mean that everyone worked for him. And that meant both that everyone was responsible to the president, and that the president was responsible for everyone in the government, and everything the government did. This is consistent with the Constitution’s vesting clause, which provides that “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” If the executive branch does it, it’s an executive power, and if it’s an executive power it should be controlled by the president.

Contrast this to a “professional” civil service, in which the president does neither the hiring nor the firing, except with regard to a comparatively small number of senior officials. The civil service doesn’t think of itself as working for the president, really, and will happily drag its feet when it doesn’t like the president’s priorities. And when the bureaucracy misbehaves, or fails to perform, the president can, at least to a degree, blame its recalcitrance for the trouble or lack of results that occurs.

Congress is also let off the hook, yet simultaneously weirdly empowered. Congress can blame “the bureaucracy” for bad things, even when those things result from laws that Congress has passed. Then it can turn around and “help” constituents by intervening with the bureaucracy it has rendered dysfunctional, earning gratitude that may be deserved in a narrow sense, but not in terms of the big picture.

Under a spoils system, on the other hand, nobody gets off the hook. If the bureaucracy misbehaves, the president can fire the misbehavers. If Congress is unhappy with what bureaucrats do, they can demand that the president fire them, and make an election issue out of it if they want.

So why did we wind up with a civil service? As is typical, the fantasy of a neutral, efficient, expert civil service was laid next to the reality of a messy functioning government. But, as is also typical, the fantasy in practice turned out to be considerably less appealing than as proposed.

    1. Robert Maranto, Thinking the Unthinkable in Public Administration: A Case for Spoils in the Federal Bureaucracy, Administration & Society, January 1998, 623,625.

October 8, 2023

Can we get back to de mortuis nil nisi bonum any time soon?

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

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.

September 15, 2023

Donald Trump as a political autoimmune condition

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

Kulak has a very interesting view on the role of Donald Trump within the American body politic:

People ask me why I’m so keen on Trump

Trump is not an exceptional political thinker, he’s a fairly awful organizer and a worse hirer of people (despite his claims otherwise)… Indeed one need only look at his choices for the Department of Justice, or his COVID response to see him consistently hiring the absolute worst enemies of his supporters and indeed himself…

He seemingly only hired people anyone on the 2008 Ron Paul campaign could have predicted would have betrayed him… and indeed would have been able to predict it in 2008.

(ex Bush people are loyal to the regime, hate their own base, and view ordinary Americans as the enemy? Who would have guessed!)

And yet little of that matters.

And to understand why, you have to understand Autoimmune disease.

Autoimmune diseases result when the immune system, the thing that is supposed to protect the body from outside threats… goes haywire and attacks the body, in response to something that is no threat at all.

All immune responses and most external disease treatments have some drawbacks … Minor immune responses like a fever or the mucus responses of the sinuses make physical exertion torturous for example … But as the response gets more extreme the more they threaten the patient itself … a medical response like Cemo might kill cancer, but its also a poison… potentially fatal to a patient if not measured precisely … Likewise, the body’s immune responses can be fatal: High Fevers can result in death or brain damage … and the Anaphylaxis response, a flood of chemicals and white blood cells meant to combat the most dangerous exposures … can and does kill people.

Of course, we are all familiar with allergies, where a harmless exposure such as certain pollens or nuts can provoke devastating and sometimes fatal Autoimmune responses.

Trump provokes such an autoimmune response in the regime.

He is not a Hitlerian master of oratory or political organizing and maneuvering, he’s not even the most impressive populist America has produced … And he’s certainly not a bloodthirsty ideological and military/political genius like Lenin or Mao (which sadly the Right-Libertarians have failed to produce, despite rivaling the communists in their output of theory and economics texts)

Yet Trump activates the class and ethnic disgust response of the regime so violently that the American regime might actually kill itself trying to reject him.

Trump should have been like Ronald Reagan, an aging artifact of an older generation, keen to compromise with the regime, easily appeased with deals that would make him at least look like he’s winning … and ultimately un-committed to combating Either the security state or the Civil Rights priesthood… the first of whom defeated JFK and the combo of whom took down Nixon.

And yet this man who showed up stating he wanted to make “big beautiful deals” and who was incapable of even hiring anyone who thought like his movement …

They went to DEFCON 1 and nearly destroyed the republic to stop him.

Because they hate his voters that much …

It’s a point Severian has made several times:

If they were capable of taking a “loss”, they [the Democrats] could’ve made Trump into the best friend they ever had. That guy was begging them to be allowed to “grow in office”. Had the Cloud People said a few nice things about him on Twitter, he would’ve done anything they wanted.

But their own convulsive reaction to the Trump insurgency made it impossible for them to do the clever thing, and their ongoing attempts to “get” Trump through any legal mechanism they can come up with has made him more politically powerful. They might have to put him up in front of a firing squad to get rid of him at the rate they’re going … but Trump as a martyr would be even more deadly to their plans than Trump as federal inmate 98722580.

September 6, 2023

Some key planks from Scott Alexander’s presidential platform

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

I was a bit surprised to find that Scott Alexander has decided to toss his hat into not one, but two party primaries for the 2024 presidential nomination:

The American people deserve a choice. They deserve a candidate who will reject the failed policies of the past and embrace the failed policies of the future. It is my honor to announce I am throwing my hat into both the Democratic and Republican primaries (to double my chances), with the following platform:

Ensure Naval Supremacy And Reduce Wealth Inequality By Bringing Back The Liturgy

The liturgy was a custom of ancient Athens. When the state needed something (usually a new warship) it would ask for volunteers among its richest citizens. Usually one would step up to gain glory or avoid scorn; if nobody did, the courts were allowed to choose the richest person who hadn’t helped out recently. The liturgist would fund the warship and command it as captain for two years, after which his debt to the state was considered discharged and he was given a golden crown. Historians treat the liturgy as a gray area between voluntary service and compulsory taxation; most rich Athenians were eager to serve and gain the relevant honor, but they also knew that if they didn’t, they could be compelled to perform the same service with less benefit to their personal reputation.

Defense analysts warn that America’s naval dominance is declining:

    Only 25 per cent of America’s 114 commissioned surface combatants (cruisers, destroyers, and littoral combat ships) are less than a decade old. By comparison more than 80 per cent of China’s 141 destroyers, frigates, and corvettes have been commissioned in the past decade. In the same time period, the United States commissioned 30 surface combatants … The nearly 600-ship Navy of the late 1980s deployed only 15 per cent of the fleet on average. Today, with fewer than 300 ships, the US Navy deploys more than 35 per cent to service its global missions, contributing to a material death spiral.

So America is short on warships. But it is very long on rich people with big egos. An aircraft carrier would cost the richest American billionaires about the same fraction of their wealth as a trireme cost the richest Athenian aristocrats. So I say: bring back the liturgy!

The American rich already enjoy spending their money on exciting vehicles — yachts for the normies, rockets for the more ambitious, Titanic submersibles for the suicidal. Why not redirect this impulse towards public service? Imagine the fear it would strike into the hearts of the Chinese when the USS Musk enters Ludicrous Mode in the waters off the Taiwan Strait, with Elon himself at the wheel. Imagine how efficiently the USS Jeff Bezos will deliver its payloads! And does anyone doubt that billionaires – usually careful to avoid taxes — will jump at the chance to do this?

The Athenians had a parallel liturgy for rich people who would select and sponsor theater productions, but I think we can skip this one for now.

[…]

Legalize Lying About Your College On Resumes

Colleges trap Americans in a cycle of burdensome loans and act to reinforce class privilege. I have previously advocated making college degree a protected characteristic which it is illegal to ask people about on job applications. But this would be hard to enforce, and people would come up with other ways to communicate their education level.

So let’s think different: let’s make it legal to lie about your college on resumes (it is already not technically illegal to lie on a resume, but companies can ask for slightly different forms of corroboration which it is illegal to lie on). Everyone can just say “Harvard”, and nobody will have any unfair advantage over anyone else.

Start An Internet-Pop-Up Trade War With The European Union

For too long, Americans have groaned under the weight of foreign cookie-related-pop-ups which they and their elected representatives have no control over. It’s time to fight back.

When I am elected, I will mandate that all American websites serve popups to European Union residents explaining why the GDPR is annoying and why it affects even Americans who have no say in it. If the Europeans want to be able to access Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other US-based site without clicking “I understand” every time they reload it, they’ll have to pressure their government to do something about GDPR.

Appoint Donald Trump Constitutional Monarch

This would require a constitutional amendment, but I’m sure I could convince enough people.

The British experience suggests that the role of a constitutional monarch is to flaunt how rich they are, get 24-7 news coverage regardless of whether or not they do anything interesting, and have scandals. Donald Trump is the best person in the world at all three of these things

Trump wants to be on top, but is not that interested in governing. Meanwhile, American liberals (by revealed preference) want to continue thinking about him every hour of every day forever, but also don’t want him to govern. Constitutional monarchy would satisfy everyone’s preferences. If Trump is destined to destroy democracy — and everyone agrees that he is — let’s make it happen as gently and non-destructively as possible.

Obviously the royal family can’t participate in regular electoral politics, which means no Trump would ever be able to run for office ever again. This is the only way we are ever getting rid of them, you know this is true, please don’t throw away this chance.

I would support reverse primogeniture-based inheritance — ie the youngest son takes the throne — just so we can have a “King Barron”.

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