Quotulatiousness

May 1, 2023

The Presidential re-match nobody wants

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

At Oxford Sour, Christopher Gage contemplates the potential re-match of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the 2024 election … and shudders:

Perhaps for good reason, any American with their eyes on the White House must be at least 35 years of age when assuming office. Mercifully, this rule prevents anyone with a TikTok account from being taken too seriously.

Apparently, Americans apply this rule to its very extreme.

This week, President Joe Biden announced his bid for re-election, promising in a video announcement to “finish the job”. Quite what job he refers to is anyone’s guess. Though in better shape than Great Britain (a bar so low it’s a carpet) America is not having the best of days, weeks, months, years, decades, or twenty-first centuries.

Biden wasted no time. His sales pitch? He’s not Donald Trump. Evidently, the Biden team assumes Trump will steamroller over Ron DeSantis en route to the Republican party nomination. It’s 2020 again.

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but every time I see “2020” written down, or the mere words “twenty-twenty” seep into my eardrums, my heart flutters, my brain jangles, and a panic attack seizes control of my body with all the charm and consideration of a central African coup d’état.

Americans seem to agree. Seventy percent of Americans don’t think the 80-year-old Biden should run for re-election. Even 51 percent of Democrats nod their heads. Meanwhile, sixty percent, including one-third of Republicans say Trump, 76, should not run for president.

President Biden is not the most spring of chickens. Half of those who think he should sit this one out say Biden’s age is a “major” reason behind their thinking.

To put it mildly, this decade hasn’t quite gone the way of the “Roaring Twenties”. In 2019, I told anyone with ears that this decade would be the decade of decades. Reader, the jury is out. By “out” I don’t mean they’re busy making their considerations. By “out” I mean the jury is riddled with hollow-point bullets.

Perhaps that’s why a 38 percent plurality told pollsters they felt “exhausted” over the very idea of a Biden versus Trump rematch. Twenty-nine percent said they felt “fear” whilst just under a quarter felt both “sadness and fear”.

Which brings me to vice president Kamala Harris. This week, we learned of Biden’s intention to rehabilitate Harris’ image. Harris hasn’t had the most illustrious of tenures. Why? Well, let’s just say VP Harris is suited to other modes of employment. Ideally, Harris would find her feet in jobs which don’t require speaking in coherent, plain sentences and jobs which place a premium upon one’s ability to laugh at the most inappropriate of times. Reader, I’m about as socially attuned as a headbutt. Unlike Harris, I’m not literally one stopped heart away from the presidency.

It cannot be that a country of 330 million people, one which correctly claims to be the greatest country on earth, must limit itself to re-running the worst year in recent history.

And yet, there’s quite some time to go before the serious business of campaigning kicks into gear. If this horrendous decade has taught me anything, it’s that conventional wisdom isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

April 29, 2023

Bad advice for Robert Kennedy Jr.

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

C.J. Hopkins proffers advice to the declared candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination:

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaking in Urbana, Illinois on October 14, 2007.
Photo by Daniel Schwen via Wikimedia Commons.

Robert Kennedy, Jr. is running for president. I could not possibly be more excited. So, I’m going to give Bobby some unsolicited advice, which, if he knows what’s good for him, he will not take.

I feel OK about doing this because, even if Bobby, in the wee hours of the night, when the mind is vulnerable to dangerous ideas, were to seriously consider taking my advice, I am sure he has people — i.e., PR people, campaign strategists, pollsters, and so on — that would not hesitate to take him aside and disabuse him of any inclination to do that.

OK, before I give Bobby this terrible advice, I have to do the “full disclosure” thing. I’m a pretty big fan of RFK, Jr. I don’t generally get involved in electoral politics, but, if I were a Democrat, I would definitely vote for him. Also, he was kind enough to blurb my book (which isn’t going to make his PR people happy) and invite me onto his podcast, RFK, Jr. The Defender, to talk about “New Normal” totalitarianism. So, I am fairly biased in favor of Bobby Kennedy. I think he is an admirable, honorable human being. I would love to see him in the Oval Office.

That isn’t going to happen, of course. The global-capitalist ruling classes are never going to let him near the Oval Office. They learned their lesson back in 2016. There are not going to be any more unauthorized presidents. The folks at GloboCap are done playing grab-ass, and they want us to know that they are done playing grab-ass. That’s what the last six years have been about.

As I put it in a column in January, 2021 …

    … This, basically, is what we’ve just experienced. The global capitalist ruling classes have just reminded us who is really in charge, who the US military answers to, and how quickly they can strip away the facade of democracy and the rule of law. They have reminded us of this for the last ten months, by putting us under house arrest, beating and arresting us for not following orders, for not wearing masks, for taking walks without permission, for having the audacity to protest their decrees, for challenging their official propaganda, about the virus, the election results, etc. They are reminding us currently by censoring dissent, and deplatforming anyone they deem a threat to their official narratives and ideology … GloboCap is teaching us a lesson. I don’t know how much clearer they could make it. They just installed a new puppet president, who can’t even simulate mental acuity, in a locked-down, military-guarded ceremony which no one was allowed to attend, except a few members of the ruling classes. They got some epigone of Albert Speer to convert the Mall (where the public normally gathers) into a “field of flags” symbolizing “unity”. They even did the Nazi “Lichtdom” thing. To hammer the point home, they got Lady Gaga to dress up as a Hunger Games character with a “Mockingjay” brooch and sing the National Anthem. They broadcast this spectacle to the entire world.

Does that sound like the behavior of an unaccountable, supranational power apparatus that is prepared to stand by and let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., or Donald Trump, or any other unauthorized person, become the next president of the United States?

So, here’s my bad advice for Bobby.

Fuck them. They’re not going to let you win, anyway. They are going to smear you, slime you, demonize you, distort every other thing you say, and just generally lie about who you are and what you believe in and what you stand for. They are going to paint you as a bull-goose-loony, formerly smack-addled, conspiracy-theorizing, anti-vax fanatic no matter what you do. If you tone down your act and try to “heal the divide” and “end the division,” they are going to have you for lunch, and then sit around picking their teeth with your bones. You know, and I know, and the American people know, that the things you say you want to do as president — which I know you sincerely want to do as president and are crazy enough to actually try to do, i.e., “to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country” — are things … well, as Michael Corleone once put it, that they would “use all their power to keep from happening”.

So, fuck it, and fuck them. Tell the truth.

Not the ready-for-prime-time truth. Not the toned-down-for-mainstream-consumption truth. The truth. The ugly, unvarnished truth. The scary, crazy-sounding truth. The angry, divisive, uncensored truth.

Yes, there is a “divide”. A great divide. A chasm. A schism. A gulf. An abyss. A gaping, yawning, unbridgeable fissure. A Grand Canyon-sized fault in the foundation of society. A rupture in the very fabric of reality.

H/T to Robert Swanson for the link.

Of course, not everyone is as fond of RFK, Jr. — and for good reason, as Matt Welch points out:

Ever since the 69-year-old conspiratorial activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination last week, a curious new category has appeared among the commentariat—libertarians and/or right-of-center journalists expressing strange new respect for a Hugo Chavez–admiring scion of the Establishment who has serially fantasized about throwing his political opponents in jail.

“I’m quite certain that I’ve never heard a more erudite speech in any political context,” enthused Brownstone Institute President Jeffrey Tucker after attending Kennedy’s announcement rally. “As [a] Democrat he must be bad on all sorts of things,” tweeted Antiwar.com’s Scott Horton, “But not the ones that matter the most.” The Libertarian Party of Colorado tweeted (and then deleted) “Bravo and godspeed hero.” Tablet, a publication not usually known for boosting overheated analogies to murderous 20th-century totalitarians, gave RFK Jr. an 18,000-word valentine with such soft-toss “questions” about his previous controversial statements (like terming the impact from childhood vaccines “a holocaust”) as: “You activated an automated outrage machine that was looking for a gotcha.”

The newly Kennedy-curious are intrigued by the rabble-rouser’s potential to disrupt an otherwise rubber-stamped Democratic primary, sure, but also by him having the right enemies — the media, the military-industrial complex, and, most of all, a political class that backed COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates.

“Just as Donald Trump … retrieved political themes from the deep past of the Republican Party,” National Review‘s Michael Brendan Dougherty mused, “so it must be that a Democrat should come along and try to revive left-leaning skepticism of government and corporate power, to denounce crony capitalism, censorship, and the CIA to boot.”

Recasting RFK Jr. as a foe of censorship and potential tamer of government requires ignoring what he has been and imagining things he’ll never be. Among a lifetime of eyebrow-raising public activities, Bobby Kennedy’s son has repeatedly egged on government to punish those who disagree with his idiosyncratic understandings of science.

[…]

Yet in 2023, Kennedy can plausibly claim (to those with short memories) the mantle of anti-censorship, for having been on the receiving end of Big Social Media’s often government-pressured pandemic speech-policing. He was banned from Instagram in February 2021 “for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines”, and his anti-vaccine-mandate nonprofit Children’s Health Defense was similarly booted by both Instagram and Facebook in August 2022. He published a book last year called A Letter to Liberals: Censorship and COVID: An Attack on Science and American Ideals. As Tablet‘s David Samuels wrote, in one of that piece’s many eye-popping passages, “At this point, the fact that Robert F. Kennedy is the country’s leading ‘conspiracy theorist’ alone qualifies him to be president.”

So is the enemy of your enemy your friend? Depends on your tolerance for unlikely conspiracy theories, and your comfort level in Kennedy’s proposed punishments for alleged perpetrators. Where Jeffrey Tucker sees an orator with a “command of facts, history, and issues,” motivated both by “truth-telling in an age of nonstop lies” and a genuine urge to “heal” the political divide, I see someone whose presentation of facts — including grave accusations of criminality — have been repeatedly and persuasively found lacking.

April 14, 2023

From “cash for access” it’s a very short step to “cash for influence”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Campbell shut down his blog some time ago — unfortunately for those of us interested in Canadian military affairs — but he’s still active on Twitter. Here he responds to a tweet from Sam Cooper of Global News:

Andrew Coyne highlights some of the boggling details in this thread:

April 12, 2023

Omnipolitization, the scourge of the western world

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

Theophilus Chilton, reposting from 2018 (!), explains why the inexorable spread of government everywhere in the west has led us to a situation where every election is “the most important election in history”, and every government decision can infringe upon or even ruin the lives of millions of people as mere side-effect:

The western front of the United States Capitol. The Neoclassical style building is located in Washington, D.C., on top of Capitol Hill at the east end of the National Mall. The Capitol was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Politics in the United States have become an all-encompassing nightmare from which the average American cannot hope to escape. As American democracy (you know, the “freedom” form of government) expands the reach of the managerial state into every area of modern life, the stakes involved in the political process have mushroomed, with control over the lives of hundreds of millions of people hanging in the balance. It’s little surprise that each election season stretches out over a year, and (as Florida and Georgia recently showed us) doesn’t end once the voting is “officially” over.

It’s reached the point where literally everything is involved in some way with politics. Your choice of restaurant now signals your political inclinations, and thus who will harass you while eating there. Businesses themselves feel compelled to virtue signal, usually in a leftward direction, lest they bring upon themselves threats of boycott, bad publicity, or worse. It has escalated to the point where being the public face of the “wrong” side earns you harassment and menace to your physical health, as Tucker Carlson and several Republican members of Congress have found out. Expressing the “wrong” opinions in the workplace or online can get you reprimanded or fired.

How did we reach that point?

It hearkens back to something I wrote about earlier concerning the tyranny of the technical society. In our particular case, we are seeing a situation playing out in real time whereby “political techniques” first pioneered by Lenin in establishing and maintaining Soviet control over Russia are being used to bring every facet of modern life into the political realm. Every action and attitude has a political ramification which can affect your employment, your access to social amenities, and even (eventually) your freedom from the gulag.

This omnipolitisation leads inevitably into a dichotomy between formal and informal power in the US governing system. Formal power is exactly as it sounds – the “constitutional” (written or otherwise) distribution of decision and policy-making authority in a government, i.e. which entity or body gets to legally do what. This usually involves theoretical limits on the roles or extent of governing authority, which sets it in opposition to the principle of omnipolitics. Conversely, informal power is also exactly as it sounds – it is power wielded extra-constitutionally (yet in a very real sense) by those who “shouldn’t” be exercising it, but nevertheless are.

February 28, 2023

QotD: Politicians respond to different economic incentives than the rest of us

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Politicians in particular have a problem – in good times, people vote for them, and in tough times … not so much.

The temptation is to delay the tough times until your successor can carry the can.

Poor old Keynes inadvertently gave politicians the answer they were looking for – the idea that during the downturn, the government should spend money into the economy to keep it going along nicely. Making sure that those lifeguards sacked from the Skegness lido can swiftly get jobs working at a government Skegness lido prevents them claiming the dole, and keeps them in the economy earning and spending until the economy washes out all the malinvestment and starts growing again. At which point the government Skegness lido closes and the lifeguards go to work at a lido somewhere where the biting Easterly wind doesn’t sandblast your skin off. The government has bridged the gap.

There’s one problem.

The government has no money of its own, so where will it get the money for their lido?

Well, Keynes said it should run a surplus during the good times and stash that surplus money away so it can be used during the downturn – a national rainy-day fund, if you will.

But guess what? Politicians don’t run surpluses.

Why would they? Every penny spent making lives better for voters today makes it more likely they will vote for you. And every penny saved against a rainy day makes it possible for your rivals to win votes tomorrow, by doing the same once they are in power.

So politicians don’t ever HAVE a rainy day fund. But that doesn’t stop them wanting to bridge the gap.

So they borrow the money.

And now what they are doing is not Keynesian, or even neo-Keynesian, but pseudo-Keynesian

By bridging the current gap with borrowed money, they simply make sure that the next gap will be costlier to bridge. Because the interest on the borrowing means that the gap will be wider.

But that’s not even the biggest problem – the biggest problem is that the gap is intrinsically important. We NEED it, to give us pause.

Whereas bridging it enables us to carry on being silly and prevents the misallocations from being flushed out – a lido remains operating in Skegness despite having no customers, and the lifeguards continue to work. Their lifesaving skills (which should be fruitfully employed elsewhere) stagnate at a lido with no punters. Their customer service skills deteriorate as the customers disappear, and what they learn instead is how to sit in a chair and stare into space. Their skills are degrading. Hysteresis, technically.

And so by delaying the collapse of the Skegness lido in pursuit of benign conditions for the voters, the government destroys the skills of our workforce.

Sowell was right – the problems we battle today were caused by the government’s interventions yesterday.

Surely using government to solve our problems is like a man quenching his thirst with seawater?

Alex Noble, “Drinking Brine”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-06-14.

February 20, 2023

“There is no way Justin Trudeau won any of the last three elections”

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

Elizabeth Nickson on recent rather alarming confirmation of many things told by various “conspiracy theorists” and purveyors of “misinformation”:

Cracks are beginning to appear in the massive election fraud strategy prosecuted against western democracies. Berlin last week reversed its city election because it had been stolen by the left, and Berliner-Zeitung revealed that a team of reporters from The Marker, Haaretz and Radio France had gone undercover for six months as clients of a company that did nothing but election theft. That company, Jorge, had “intervened in 33 national election campaigns and votes. In 27 cases, it is said to have influenced the elections in favor of its clients. In order to control the opinion on the Internet, the secret company controls over 30,000 credible fake accounts on social media platforms”.

And in Canuckistan this morning, in the organ of the bien-pensant liberal establishment, there was this nugget.

There is no way Justin Trudeau won any of the last three elections. And, honey, this little story from Canada’s most prestigious newspaper is just the beginning.

But first, a story of my own …

When I turned right I had been hired to write an op-ed column for the above Globe and Mail, and what unfurled from my fingers was pure conservatism. I’d hold up my fingers and think, What the hell? Where did that come from? But I continued, and as I did, family and friends sheered away until, except for my mother, I was left virtually friendless.

I had moved back to Canada, you see, and we are 100% captured by the left. There are a handful of conservative writers in the country, but they are soft and weak and they prevaricate because otherwise they would not eat. Luckily I had spent most of my adult life out of the country, had a broader pool to draw from, and given my new thinking, mirable dictu for every friend I lost, I made five new ones. And they were smarter, more responsible, more interesting people. I missed the clothes, restaurants and parties for a while, then I gave up on those too. Essentially, sickening. Finally corrupting.

But it continues, since we live in a hard-left community. We are isolated. Even Jamie, because he lives with me, has lost friends and family. We have his sons, his ex-wife, one of my brothers. The rest are just cold, pitiless. Cruel.

This has happened to hundreds of thousands of people. It’s called “bad-jacketing” and is part of the Fifth Generation Warfare launched against malcontents large and small (like me) up and down the social ladder. Millions. Tens of millions. The competent are targeted, isolated and bad jacketed. It is meant to drive the competent out of the culture. Why is everything breaking? Why is the economy failing? Everyone left in the system is incompetent and vicious with it. It’s why Soviet Russia failed, why the Eastern Bloc collapsed, it is why China went for a capitalist hybrid. Everywhere socialism is tried it destroys the competent and then destroys everything else.

The left is implacable and they punish. They hurt you until you give up. They will break anything you have. Thinking about helping a young neighbor last month, which would require a week or more of brutal work, I finally thought: I have not helped or befriended one single socialist — and she was an avowed socialist — who hasn’t eventually stabbed me in the back. Not one.

When I was driven out of the profession, I spent ten years studying. Was I right? Was I wrong? I should have signed up for a remote doctoral program, because I worked. I study, therefore I am. I studied therefore I was, should be written on my cremation plaque in the family plot. Not that they’ll let me in.

We are all intimidated by that level of hate and exclusion. All of us, politicians, editors, bureaucrats, charities, all of us are terrified of being taken down in our personal lives. Bad-jacketed, rejected by those you love deeply. I know how that feels and I bet you do too.

December 19, 2022

“[T]he major promoter of the ‘Canada is broken’ thesis over the past few years has been … Justin Trudeau”

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

In the free-to-cheapskates exerpt from this week’s Dispatch from The Line, they set up the possible lines of attack for the next federal election:

What was more interesting to us this week were the comments made by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to thousands of Liberals at a large in-person Christmas party. As one does at any good Christmas party, the PM took the chance to, uh, savage his rivals. To wit: “Canada is not broken … Mr. Poilievre might choose to undermine our democracy by amplifying conspiracy theories. He might decide to run away from journalists when they ask him tough questions. That’s how he brands himself. That’s his choice. But, when he says that Canada is broken, that’s where we draw the line.” (Full video of the speech is available via CTV News).

The PM was responding, of course, to a recent line of attack favoured by the Conservatives: that Canada is broken, and we need the Conservatives to fix it.

There are three comments we’ll make in response to this.

The first is strictly an analysis: Trudeau is staking out some interesting rhetorical ground. We aren’t sure this will be the ground on which the next campaign is fought over — God only knows what’ll happen between now and whenever we are next headed to the polls. But if this is the subject of our next “ballot question”, well, that’s just fascinating. “Sunny Ways” vs. “Everything Is Broken and It’s Your Fault.”

How fun! Both men would be able to make an honest pitch for their case. As we’ve written before, the Liberals seem exhausted and spent. They’ve accumulated baggage since their first smiley-faced win back in 2015, and the country has been thoroughly battered by events since then. That suggests that Poilievre, who is at his best when on the attack, could mop the floor with Trudeau.

That said, we don’t take that outcome as a given. First, Trudeau is a damned good politician, better than the Conservatives still give him credit for, and though we are starting to wonder if Trudeau is past the point of no return, we will never count him out. We also think that if the Conservatives make “Things are terrible” the centrepiece of their next campaign, may find that Canadians recoil. Canadian pride is a fragile, brittle thing, and while many of us may feel like things are bad, it’s not clear to us that Poilievre saying so won’t rub a lot of voters the wrong way.

But we honestly don’t know. That’s why it’s fascinating.

The second point is a bit of a reminder: It is worth noting that the major promoter of the “Canada is broken” thesis over the past few years has been … Justin Trudeau. We don’t think we — your Line editors, the media, Canadians in general — should let him take such casual re-occupation of the “Sunny Ways” position, since he’s spent the last five years absolutely dumping on Canada, its history (genocide), its symbols (the flag), and its institutions (the military, amongst others). No one has done more to proclaim Canada broken than Justin Trudeau. Is he now claiming that he’s fixed all the problems he’s spent the last half decade making political hay over?

We mean … the guy won’t even fix his house.

The third point is our own view: of course Canada is broken. And Trudeau has done nothing to fix it.

Now, we have to define our terms here. “Broken” isn’t “destroyed”. We don’t think we’re descending into some kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland. It remains undeniably true that Canada is, in global terms, a nice place to live. Safe. Lots of food. No one is firing missiles at us. Sweet! But, like, gosh, folks. Look around. If the PM really wants to assert that Canada isn’t broken, we’ll agree insofar as it’s not so broken that the average person fears starvation and violent death. Sure. But that average person also probably can’t get a passport, or a family doctor, or timely care in an emergency room, or a house in a big city where the jobs are clustering, or Tylenol for their kids.

QotD: When reality fails to follow the model, ditch reality

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

Alexander wept, for he saw there were no more worlds to conquer …

I get that, man. On some fundamental level. But that makes me a generally unhappy guy. So it is, so it has always been.

For whatever reason, the Leftist is able to externalize that. If there are no more worlds to conquer, well, that’s the world’s fault. I remember hanging out with some of the Political Science goofs at Flyover State. For whatever reason, they rank pretty high for Poli Sci — their department developed some measure of whatzit to better analyze the doodad, you know how it goes, the Karl Roves and James Carvilles of the world all use it.

Anyway, this was 2004, when George W. Bush won his reelection campaign against Kerry. Exactly zero of the Flyover State Poli Sci goofs predicted that. They were all certain that Kerry was cruising to victory. When I pointed out that this seems to be a BIG flaw in their precious model — the election wasn’t even particularly close — their response was instructive: It wasn’t the model’s fault. Rather, it’s that the American public chose to throw a temper tantrum.

That’s seriously what they went with. There’s the actual, observed behavior of 70 million people; and there’s your model; and when the one contradicts the other, the only possible explanation is: All those people are idiots.

(One of those grad students I was talking to ended up doing something “unofficial” yet fairly important for the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016; if I’d known that, I could’ve called it for Trump at the very start of election and made a fortune on prop bets).

It’s probably genetic for them, too. Which is either hopeful or depressing, depending, but I think it answers the question: Why does society end up being ruled by Very Clever Boys? They just can’t do anything else. They can’t internalize; they have game the system. Have to. A society that wants to survive must find a system for them to game, somewhere far isolated from the real affairs of people.

Severian, “Me vs. The World”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-14.

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 10, 2022

The headscratcher that was the American midterms outcome

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 6, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 11, 2022

Quebec politics explained (in Quebec!)

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

J.J. McCullough
Published 9 Oct 2022

Politics in Canada’s French province. Thanks to Bespoke Post for sponsoring this video! New subscribers get 20% off their first box — go to https://www.bespokepost.com/jj20 and enter code JJ20 at checkout.

My election watching buddy Sisyphus55: https://www.youtube.com/c/Sisyphus55
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October 5, 2022

“The centre ground on domestic policy and public services is Corbynism with a union flag on it and the word ‘British'”

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

Ed West on the decidedly conservative cast of many British voters’ core beliefs:

Jeremy Corbyn, then-Leader of the Labour Party speaking at a Rally in Hayfield, Peak District, UK on 25th July 2018 in support of Ruth George MP.
Photo by Sophie Brown via Wikimedia Commons.

It wasn’t until I was a fairly grown up that I learned just how conservative many Labour voters were. My parents’ Labour-supporting friends had mostly belonged to what Ken Livingstone called ‘the party of the metropolitan pervert’, London types who worked in creative industries or the public sector and held ultra-liberal views (at least for the 90s). But out there in the real world there were all these Labour supporters who were even more Right-wing than my dad, whether on crime, immigration, Europe, sexual relations or pretty much any social issue. They just wanted, in Blackadder’s words, a few less fat bastards eating all the pie.

That is pretty much where the public are now. As Aaron Bastani put it: “The centre ground on domestic policy and public services is Corbynism with a union flag on it and the word ‘British'”.

Although Jeremy Corbyn lost decisively in 2019, many have forgotten the political lesson of the Corbyn era — that it wasn’t his economic policies that put people off, but his lack of patriotism. He came from that long line of Quaker-Unitarian radicals who have always been seen as too sympathetic to Britain’s enemies, whether it was Robespierre, Napoleon, the USSR, Irish republicans or Islamic radicals.

Corbynomics is certainly more popular than what the current Tory Party is offering, especially that served up in the recent mini-budget, after which it could be said that things are developing not necessarily to the Government’s advantage.

I don’t have strong opinions on the aborted 45% tax cut; it didn’t seem very wise, or fair, but I’m not sure how drastic it was; Robert Colvile in The Sunday Times suggests that the proposal was not as bold as people make out. Yet it seems to be hugely unpopular, except with the Institute for Economic Affairs.

But I’m not convinced that makes it bad.

The IEA’s Kristian Niemietz has repeatedly pointed out that free-market economics is generally quite unpopular, and during the depths of the Brexit dispute he wrote a piece opposing what he called “Bregalitarianism”:

    The Bregalitarian loves to wallow in faux-indignation every time an opponent – which can be a Remainer, but it can also just be a more cautious, less enthusiastic Brexiteer – mentions the possibility that not everyone who cast a vote on 23 June 2016 was fully aware of all the possible ramifications. “How DARE you suggest that 17.4 million voters are stupid!”, cries the Bregalitarian. “How DARE you be so patronising and insulting!”

    I find this Bregalitarian rhetoric deeply disingenuous – and never more so than when free-marketeers engage in it … Here’s a little home truth: if you are a free-marketeer in Britain in 2018, you are part of a small and unpopular minority. The vast majority of the British public disagree with you on virtually everything. There is majority support for a (re-) nationalisation of energy companies, the railways, water and bus companies. There is majority support for rent controls and various price controls.

    As a free-marketeer, you probably want, if not fully privatised, then at least mixed systems of healthcare and education, with much greater private sector involvement. If so, you are almost alone in Britain with that view. There is also majority support for a lot more government regulation, a lot more government interference with private business decisions, higher taxes and a larger state.

Indeed, public opinion on economic issues is quite eye-watering: a full 28 per cent of British adults want banks to be run by the state, and 30 per cent even want internet providers nationalised. A quarter want travel agents nationalised.

September 22, 2022

Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea

Filed under: Government, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tom Scott
Published 9 Dec 2019

We still shouldn’t be using electronic voting. Here’s why.
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September 19, 2022

QotD: Representative government

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

If it’s to work at all, representative government has to be representative. That is, it must be consented to by the governed. But not only did we not consent to be ruled this way, we couldn’t. Just to take the most obvious problem: We have no idea who our rulers actually are.

Hawaiian judges are our kakistocracy‘s public face, but all the decisions that matter are made long before the hacks in black get involved. As we know, we Americans commit, on average, three felonies a day. If, when, and how these come to the State’s attention are almost completely random. This is true for any law, actually, and because it is, it’s not really an exaggeration to say that your livelihood, and often your actual freedom, depends on what side of the bed the cop got up on this morning.

If The Authorities notice you when they’re in a good mood, you skate. If The Authorities are in a bad mood, though — tired, hung over, had a fight with the spouse, whatever — you’re screwed. What actually happens to you depends on the lawyers, a.k.a the most incestuous little fraternity on the planet. Whether they choose to prosecute or not, and for what, and what deals they make over a drink or seven determine what happens to you once you get in front of hizzoner … who, of course, is also butt-buddies with all the lawyers who appear in his chambers, since he was one of them not too long ago and they remain his entire social circle.

Who in his right mind could possibly agree to this? No, forget “right mind” — it’s simply not possible for anyone, not even someone as far out on reality’s fringes as the SJWs, to consent to this. Those “people” (in the strict biological sense) think houseplants have human rights, but not even they would agree to have their life’s course determined by two dimbulbs with great hair and ugly neckties cutting deals with each other in a dive bar.

But so long as we fetishize the form of “representative government,” it can’t be otherwise. As folks in Our Thing never tire of pointing out, had The People ever been consulted about our preferences, at any time after 1963, we’d still be living in a White Christian nation with a solid manufacturing base and a minuscule military footprint. If it were possible to throw the bums out, we would’ve thrown out every bum on every ballot since at least Calvin Coolidge. But we can’t throw the bums out, because the process is rigged.

Severian, “Form > Process > Outcome”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-06.

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