Great 2018 political ad #2

Video of black masked and clad Antifa smashing windows, hurling urine and feces, stomping little old ladies, holding signs saying Fuck the Police and America is Racist.

Voiceover: And these Democrats say that we're the fascists......

What? You say I'm exaggerating? That this is a small fringe? That it doesn't have the support of the Democrat party? Well maybe you should have been saying that over the last year when these thugs were stomping your political rivals. To your (approving?) silence.

What is all this talk of fascism really about

Everyone who is anyone is panicked about resurgent fascism. To hear the chattering classes tell it, there's a Brownshirt under every bed and Trump is if not Hitler, then at least Mussolini. But Brendan O'Neill argues that what's really going on is the return of normal politics. And all this fascist talk? The screeches of elites who believed that all the "New World Order" bilge was actually true and guaranteed them power in some noveau version of a very ancien regime. As O'Neill puts it:

This, precisely, is what they mean when they say ‘fascism’. They mean you, me, ordinary people; people who have dared to say that they want to influence politics again following years of being frozen out. When they say fascism, they mean democracy.

Yes dear friends, you're the fascist bogeyman. So next time you run into a scribbler or apparatchik: say "boo". They might just soil their knickers.

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/what-fascism-is-and-isnt/19467#.WaVRINBOnqA

White Supremacism's Modern Roots

As Brendan O’Neil of Spiked recently  wrote on his Facebook page:

“You are a white man. Check your privilege. Stay in your lane. You will never understand black people’s lives or experiences. You’re all about whiteness, that’s how you’re conditioned.” — SJWs 

“I am a white man. What a privilege. I’m going to stay in my lane. I will never understand black people. I’m all about whiteness, it’s how I’m conditioned.” — White Nationalists

My Visitor Log tells the tale of China's Totalitarian Control

Most populous country in the world with hundreds of millions of internet users and not one of them has ever been allowed to browse my site.  The Chinese Gerontocrats are terrified of me. Losers.

Predictions for the new 'Socially Just' Identitarian Regime

So what happens as America becomes more racially and gender identity divided?

Public schools wane and private, parochial, charter, home and voucher schooling will grow.

Welfare benefits for the poor fall. Welfare benefits are highest in places with very homogenous populations and cultures - we care most for the welfare of people like us. They are noticeably smaller in most traditionally diverse locations. Newly diverse locations with high benefits like CA are busy bribing all the different racial groups demanding rewards and no doubt will radically truncate benefits as soon as they go bankrupt.

Affirmative action will get so complex and cause so much rage that it will die of its own irrationality. When there was one set of 'victims' and one set of 'oppressors' the process was easy to organize, manage and ultimately limit. But the more identities there are, the more finely graded levels of 'victim' and 'oppressor' that must be accounted for, the more chaos and conflict, the less support there will be for the whole idea. Which politicians and elites have always liked far more than the public anyway.

Finally, as different states evolve to different 'identity' cultures there will be more and more pressure to loosen the Union. How can people lacking our identity possibly govern us justly? It will also lead to balkanization within states and even metro areas.

Maybe we'll end up like Classical Greece: 1500 city states fearing, hating and warring against each other with 'Empires' like Athens or Sparta rising and falling with the tide of human affairs.

It's all so very Progressive.

The perfect political ad for 2018 and beyond

The destruction and desecration of historical icons from Joan d'Arc to Columbus to Lincoln to Robert E. Lee is creating a fabulous opening for Republicans.

Opening Shot:  A shot of the 215 year old monument to Columbus shattered by vandals.
Shot: Lincoln bust burnt. Joan d'Arc vandalized.

Voice Over: Voters want their leaders to be builders, to get things done. Yet Democrats only know how to destroy.

Shot: Masked black clad Antifa shattering windows, attacking unarmed people, setting things on fire.
Shot: Statues being torn down by black clad mobs.

VO: Americans don't want to pay the bill for Democrat destruction.

Closing Shot: What's next? Graphic of the Statue of Liberty being pulled down.

Liberalism is exhausted

And there is nothing to replace it but racial and gender identity. Oh and sex and drugs - lots of that.

In a world without  purpose it's a wonder more people aren't overdosing. Rod Dreher's piece is important to read. Hattip instapundit.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-storm-before-the-storm-weimar-america-liberalism/

"This is a massive, massive scandal"

Democrat IT staffers may have sold secrets to Pakistani and Russian intelligence. No wonder they've been harping on statues.

http://nypost.com/2017/08/19/it-staffers-may-have-compromised-sensitive-data-to-foreign-intelligence/

Seattle bans criminal background checks for rentals, Male, Black, Latino and Young Homelessness to soar

A classic example of shallow, thoughtless good intentions gone awry. There is copious evidence that denying landlords and employers information on candidates increases their reliance on the information that they have available: namely the race, age and gender of the candidate. The result is that races and genders with higher criminal propensities suffer MORE discrimination, not less because there is no way for the decision maker to differentiate between 'safe' and 'unsafe' so the more 'unsafe' group gets punished indiscriminately.

Progressivism is a science free cult.

From Reason, here.

Isn't it Ironic?

That the Democratic party feels compelled to destroy thousands of statues and monuments honoring Democrats that were erected by Democrats in what were then Democrat controlled jurisdictions?

A party that feels compelled to do that isn't a powerful party, it's a desperate party.

Last Trump for the Democrats?

I think Richard Fernandez hits the causal nail on the head.

When The State has to resort to masked storm troopers that pretend that they're anarchists to shut down unpopular fringe speech you know that they're losing. Because a Party of the State that doesn't have the confidence to ignore criticism from a group hated by 95% of the nation is in serious trouble.

And a Party of the State that does not control The State....is nothing. The smell of death surrounds it. Hence all the hysterical flailing.

For the longest time I couldn't figure out why Democrats were so upset by a crude loudmouth like Trump. Now, after dozens of riots and hundreds of fabricated news stories I think I know:

For Democrats he may truly represent The Last Trump.

And at the center of the web: A Clintonite

One question I had about the events at Charlottesville: Where were the police? In every other crazy hater march I've ever read about - right or left - the cops and Guard were in the middle doing their job" keeping the peace by keeping the various crazies from tearing each other up. But according to the ACLU, they were ordered to not do their job. And guess who was in charge: Former Clinton consigliere and uber loyalist Gov. Terry McAulliffe. Why am I not surprised?

The self refuting nature of Identity Politics

Good piece by Rod Dreher exploring the fundamental contradiction at the center of Social Justice Warrior ideology. Put simply:

First they (the 'woke' that is) hold that the different sexes, races and nationalities naturally have the same distribution of skills and preferences. And logically following from this assumption is the conclusion that deviation from proportional outcomes can therefore only be due to "hate" or structural bias.

At the same time the "Big Bad Woke" argue that the perspectives and experiences of different sexes and races are so unique and unavailable to other races and genders, that failure to include all of the various identities in an institution leads inevitably to Error and debilitating group think. So much so that a white author cannot possibly write about a black character.


But here's the rub: They both can't possibly be true.

And since they can't, the SJW are doomed to inevitable failure, discrediting and defeat. But as the Soviet Union (and Venezuela) showed: a fanatical ideology can do a lot of damage before reality burns through their will to believe. The 'woke' don't believe they are fighting for 'better' against 'worse'. They believe they are fighting for the True Good against Evil.

And True Believers who believe that are the most dangerous creatures on the face of the earth.

The Myth of Cosmopolitanism

This is a super piece by Ross Douthat in the NYT from last year. It articulates the experience that anyone from a truly diverse background experiences upon contact with the "Diverse, Sophisticated, Global Elite". Who are about as diverse as.....Sweden used to be before it's fearless and oh so diverse leaders started tearing the country apart with real diversity.  Beware: when an elitist speaks to you of diversity, they are really talking about conformity. As my Grandad might say: "They are so full of s**t that their ass drags the ground".

NOW that populist rebellions are taking Britain out of the European Union and the Republican Party out of contention for the presidency, perhaps we should speak no more of left and right, liberals and conservatives. From now on the great political battles will be fought between nationalists and internationalists, nativists and globalists. From now on the loyalties that matter will be narrowly tribal — Make America Great Again, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England — or multicultural and cosmopolitan.

Well, maybe. But describing the division this way has one great flaw. It gives the elite side of the debate (the side that does most of the describing) too much credit for being truly cosmopolitan.

Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one’s own. It takes its cue from a Roman playwright’s line that “nothing human is alien to me,” and goes outward ready to be transformed by what it finds.

The people who consider themselves “cosmopolitan” in today’s West, by contrast, are part of a meritocratic order that transforms difference into similarity, by plucking the best and brightest from everywhere and homogenizing them into the peculiar species that we call “global citizens.”


This species is racially diverse (within limits) and eager to assimilate the fun-seeming bits of foreign cultures — food, a touch of exotic spirituality. But no less than Brexit-voting Cornish villagers, our global citizens think and act as members of a tribe.


They have their own distinctive worldview (basically liberal Christianity without Christ), their own common educational experience, their own shared values and assumptions (social psychologists call these WEIRD — for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic), and of course their own outgroups(evangelicals, Little Englanders) to fear, pity and despise. And like any tribal cohort they seek comfort and familiarity: From London to Paris to New York, each Western “global city” (like each “global university”) is increasingly interchangeable, so that wherever the citizen of the world travels he already feels at home.

Indeed elite tribalism is actively encouraged by the technologies of globalization, the ease of travel and communication. Distance and separation force encounter and immersion, which is why the age of empire made cosmopolitans as well as chauvinists — sometimes out of the same people. (There is more genuine cosmopolitanism in Rudyard Kipling and T. E. Lawrence and Richard Francis Burton than in a hundred Davos sessions.)

It is still possible to disappear into someone else’s culture, to leave the global-citizen bubble behind. But in my experience the people who do are exceptional or eccentric or natural outsiders to begin with — like a young writer I knew who had traveled Africa and Asia more or less on foot for years, not for a book but just because, or the daughter of evangelical missionaries who grew up in South Asia and lived in Washington, D.C., as a way station before moving her own family to the Middle East. They are not the people who ascend to power, who become the insiders against whom populists revolt.

In my own case — to speak as an insider for a moment — my cosmopolitanism probably peaked when I was about 11 years old, when I was simultaneously attending tongues-speaking Pentecostalist worship services, playing Little League in a working-class neighborhood, eating alongside aging hippies in macrobiotic restaurants on weekends, all the while attending a liberal Episcopalian parochial school. (It’s a long story.)

Whereas once I began attending a global university, living in global cities, working and traveling and socializing with my fellow global citizens, my experience of genuine cultural difference became far more superficial.

Management 101: You can get a lot done when you know how to manage

Trump's delegation of authority to the decision makers in the field has led to much better results against ISIS and illegal immigration. Imagine that.

Lifetime legislators don't learn management skills, they learn manipulation skills.

Hattip Instapundit.com