Quotulatiousness

April 9, 2023

What’s the “exit strategy” from the Trump fiasco in NYC?

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Severian wonders how the deep state’s public muppets will manage now that former President Donald Trump has been brought to court:

Let us ask ourselves, then, what The Left‘s “exit strategy” could possibly be, for any of their outstandingly Juggalicious projects. They of course don’t actually have one — “grokking the skull-fuckingly obvious consequences of their actions” not being the Left’s long suit — but if they did, what would it be?

And I admit, I’m buffaloed. We’ve already talked about the Ukraine thing, so let’s contemplate how the BOM’s “indictment” ends.

One wonders what happens if they throw the book at him. What’s the max sentence? It’s important. Does he face actual jail time? How much? I’m assuming for the purposes of this exercise that the jury will not only convict him, but give him the max, because c’mon man, this is AINO — we live in a Prerogative State now; jaywalking is a federal pound me in the ass prison offense if you can be proven to have voted the wrong way. What can they give him?

[…]

Throw BOM in the slammer, and there you have it. Not even Toby fucking Keith could fail to conclude that we now live in a police state. They’re screwed …

But they’re equally screwed if he gets off, because then their guys will go nuts, and forget passive resistance, the Left gets to riot. And riot they shall, because they’ve got a real taste for it now. Even if everything breaks perfectly for the Juggs for the next few years, Antifa etc. will still be rioting whenever they feel aggrieved — and when do they not? — simply because they like it. And they never face any consequences, so why not flip cars and break shit and light buildings on fire every time Starbucks raises the price of a frappucino?

Same deal if the BOM gets a slap on the wrist. I think that was the original plan, insofar as they’re capable of planning — indict him, slap him on the wrist, and turn him loose. They didn’t think past “getting him off the 2024 ballot”. If they even thought that far … which I doubt, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Even though they must know that 2024 will be Fortified for Democracy™, the BOM’s very existence terrifies them, because he shows that there’s a possible alternative. We see him for the ridiculous CivNat pussy he is, and we know full well we’re not voting ourselves out of what’s coming. But they see him as a real threat.

A Serious version of the BOM would be a very big deal indeed. They can’t allow that to happen. And so long as the BOM stays on this side of the grass, that seems to them to be a live possibility.

So what can they do? Seriously asking. How the hell do they get themselves out of this? If you were the Machiavelli behind Les Juggs, what would you tell them to do? I’m a Historian, so I can envision a lot more “worst case scenario” than most people, and all I can think of is “Roll the fucking tanks”. I don’t think even their total lock on the Media will work this time — you can instruct them to never speak of it again, but they don’t see themselves as your loyal stenographers anymore; they consider themselves news makers, not just news reporters.

Maybe … just maybe … you could sacrifice Alvin Bragg. Throw the case out for the obviously political hitjob it is, then keester Bragg with everything in the arsenal. Disbar him; haul him up on “prosecutorial misconduct” charges, and the throw the book at him. If I were trying to get Les Juggs out of it with the minimum of violence while maintaining the barest fig leaf of legitimacy for The System, that’s what I’d advise.

But they’re simply not psychologically capable of doing that. Admitting it’s a hitjob means admitting that the BOM was right about something, and that cannot stand.

The technocratic elite believe “You cannot be trusted with your own mind”

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

Chris Bray explains why he was struggling to write about the farcical events in New York City and the show trial of Bad Orange Man:

I started to write about the precedents for the Trump indictment and related topics in the recent criminalization of political disagreement, but I couldn’t summon up the energy to keep going. I was boring myself, and I kept stopping. It took a couple of days, but I figured it out: I realized that I was treating a pseudo-event as an event.

The thing that finally got me over the cognitive hump was Jacob Siegel’s massive article on the disinformation hoax, which you have no choice but to read. I printed it out and read it on paper, and I suggest you do the same. He’s describing, in depth and with considerable precision, an information technocracy organized around a principle now taken as a given by the governing class: “You cannot be trusted with your own mind.” There’s much more to say about it, but I’m mostly not going to say it. Siegel said it, and you should go see what he said. It’s important, and will show up in political discussions for a long time.

However. The development of this enormous manipulative apparatus, policing your perceptions and putatively guardrailing where your mind can go, cannot succeed. It treats bytes as trees; it treats information, or pieces of pseudo-information, as reality, and presumes that your perception can be shaped. It presumes that Twitter can become real, that repetition coupled with repression of the counterclaim can make you think X is Not-X. It can’t. The Federal Center for Lake Perception, working in conjunction with an endless variety of lake-centered NGOs and lake-describing academic researchers, tells you your house sits next to a lake. You look outside and don’t see a lake. The end. Hundreds of paid influencers can tell you that a lump of shit is filet mignon, and social media companies can suspend the accounts of users who say that the shit is shit, but then you take a bite.

That which is, is. Its isness is ineradicable. You’re a person in the world; you can see what is and what isn’t, and you mostly can’t not see, even if you try to make your mind comply. Starving person reads wall poster declaring resounding success of annual crops due to Great Leap Forward, dies of hunger.

Alex Berenson said on Twitter that the mRNA injections don’t prevent transmission or infection, so his account was cancelled and he was denounced for disinformation, so now you know that the injections do prevent transmission and infection. Right? Mind control. Very effective. Your brain just slides right in between those guardrails, doesn’t it, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

March 18, 2023

“Strongmen” all run the same basic “playbook” says scholar

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

Chris Bray considers the arguments made by Ruth Ben-Ghiat that ropes every “strongman” together into a single, coherent strategy that applies at all times and under all circumstances:

Holocaust scholars have always argued from every possible perspective, and will always argue from every possible perspective, about causation. There’s a school gathered around “No Hitler, no Holocaust”, and there’s Zygmunt Bauman, who barely mentions the man in an argument about the inherently dehumanizing tendencies of the modern bureaucratic state. Christopher Browning depicts a battalion of Order Police participating in state-organized mass killing because of cowardice, habitual obedience, and social compliance; Daniel Goldhagen replies that no, Germans killed Jews because Germans hated Jews, full stop. But in this extraordinary diversity of voices, there is argument. If you ask, why did this happen?, many answers follow — growing out of questions about the operation of power, the limits of moral agency, the basic human willingness to comply, and so on, that aren’t easy to answer.

Then comes 21st century American political scholarship.

Here’s how the publisher explains this book:

    Ruth Ben-Ghiat is the expert on the “strongman” playbook employed by authoritarian demagogues from Mussolini to Putin—enabling her to predict with uncanny accuracy the recent experience in America and Europe. In Strongmen, she lays bare the blueprint these leaders have followed over the past 100 years, and empowers us to recognize, resist, and prevent their disastrous rule in the future …

    Vladimir Putin and Mobutu Sese Seko’s kleptocracies, Augusto Pinochet’s torture sites, Benito Mussolini and Muammar Gaddafi’s systems of sexual exploitation, and Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump’s relentless misinformation: all show how authoritarian rule, far from ensuring stability, is marked by destructive chaos.

All that stuff is the same, see, “from Mussolini to Putin”. Pinochet and Berlusconi are the same, Russia and Italy are the same, new postcolonial nations and old reborn nations are the same, resource economies and service economies are the same, 1922 is 2016, modern culture is postmodern culture, mass media is social media — all in a blended mass of social reality and cultural factors, turning the March on Rome and mean tweets into the same “playbook”, which is also the same “blueprint”.

What caused the Bolshevik revolution? Lenin said so. What caused the Holocaust? Hitler said so. Why was there political violence in Chile? Pinochet said so. You can see the richness and complexity of single-actor history with blueprints and playbooks.

Turning the urgent precision of this analysis to the task of understanding contemporary politics, scholars know that Trump’s personality is very bad, but is DeSantis more badderer in the badness of his mean and bad personality? Does he use the playbook, exactly like Lenin and Mobutu Sese Seko? Is he running Florida just like the Congo? (Is Kristi Noem precisely identical to Joe Stalin, Idi Amin, and Tiberius? Depends on how she does in the primaries.)

It’s politics without politics, stripped of systems, processes, principles, historical uniqueness, geographic and economic factors, and competing forces in culture and society. Political power is a weight falling off a table onto a lever; the leader acts, his instruments are acted upon, and the machine of society moves according to the force and direction applied by the leader. Is it significant that our particular political moment is postindustrial, urbanizing, and increasingly made up of social and economic interactions mediated through an electronic screen? No, Trump is using Lenin’s playbook. Politics is all the same, and entirely about names and personalities.

March 13, 2023

People in high places like “Pryam Farll”

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

Elizabeth Nickson on the kakistocratic “elites” of the west and the dangerous policies they’ve been pushing:

How our leaders are seen by the people, their prey.

Around early Trump, a character calling himself Pryam Farll acquired a host of “friends” on Facebook among the most influential intellectual activist/writers on the right. He claimed to be a member of the Danish Royal Family, related to Prince Phillip, who spent Christmas at Sandringham, mentored Prince Harry and who read Putin’s email. He hated Putin with all his strength, claimed to be a General in US Intelligence, had worked in Reagan White House, and spent his time dropping into NATO, the EU, and Defence Departments in countries adjacent to Russia in the service of marshalling power against Putin, surrounding him with armies and bases and, as it turns out, bioweapons labs. He was also, tongue-in-cheek, “6’8″, devastatingly handsome and mind-blowingly rich”. He posted a dozen times a day, hilarious, way too bright, and substantive. Around the time that the first lie emerged about the Russia Hoax, which he claimed to have helped invent, he said he was in at the War Office in Romania, and to “start no trouble whilst he worked”.

Then he vanished.

And whether he was a genius kid in the basement or a mock-up by MI6 counter-intelligence meant to influence the influential, he serves as a type, the type that got us into this mess, where we are ghost-walking into nuclear conflict. The British since McKinder have had it out for the Russians and Russia-hate is baked into their intellectual class. Did the U.S. blow up Nordstream? Maybe, maybe not, but we very probably paid for it. More like MI6 and General Farll did the deed, and theirs is the ghastly world we now inhabit.

The early neo-cons promoted war as a way to get the “common” people “exhilarated and unified”. Get them off rock and roll, sex and shopping onto a spiritual crusade for “democracy”, they thought, demonstrating one of the aspects of this type: they didn’t have much fun in high school.

Iraq 1 and 2 were a result of this thinking. And now Ukraine. This crowd has spent almost a decade since Trump’s throwaway remark that maybe we should ally with Russia, stirring up hate. This entirely, entirely to cover for their thefts and crimes. And now they present us with another opportunity to be exhilarated and unified. Aren’t we just blessed?

If the Ukraine had signed and executed Minsk 2, we wouldn’t be in this mess. This was created by slender boy-men like Antony Blinken and little-girl-women like Samantha Power and Victoria Nuland, playing the Great Game without any notion of the actual effect of their ambitions on those they see as servile nothings, good for tax dollars like us, or foreign meatsuits to bomb to death. They have killed or wounded 500,000 Ukrainians in the last two years. Britain alone has issued 190,000 visas to terrified Ukrainians. Soros’s 2014 Color Revolution, where they installed a puppet over an actually elected Russian-friendly President, started the rush and ever since it’s all Pryam Farll angling for nuclear conflict.

[…]

Of course this is all centered around the intellectual fatuity of the Davos plan to enslave humanity in a technocratic prison because “climate change”. Russia under Putin is rapidly reclaiming its thousand year old culture, reintegrating the church, refusing the revolting ambi-sexual garbage of our culture. Davos couldn’t tolerate that. Plus Davos Man wants Russian resources, the vast wealth locked up in the steppes and Siberian wastes can power unimaginable wealth. So, they are willing to destroy the culture that created Tolstoy. No other literature approaches Russia’s in its prime, nor is there a more transcendent music. This is what Big Money and Davos want to bend to the west’s corrupt values? Imagine the arrogance it takes to decide to destroy a 1000 year old culture. And one that is nuclear-armed. And to do it with the bodies of Ukrainians.

They will spend eternity experiencing the pain of those families they ruined in service of their vanity. The sooner we get rid of them, the better.

January 30, 2023

Eff the WEF | The spiked podcast

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, Government — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

spiked
Published 27 Jan 2023

Tom Slater, Fraser Myers and Ella Whelan discuss the World Economic Forum, men in women’s prisons and Facebook’s unbanning of Donald Trump. Plus, Timandra Harkness explains the dangers of the UK’s Online Safety Bill.
(more…)

December 10, 2022

“Notes from the administration of a private social media company: ‘Weekly sync with FBI/DHS/DNI'”

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

Chris Bray on the tendency of people in a group to “go along to get along” with the group consensus:

Elon Musk has gone from letting us in on some very interesting things to holy shit somebody just dropped a bomb, with a little help from Matt Taibbi:

Especially:

Notes from the administration of a private social media company: “Weekly sync with FBI/DHS/DNI“. Re: election security, they say, in a discussion about killing a story that harmed one political party and helped the other political party.

This isn’t left and right, anymore — if you regard yourself as a liberal, a progressive, a Democrat, or any other related identity, surely you agree that the national security state shouldn’t be intervening in our political discourse, even though in this instance the person who was harmed was Donald Trump. Surely this is something we can all agree on, across lines of identity and party politics. Right?

“We blocked the NYP story”, of course, means that they blocked the story from the New York Post about Hunter Biden’s laptop, wide public awareness of which could have changed the outcome of the election. So the alphabet-soup agencies were shaping the public discourse around partisan politics during the run-up to an election, at least sometimes telling private social media companies what posts and accounts they wanted limited, silenced, and removed. And Twitter was glad to comply. (See Taibbi’s complete thread for more.) Federal agencies intervened in our politics, for what the available evidence strongly suggests to have been partisan ends.

I suspect the statement “could have changed the outcome of the election” is overstated. From everything I’ve read, the election results were “fortified” enough to survive any amount of unwelcome fact leaking through to the voters. I mean, really: who would want to live in a country where the unwashed voters might have a say in what went on with the government?

November 23, 2022

The potential mass-casualty event of Trump being re-instated on Twitter

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

You can almost hear Tom Knighton‘s eyes rolling here:

I’m not the biggest fan of Donald Trump. Most of his policies — the things he enacted quietly as he went — were pretty decent, including criminal justice reform and reducing federal regulations.

He just couldn’t stop tweeting.

I joked more than once that I wish someone would lock his phone so he couldn’t get on the app. However, I never once thought he should be banned from the platform.

But he was.

Now, he’s back.

Sort of.

His account isn’t banned anymore, though as of this writing, he doesn’t appear to be using it.

Yet this is, apparently, something just short of genocide if you listen to some journalists.

No, seriously.

I hoped this was a troll, but it’s not.

He apparently actually believes this is a thing, too, because it’s not the only time he claimed Trump being on Twitter will result in people’s deaths.

Again, there’s no word whether Trump will return to use the platform. As of this writing, his last tweet is from January 8th, 2021, so even if Trump’s tweets somehow could result in people’s death, it doesn’t seem like it matters since he’s not back on the platform.

But this unhinged individual has the old-school blue checkmark, the one given because an individual is “notable”.

Yet he also has his cover photo set to a screenshot of him being blocked by Trump. In other words, it looks like the boy is a might obsessed with the Orange One.

And this is the problem.

It’s not about Trump, but the media. This is a guy with mainstream media bylines aplenty. He’s got the old Twitter mark of approval, and he’s literally arguing that a former president having the ability to voice his thoughts on a social media platform will result in people’s deaths.

Does he think Elon Musk has weaponized tweeting and only given the launch codes to Trump?

The Babylon Bee (or as Instapundit says, “America’s Newspaper of Record”) is already on this hot new calamity:

October 12, 2022

The two traditions of the American political left

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

Chris Bray responds to a post by Leighton Woodhouse that declares that “left libertarianism” has won the battle for the soul of the American left:

I see two traditions on the American political left.

One is a tradition skeptical of authority, or aggressively hostile to it: Striking miners battling Coal and Iron Police, or Pinkertons, or Colorado sheriffs, or the National Guard; Wobblies fighting cops in the street; Great War-era socialists attacking the military draft, and going to prison for it; the Weatherman planting bombs in police and military offices. This tradition on the left views government as authority, a repressive servant of the status quo — “the executive committee of the bourgeoisie”. Leftists in this tradition say that of course government serves capitalism and corporate power, and of course the government isn’t on our side. Go back to the Coal and Iron Police to see how radical labor activists saw them: state-sanctioned police, with badges, on the private payroll of the industrialists. The young radical George Orwell, writing about his time fighting in Spain: “When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”

The other is a tradition centered on the supposedly inherent decency, wisdom, and fairness of government, a tradition that runs through the capital-p Progressive Era and Woodrow Wilson, to the New Deal, and onward into the Great Society. In this tradition, state power is benevolence itself, and points its kindness downward. Government interposes itself between the downtrodden worker and the power of the wealthy, ensuring the dignity of the poor. Tax the rich! In this tradition, government represents our best selves, our highest yearning for a better world. Why, just look at how much more equitable the progressive income tax made our social order, back when marginal tax rates were so much more fair at the top. Government serves, protects, nurtures: It’s the tool of the ordinary man, offering the noble guarantees of Social Security and Medicaid. Of course government is on our side, fellow downtrodden, and we need more of it.

Those two traditions don’t fit together, though the obvious way to square the circle is to say that a Bill Ayers opposes the power of the state when it opposes him, and embraces it if he thinks his side has come to control it. This would mean that there aren’t two ideological traditions — just two different instrumental postures. But no one who survived the Ludlow Massacre thought the government was a benevolent servant of the working man.

As Leighton Woodhouse notes, we have a good deal of what looks like anti-authority leftism in our cities, in the form of movements that call for the end of mass incarceration, the defunding of the police, and the transition to a social services model in response to homelessness and drug addiction. In this view, rising crime and growing homelessness are signs of urban leftists rejecting authority as a tool. Homelessness is not a crime, you fascists!

But I’ve written before about the incredible strangeness of progressive political columnists denouncing Donald Trump’s vicious authoritarianism, and then proudly pivoting to an expression of their approval of the warm and caring Justin Trudeau — who cracked down on incipient Trumpism in his country by boldly freezing the bank accounts of dangerous participants in the evil right-wing truck convoy. When government freezes the bank accounts of protesters, government is fighting against authoritarianism, obviously. More government power means less authoritarianism!

October 9, 2022

What do you call it when a military-funded organization intervenes in US domestic politics? It’s “anti-fascism“, obviously

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

Chris Bray continues digging into the activities of a Department of Defence-funded operation at the University of Maryland:

I wrote this morning about the disinformation expert Caroline Orr Bueno, a postdoctoral fellow at ARLIS — the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security at the University of Maryland (who is identified as Caroline Orr on her ARLIS profile, so that’s the name I’ve used for her). Orr aggressively and repeatedly argues against the American political right, framing conservative politics as fascist and describing Donald Trump as an authoritarian figure. She makes a political argument, and she does it often.

This is true not only of her social media posts, but also of her published work. She’s a pro-Antifa political partisan (more about this in a moment), specifically arguing against the right and against Donald Trump rather than only studying disinformation across the political spectrum.

Now: ARLIS, where Orr works, is primarily funded by the Department of Defense, and its “core sponsor” is the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. You can download the 2021 annual report from ARLIS here […] You can find a description of the laboratory’s $46 million in funding on page 26 of that report:

So a research center largely funded by the military, and specifically sponsored by and aligned with the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, is arguing against a likely candidate for President of the United States and his supporters, participating in the work of shaping a political narrative while drawing DOD funds. Orr’s national security work as a military intelligence-funded researcher is to make sure people know that Donald Trump is bad.

This scholar has military funding:

Military intelligence is paying for politics. Military-funded academic researchers have the same academic freedom every other academic researcher has, and Orr has a right to express political opinions. But she’s doing government-funded research into the academic topic of Trump is bad so don’t support him, and that’s a misuse of federal funding and military authority. I assign the failure to the institution, not to the person. (The irony of military-funded academic leftist politics is not hard to spot, but that sort of thing doesn’t seem to matter anymore.)

October 1, 2022

American Empire, question mark

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

An interview with Niall Ferguson in the Dartmouth Review by Lintaro Donovan revisits Ferguson’s 2005 book Colossus in light of what has happened during the nearly two decades since it was published:

TDR: In your 2005 book Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, you advance the thesis that the United States is an empire in denial and that such denial will be our undoing, both domestically and abroad. Does that thesis still hold in the world of 2022?

NF: I think it has withstood quite well the test of nearly 20 years. If you recall, the analysis was that the United States was trying essentially an imperial enterprise in Afghanistan and Iraq and that there were three deficits that were going to make it fail. There was the manpower deficit, because people really did not want to spend that much time in Afghanistan and Iraq – hence the short tours of duty. There was the fiscal deficit, which was already obviously a problem and has only gotten worse. And then there was the attention deficit. The prediction was that the US [BREAK] public would become disillusioned with these endeavors just as it became disillusioned with Vietnam. And if anything, the surprising thing is how long it took to get out of Afghanistan.

I wouldn’t have predicted it would be 2021. I expected it sooner than that. But I think that the overall framing of the US as an empire-in-denial works because it’s so deeply rooted in the way Americans think about themselves and the language that their leaders use. What was odd was that some neo-conservatives back then really were willing to say, “We’re an empire now”.

Of course, it kind of blew them up politically so that they’re now an irrelevant bunch of never-Trumpers. So I feel that book stood up remarkably well to the test of time. I’d stick by it.

TDR: What I’m hearing from your answer is that our denial is sort of endemic to what Americans are and that there were issues that were already present before the invasion of Iraq. Do you think that there’s any personality in American public life today who might be able to get us out of our denial and fix these issues that you’re talking about?

NF: No, because I think, if anything, the kind of aversion to empire has grown on both the left and the right. And so you have different versions of it.

Those wings, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the Trumpian wing of the Republican Party, are much stronger than they were then. I don’t think we are going to see any revival until the US suffers the kind of attack that it suffered at Pearl Harbor or 9/11.

Until there’s a punch landed, what will happen is that the US will try to exercise power through indirect means like sanctions or getting Ukrainians to fight Russians or arming the Taiwanese. And, in that sense, I think we’ve reverted to a Cold War playbook without calling it a cold war.

The problem is that we aren’t as far ahead [of China] economically and technologically as we were relative to the Soviet Union. If you’re doing a cold war with China, you have to reckon with quite a formidable antagonist, but that I think is where we are.

It’s amazing how far there is now a bipartisan consensus that China’s the problem. The continuities from the Trump to Biden Administration are very striking in that respect. I don’t see that changing until something bad happens, whether it’s a showdown over Taiwan that the US actually loses, or the collapse of Ukraine, which I guess is a conceivable if now unlikely scenario, or another terrorist attack, though I think that’s not especially likely these days.

The other thing to watch out for is the Middle East. Basically, as in the Cold War, you’ve got the potential for a crisis to happen. The problem for the US is that it’s quite overstretched. If there’s a crisis in Eastern Europe and a crisis in the Far East, say Taiwan, and one in the Middle East, then the US is going to be completely unable to respond to all of those.

It’s already in the position that it can’t give Stinger and Javelin missiles to the Taiwanese, because they’ve already been given to the Ukrainians and we can’t actually make that many new ones. It feels like we are doing Cold War but with quite a bit more overstretch than was true certainly in the 1980s.

August 26, 2022

QotD: The WARG rating – “Wins Above Replacement Goldstein”

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

No totalitarian regime has ever successfully solved what you might call the Emmanuel Goldstein Problem. They just can’t exist without some kind of existential threat to rally around; it’s their nature. In 1984, the Party simply created Goldstein out of whole cloth, but they seemed to believe this was just another temporary expedient — they were counting on technology to do all the heavy lifting of mass mind control, so they wouldn’t have to resort to things like Goldstein and MiniTrue.

Obviously that ain’t gonna work in Clown World, Cthulhuvious and Sasqueetchia being notso hotso on the STEM. They’ll always need a Goldstein, then, and that’s a real problem, because whatever else Bad Orange Man is, he’s also pushing 80 years old. How long would he have, even in a sane world? 10 more years, tops? And the candidates for Replacement BOM are generally a sorry lot … but even if they weren’t, they’re about to get purged, too. The WARG is already going negative …

For overseas readers (and those not conversant with “Moneyball”: Baseball has these weird “sabermetric” stats that purport to compare players from different teams and eras in terms of absolute value. It’s acronymed (it’s a word) WAR, Wins Above Replacement; “replacement” being an absolutely average player. Like all baseball “sabermetrics” it quickly gets ridiculous, but see here. According to this guy, then, Babe Ruth has a per-season WAR of 10.48 in right field. That means Babe Ruth, himself, personally, alone, was worth 10 and a half wins above your “average” player. If Ruth goes down for the season in a tragic Spring Training beer mishap, you can go ahead and take 10 wins off the Yankees’ record that season (assuming they replace the Bambino with some scrub just off the bus, which back then is what would’ve happened).

WARG, then, is Wins Above Replacement Goldstein. I’d say that Orange Man set the bar for Goldsteins, but that’s not statistically useful, since Trump Derangement Syndrome is so far the apex of liberal lunacy. To make statistical comparisons useful — to find a “replacement Goldstein,” as it were — we have to have someone the Left considered an existential enemy at the time, but who didn’t really do much in the grand scheme of things. So I nominate George W. Bush. If Bush is the “Replacement Goldstein,” then his WARG is a nice round zero. Trump would have a Babe Ruth-ian WARG.

This gives us a convenient measurement for looking at various Republicans, both current and historical. Richard Nixon would have a pretty high WARG — he drove them even more nuts than W. did — and Ronnie Raygun would be up there, too. Gerald Ford would have a slightly negative WARG, since not even the New York Times could pretend Gerald fucking Ford was a threat to the Progressive takeover. Your steeply negative WARGs would be those “Republicans” actively working with the opposition, like Bitch McConnell.

I’d argue that Ron DeSantis and maybe Greg Abbott still have positive WARGs … for now. But they’re going to get gulaged here in pretty short order. Who’s the next guy on the bench? Your Marjorie Taylor Greenes and whatnot drive certain segments of the Left insane, but she’s just too ludicrous to have a positive WARG. And then things start getting really pathetic …

The Law of Diminishing Returns makes the WARG problem even more acute. Freakout fatigue is a real thing. The Media will give it the old college try, of course, but you really just can’t convince people that a goof like Greene is some kind of existential threat to Our Democracy. Her WARG goes negative every time she opens her mouth.

Severian, “Salon Roundup”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-20.

August 25, 2022

Liz Cheney “got smashed worse than a wine aunt who just lost a national championship cat show”

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

Theophilus Chilton indulges in a bit of gloating over Liz Cheney’s Republican primary loss to a Trump-supported challenger:

Liz Cheney with Robert Aderholt and former Vice President Dick Cheney, 14 November, 2018.
Photo from the office of Robert Aderholt via Wikimedia Commons.

The biggest news in domestic American politics in the past week was the absolutely shattering upset of Liz Cheney by Trump-backed challenger Harriet Hageman in Wyoming’s Republican primary for its at-large House seat. I mean, she got smashed worse than a wine aunt who just lost a national championship cat show. In a race that should have been hers for the taking, she was instead defeated by 37 points in one of the worst primary losses suffered by a sitting politician in recent history. If I sound like I’m vicariously gloating, it’s because I am.

Yet, if you were to listen to what the world of Never Trump is saying, you’d think that rather than an ignoble defeat caused by poor political decision-making, Cheney’s self-immolation was a glorious act of martyrdom for the cause of our sacred norms. Seriously, their cope for her loss is that she was too brave and too principled to do anything as tawdry as give the actual voters what they want. Cheney and the rest of Never Trump have seemed kind of bitter, like they’re angry at the voters for not getting with the program. At the same time, the current buzz involves Never Trump trying to gin up enthusiasm for a Cheney 2024 presidential run.

So yeah, there are a ton of Never Trumpers out there running with the line that Liz Cheney will be a serious contender to challenge Trump in the 2024 GOP primaries. “Now,” you might be thinking to yourself, “what on earth makes them think that she has a snowball’s chance in the great perdition of breaking even the low single digits?” And you would be correct. There is, in fact, zero chance that “she’s gonna get him next time!” Yet, why are a bunch of people who are supposedly savvy politicos and insiders trotting out such obvious nonsense?

What’s going on here is that these people are being put through a humiliation ritual, a peculiar kind of loyalty test that the Regime will often impose on its enemies, both potential and actual. These savvy politicos don’t really believe that Liz Cheney has any chance at all — but they have to say so if they want to remain in the good graces of the powers that be. Indeed, once you start paying attention to modern politics and culture, it’s amazing to see just how much of what goes on is basically this kind of loyalty test. Are you a Goodthinker who goes along with the sociocultural programming or are you a Badthinker who questions or rejects elements of the Regime’s playbook?

A few years ago, I wrote about the distinction between narratives and reality. There is a great gulf between what the Left says it believes and what actually is. What you see on the news and on social media has no bearing on reality or vice versa. But the thing to keep in mind is that none of this matters to the Left. They don’t actually want to convince or be convinced. The public face of their ideology and their policy decisions most often are not determined by some Rockwellesque ideal of public debate, but by social force.

August 14, 2022

QotD: The 2016 US election was a rejection of the media

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

Here’s a surprising report: President Trump’s support is actually rising after his attack on “The Squad”.

The rise in support isn’t the surprising part. The surprising part is that the Media still find this surprising.

Not to toot my own horn too much here, but I’ve been writing about this since 2015 … “Make America Great Again” was the Trump campaign’s official slogan, but unofficially — and much, much more effectively — it was: “Fuck the Media”. The 2016 election is known far and wide as “The Great Fuck You”, but somehow, some way, almost everyone still fails to grasp that it wasn’t the Democrats who got told to fuck off. It wasn’t even the “Progressives”. It was The Media. The Great Fuck You was aimed entirely at the Media.

Severian, “Which Hand Holds the Whip?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-17.

August 13, 2022

Tired – Orange Man Bad. Inspired – Orange Man Radioactive!

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

Jim Treacher isn’t a Trump fan, didn’t vote for him, and even he is being coerced into very grudging support of the man, thanks to the incredibly ham-handed things the US federal government has been doing:

Our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters are now scolding us for referring to the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago as a raid. We’re not supposed to call it a raid. Which means, of course, it was definitely a raid.

We still don’t know what they were looking for during this raid. Or do we?

Oh.

Wait.

What?

Nuclear documents? What, like launch codes? Schematics? Locations? What are we talking about here?

What did they think the guy was going to do with this stuff? Is any of it even current? Don’t they change the launch codes every day? And nobody missed these documents for 18 months? What’s the danger here?

Call me a RINO cuck turncoat all you want, but I don’t trust the government, no matter who’s running it. I had to learn that the hard way when the State Department crippled me for life and then lied their asses off about it. That’s what bureaucracies do. They protect themselves at all costs, and the truth is the first thing to go by the wayside.

Sounds like that’s what’s happening here. They really screwed up this time, and now they’re panicking.

It’s been seven years since You-Know-Who rode down that escalator and threw his hat into the ring, and the Democrats have learned absolutely nothing. The more they try to hurt this guy, the more they end up helping him. Now they’re galvanizing the right behind him. Even traitors like me, who think 1/6 was bad and probably wanted Hillary to win, are incredulous that they’re abusing their power like this.

It’s already backfiring, but at least the libs can still air out their bloodthirsty fantasies:

They really do believe that’s what he did. They really do believe that’s what will happen to him. Or at least they’re willing to pander to their insane followers on social media.

July 3, 2022

QotD: The US media when Donald Trump “happened”

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

[The 2008 election was] where the split between Party and Media really became obvious — the Party desperately wanted the only “adult” (by 21st century Democratic Party standards) in the room to be the nominee, but The Media wouldn’t hear of it. It seemed as though the struggle for the whip hand was finally over …

But then Donald Trump happened, as my students would’ve written. Though it’s only a few years in the past, we’ve already forgotten just how much The Media loved Bernie Sanders when the Republican nomination was still in doubt. Trump, of course, made The Media lose their shit so egregiously that what they did to W. looked like the happy ending to an Oriental massage, but virtually nobody was cheerleading for Hillary qua Hillary. It took the specter of The Donald as president to get them all on the same page.

Which brings us to now. The Democratic Party can read a poli-sci textbook. They know how difficult it is to beat an incumbent president in a good economy. Hell, it’s almost impossible to beat an incumbent president in a bad economy — see 2004 and 2012. It takes a major systemic shock to turf out an incumbent in the modern era — a catastrophe on the magnitude of a serious third party challenge (Ross Perot in ’92), or the incumbent being Jimmy Carter. The poli-sci textbooks say that the Dems’ only hope is to run the closest thing to the Antimatter Donald Trump they can find. That is to say: the blandest, SWPL-iest Goodwhite on their roster.

Alas for them, The Media will be having none of that. Trump somehow triggers them even more than he did in 2016 — don’t ask me how; it violates several important laws of thermodynamics — so they’re going all-in on goofballs like AOC and her “Squad.” The Media loves “the Squad,” and since The Media have convinced themselves that theirs is the whip hand, they’re ordering us to love “the Squad” too. To which Trump replies with a version of “lol get fucked,” and since “you’re free to leave this country if you hate it so much” seems forehead-slappingly obvious to anyone without a journalism degree, Trump’s poll numbers rise. Which prompts another stern lecture from The Media, which receives another “lol get fucked,” and around and around and around we go …

But here’s the thing: The battle for the whip is a battle royale. There are more than just two combatants. The Party still thinks it’s in charge. The Media, with 2008, 2012, and 2016 in its pocket, think they’re in charge. Nobody bothered to ask “the Squad,” though, and that’s the truly terrifying thing: “The Squad” thinks they’re in charge, and they might actually be right.

We’ve already got Congress voting to condemn Trump’s tweets. Set aside how brain-bogglingly infantile that is — and how petty and retarded it appears to the American public. Consider just how badly Nancy Pelosi et al, aka The Party, had to screw up to find themselves in this situation.

Severian, “Which Hand Holds the Whip?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-17.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress