Three years after buying The Village Voice, and a year after the paper shut down its print edition, owner Peter Barbey told the remaining staff today that the publication will no longer be posting any new stories.
“Today is kind of a sucky day,” Barbey told the staff, according to audio obtained by Gothamist. “Due to, basically, business realities, we’re going to stop publishing Village Voice new material [sic].”
Barbey said that half of the staff, which is around 15 to 20 people, will remain on to “wind things down,” and work on a project to archive the Voice’s material online.
The rest of the staff will be let go today.
Since they announced they were ending print publication a year ago, this is no surprise.
It’s like when some musician who was briefly important in the sixties dies, and you go “Oh, wait, he was still alive?”
Alternative weeklies were useful for carrying club, event and restaurant listings, all things the Internet does better now. As far as I can tell, their “carrier medium for liberal opinion” business model is only viable two ways: Carry tons of sex ads (something else the Internet does better now), or have the tabloid as an adjunct to a large, profitable music festival (the Austin Chronicle model). Since the most recent super-geniuses running the Village Voice eliminated sex ads, plus the tremendous BS involved in running any business in New York City, the graffiti was on the brownstone wall.
Plus it’s not like readers have a crying lack of far left-wing voices in the media today…
I suspect people in the upper Midwest want summer to last as long as possible, but here in Texas, I admit to getting mighty tired of walking my dog at night when it’s still 90° and windless…
About 58% of men convicted in Sweden of rape and attempted rape over the past five years were born abroad, according to data from Swedish national TV.
Public broadcaster SVT said it had counted all court convictions to present a complete picture in Sweden.
But Sweden had thousands more reported rapes, and there is no ethnic breakdown for those.
Immigration and crime are major issues in Sweden’s general election campaign. The vote is on 9 September.
The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats hope to make significant ground, although they have slipped to third place in the latest opinion poll.
The Mission Investigation programme, due to be broadcast on Wednesday by SVT, said the total number of offenders over five years was 843. Of those, 197 were from the Middle East and North Africa, with 45 coming from Afghanistan.
The report clearly shows a pattern of cover-up by the Church, even detailing the precise methods the archdioceses used to avoid prosecution. Of this, there can be no doubt that the scope of the abuse was known by the Church, and that it sometimes took extraordinary measures to bury evidence and deny facts.
Over 1,000 individual victims are identified, but the report acknowledges that many of them came forward only as news spread that the report was being compiled. The writers of the report are aware that public release of this report may result in thousands more victims coming forward. An interesting facet of mass-child-abuse cases is that many victims keep silent for decades assuming no one will believe them; however, when seeing that “Rev. Joe Smith” has been identified doing X, the victims often realize “Hey, he did that to me, too” and then realize they were not alone, and are now credible.
More interestingly, the report acknowledges the cooperation of the Church in its compilation. Even though the report lambasts current Church leaders, the report acknowledges the various archdioceses of Pennsylvania (with the exception of Philadelphia, which is still preparing information) were readily assisting with producing evidence: letters, memoranda, reports, and more were promptly turned over, and Church officials almost seem to be eager to get this information public. The report even stipulates that, for the first time, there is reason to be optimistic the Catholic Church is cleaning house at last.
Most people don’t know the self defense laws of their own state. Sadly, “most people” frequently includes prosecutors. Says friend-of-the-blog firearms training expert Karl Rehn: “I think his comments are correct in that article.”
None of this would be happening, of course, but for Bob Mueller’s effort to drive President Trump from office on behalf of his de facto client, the Democratic Party. In a nauseating bit of hypocrisy, Deputy U.S. attorney Robert Khuzami said today that “The essence of what this case is about is justice, and that is an equal playing field for all persons in the eyes of the law….” Equal justice has nothing to do with this prosecution. Michael Cohen was targeted solely because he was Trump’s personal lawyer, and enforcement of campaign finance law is anything but equal. Just ask Dinesh D’Souza.
As we and others have said many times, what is going on in the courts is mostly theater–unless, of course, you are Paul Manafort or Michael Cohen. President Trump can’t be indicted, so legal niceties are not very material. The Mueller Switch Project has three objectives: 1) furnish House Democrats (assuming they take the majority in November) with ammunition to impeach the President; 2) help the Democrats to win the midterm elections; and 3) make President Trump’s re-election less likely in 2020.
Today’s legal developments unquestionably represent a step forward for the Democrats on all three fronts. But in principle, there is no reason why they should change the landscape. Manafort’s conviction has nothing to do with Trump. And no matter how Mueller may try to dress it up with talk about campaign finance–which voters don’t care about, anyway–the Cohen plea simply confirms what we already knew–that Trump tried to keep Stephanie Clifford quiet. That may be a big deal to Melania, I can’t speak for her. But I doubt that it is a big deal to a significant number of voters, and I doubt that tomorrow’s headlines will move the needle on the midterm election.
Texas successful in getting District Court to overturn ObamaCare fee. Texas Attorney general Ken Paxton: “Obamacare is unconstitutional, plain and simple. We all know that the feds cannot tax the states, and we’re proud to return this illegally collected money to the people of Texas.”
This piece claims that had (for example) Ted Cruz won the nomination and beaten Hillary Clinton in 2016, the liberal overclass would be acting just as deranged toward him as it is toward Donald Trump.
Bill [Kristol] and his fellow travelers such as Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, Max Boot, and George Will, among other NeverTrumps and their allies, are telling each other, and anyone who will listen, that Trump is not only far worse than the Democrats in Congress, but solely responsible for the combative state of American politics.
Trump’s unexpected and overwhelming success as an amateur politician is a clear and present danger to the Professional Conservative Class, as he does not and will not listen to them. This cabal is used to being feted by the mainstream media as setting the tone for the conservative movement, which more often than not includes being obsequious toward the dominant movers and shakers in Washington: the Democrats and the media.
Therefore, the radicalization and absolutism of the Democratic Party that have been evolving over the past two decades are subsumed by the greater threat of Donald Trump. To listen to the NeverTrump crowd, had he not won the presidency, the country would be far better off, civility would reign supreme, and Democrats and housebroken Republicans would hold hands as they cheerfully do the bidding of them who must be obeyed: the American Ruling Class.
Snip.
Ted Cruz represents an existential threat to the Democratic Party. He is Cuban-American and thus would be the first Hispanic nominated to run for president by either major party. The Democrats and the left view the 57 million Hispanic Americans and 38 million black Americans as the unquestioned property of Democratic Party, thus they are not allowed to wander off the plantation. Any threat to that hegemony must be met, and has been met, with unrestrained ferocity.
Therefore, the foundational strategy the Democrats and Hillary Clinton decided to deploy against Cruz, if he won the nomination, was to portray him as an out-of-control and dangerous extremist – so vile and fanatical that his own party could not stomach him – thus an out-of-touch and faux Hispanic.
To augment this strategy, Cruz would have been vilified as a virulent Islamophobe, an anti-immigration bigot, a Bible-toting intolerant Christian Evangelical, someone in favor of draconian spending cuts, and a toady of the far-right…and he was born in Canada.
Further, as this same cabal went to great lengths and expense to produce and use a phony dossier regarding Donald Trump, it would be safe to assume that they would have done the same with Ted Cruz, particularly in light of a fictitious story about a number of alleged extramarital affairs planted in the National Enquirer in March of 2016. There would have been incessant leaks to the media that would have mirrored what they did to Trump.
There is a certain amount of truth in this, but there is something about Trump, just like there was something about Sarah Palin, that needles our self-anointed overclass at a subconscious, visceral level. The idea that this obvious social inferior gnaws at them and makes them irrational in a way that I suspect a Ted Cruz presidency would not.
Nothing qualifies you to attend a DNC meeting, or run for president, like being the mouthpiece for a porn star. And really, is that actually the whole DNC meeting? It looks like a PTA meeting.
Game studio allows social justice warrior customization…for a World War II game. Check out the comments. “Ever since I was a kid watching the likes of The Longest Day and Where Eagles Dare I’ve fantasized about raiding occupied Norway as an Asian transgender pirate.” (Ht tip: Borepatch.)
Enjoy a video of two great pundits that are great together: Scott Adams interviewing Greg Gutfeld.
(Skip to 2:20 in to skip the long, read-off-the-cheat-sheet introduction.)
Part of the interview focuses on Greg Gutfeld’s new book The Gutfeld Monologues: Classic Rants from the Five. My friends Mike and Andrew went down to a Gutfeld book signing event in The Woodlands earlier this month, and they said the line was out the door…
Netroots Nation bills itself as “the largest annual conference for progressives.” This year’s conference was plagued with nearly empty events, racial incitement and wild radicalism far outside of the American mainstream, including items for sale with threats of violence.
This year’s conference just wrapped in New Orleans.
Wait a minute, how do you throw an under-attended conference in New Orleans? I mean, it’s in New Orleans.
Of course, the dwindling ranks of Netroot Nation are probably packed with dour feminists and vegetarians, so perhaps New Orleans offers less of an appeal to them than you might think.
Keynote addresses were delivered at Netroots Nation by Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Cynthia Nixon, and self-described democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. These speakers, and the conference’s legion of panelists, pushed an unrelenting new era of racially-focused activism and organizing.
The problem was, much of the time there was nobody there to hear it.
The conference was plagued by nearly empty events. “This is What Democracy Should Look Like” was a panel featuring Atima Omara, A’shanti Gholar, and Carol McDonald. With seating for more than 200 at the event, barely 20 Netroots attendees came to hear.
Also this:
“Among the topics at Netroots Nation were race, mobilization, race, voting rights, race, and cultural oppression by the dominant patriarchy.”
Media reports claim Netroots Nation got its usual 3,000 attendees, but I’m not seeing it in these tweeted photos:
Which means Cory Booker is either a liar or an idiot…)
I would think that if they had anywhere close to three thousand people, there would be at least one picture from the event that showed at least a thousand people in one room, and I’m not seeing one anywhere online.
My impression is that far-left organizations like Netroots Nation suffer from one of the same problems plaguing the libertarians: All chiefs and no indians.
Antifa radicals were behind several violent assaults that resulted in injuries in Portland, Oregon, during a right-wing free speech rally on Saturday [August 4]. The assaults included a journalist who was hit in the head with a water bottle, a counter-protester who was clubbed in the head with a modified trench club, and Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson, who was attacked while he walked through the antifa crowd. There were only four arrests.
Far-left agitators stormed Portland City Hall Wednesday, cursing through bullhorns, disrupting a meeting, and assaulting security guards.
The activists, including masked antifa agitators, were protesting what they called “police brutality” after Portland Police used strong crowd-control techniques to control the violent “antifascist” counter-demonstration Saturday at the Patriot Prayer rally.
Police fired rubber bullets and flash-bangs into the rioting crowd after antifa counter-protesters refused police orders to get out of the street, and threw rocks and bottles at officers.
But it wasn’t just in Portland. Over in Charlottesville, on the one-year anniversary of the LARP Nazi’s supposed “Unite the Right” rally, in addition to police, Atifa was also assaulting NBC reporters:
All-white crowd in Charlottesville chants “Black Lives Matter” as State Police officer is beaten pic.twitter.com/PU1X6aRRYB
It’s easy to understand why young, unemployed left-wing losers would join antifa: It’s fun beating up people and smashing stuff. But one wonders what George Soros hopes to accomplish, other than alienating moderates, by throwing funding their way…
Edited to add: Saw this just after I posted this. Antifa brought their special brand of happiness to Toronto on Saturday as well:
Berkeley police released video Thursday of roving bands of black-clad vandals who smashed the windshields of 21 city vehicles, setting one blaze, during a violent weekend clash between anti-fascist and anti-Marxist protesters.
At least 20 people were arrested, many armed with a variety of weapons, at Sunday’s “No to Marxism in America 2” rally. During the height of the violent confrontation, a group of masked persons dressed in black clothing used hammers to vandalize 21 City of Berkeley vehicles parked in an off-street parking lot.
One of the vehicles was set on fire.
In a separate act of vandalism, at least two black-clad protesters can be seen smashing the windows of the Marine Corps Recruiting Center with hammers. The suspects repeatedly hit the windows with a hammer or tire iron causing an estimated $2,000 worth of damage. An ATM machine was also vandalized.
How’d I miss that?
On the other hand, I just naturally assume at this point that Antifa riot in Berkeley more often than not…
In June 1996 — after the staffer had begun working for Feinstein — the FBI detected that the Chinese government was attempting to seek favor with the senator, who at the time sat on the East Asian and Pacific affairs subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, which oversees US-China relations. Investigators warned her in a classified briefing that Beijing might try to influence her through illegal campaign contributions laundered through front corporations and other cutouts.
The warning proved prescient.
One Chinese bagman, Nanping-born John Huang, showed up at Feinstein’s San Francisco home for a fundraising dinner with a Beijing official tied to the People’s Bank of China and the Communist Party Committee. As a foreign national, the official wasn’t legally qualified to make the $50,000-a-plate donation to dine at the banquet.
After a Justice Department task force investigated widespread illegal fundraising during the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign, Feinstein returned more than $12,000 in contributions from donors associated with Huang, who was later convicted of campaign-finance fraud along with other Beijing bagmen. The DNC and the Clinton campaign had to return millions in ill-gotten cash.
Still, Beijing got its favored trade status extended — thanks in part to Feinstein. In speeches on the Senate floor and newspaper op-eds, she shamelessly spun China’s human-rights violations, as when in 1997 she compared Beijing’s 1989 massacre of hundreds of young demonstrators to the 1970 Kent State shootings, calling for the presidents of China and America to appoint a human-rights commission “charting the evolution of human rights in both countries over the last 20 to 30 years,” that “would point out the successes and failures — both Tiananmen Square and Kent State — and make recommendations for goals for the future.”
Feinstein also led efforts to bring China into the World Trade Organization in 1999, which gave Beijing permanent normal trade relations status and removed the annual congressional review of its human-rights and weapons-proliferation records.
Feinstein, still among the Senate’s most influential China doves, travels to China each year. Joining her on those trips is her mega-millionaire investor husband, Richard C. Blum, who has seemingly benefited greatly from the relationship.
Starting in 1996, as China was aggressively currying favor with his wife, Blum was able to take large stakes in Chinese state-run steel and food companies, and has brokered over $100 million in deals in China since then — with the help of partners who sit on the boards of Chinese military front companies like COSCO and CITIC.
China investments have helped make Feinstein, who lives in a $17 million mansion in San Francisco and keeps a $5 million vacation home in Hawaii, one of the richest members in Congress.
Academic dogma postulates that white people cannot be the victims of racism, and such banal white demonization has now seeped into the larger liberal commentariat. With that bias comes the notion that one can smear the white working classes with impunity. Caputo, however, was not brave or stupid enough to visit a Trump rally and to suggest to the crowd around him to get to a Clear Smile clinic.
If you are a non-white purveyor of such prejudice, venom like Jeong’s is contextualized through the lens of compensatory historical grievances. Someone’s grandfather mistreated your grandmother, so you can invert and then replay the roles with impunity. Or less charitably, life’s disappointments are always due to past cosmic injustice, not one’s own perceived tragic shortcomings or bad luck or just cruel fate.
If you are an elite white liberal, you are a twofer: virtue signaling your identity politics bona fides, while psychologically squaring the circle of your own privilege. Those who ridicule less fortunate white others for their supposed racial privilege—themselves often the products of old boy networks, elite upbringings, inherited perks, prep schools and parental leveraging—end up as the privileged smearing the non-privileged for their privilege.
Jeong is a Harvard Law graduate. Strzok has a master’s degree from Georgetown. The ridicule of the white working class by NeverTrump conservative pundits is read on the pages of the nation’s premier newspapers or voiced in hallowed symposia.
Is such ignorance of an entire class because of, or in spite of such, elite training?
Snip.
“In answer to the now hackneyed question, who or what created Trump? All these purveyors of class and racial prejudice need only look in the mirror.”
That “Democratic Socialist wave” crested and broke-up before it ever hit the shore: Just about all Bernie bros go down in Democratic primary defeats. “Rather than demonstrate that his movement has a broad reach across the electorate, Sanders has instead demonstrated that’s a fringe movement even within the Democratic Party.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind. When the poetry editors of The Nation virtuously publish an amateurish but super-woke poem, only to discover that the poem stumbled across several trip wires of political correctness; when these editors (one of them a full professor in the Harvard English department) then jointly write a letter oozing bathos and career anxiety and begging forgiveness from their critics; when the poet himself publishes a statement of his own—a missive falling somewhere between an apology, a Hail Mary pass, and a suicide note; and when all of this is accepted in the houses of the holy as one of the regrettable but minor incidents that take place along the path toward greater justice, something is dying.
When the top man at The New York Times publishes a sober statement about a meeting he had with the president in which he describes instructing Trump about the problem of his “deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric,” and then three days later the paper announces that it has hired a writer who has tweeted about her hatred of white people, of Republicans, of cops, of the president, of the need to stop certain female writers and journalists from “existing,” and when this new hire will not be a beat reporter, but will sit on the paper’s editorial board—having a hand in shaping the opinions the paper presents to the world—then it is no mystery that a parallel culture of ideas has emerged to replace a corrupted system. When even Barack Obama, the poet laureate of identity politics, is moved to issue a message to the faithful, hinting that that they could be tipping their hand on all of this—saying during a speech he delivered in South Africa that a culture is at a dead end when it decides someone has no “standing to speak” if he is a white man—and when even this mayday is ignored, the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to the end.
In the midst of this death rattle has come a group of thinkers, Peterson foremost among them, offering an alternative means of understanding the world to a very large group of people who have been starved for one. His audience is huge and ever more diverse, but a significant number of his fans are white men. The automatic assumption of the left is that this is therefore a red-pilled army, but the opposite is true. The alt-right venerates identity politics just as fervently as the left, as the title of a recent essay reproduced on the alt-right website Counter-Currents reveals: “Jordan Peterson’s Rejection of Identity Politics Allows White Ethnocide.”
If you think that a backlash to the kind of philosophy that resulted in The Nation’s poetry implosion; the Times’ hire; and Obama’s distress call isn’t at least partly responsible for the election of Donald Trump, you’re dreaming. And if you think the only kind of people who would reject such madness are Republicans, you are similarly deluded. All across the country, there are people as repelled by the current White House as they are by the countless and increasingly baroque expressions of identity politics that dominate so much of the culture. These are people who aren’t looking for an ideology; they are looking for ideas. And many of them are getting much better at discerning the good from the bad. The Democratic Party reviles them at its peril; the Republican Party takes them for granted in folly.
The global influence of Europe continues to wane, at least as defined by demographic robustness, technological innovation, the quality of higher education, and the ability to defend its interests. Its aristocratic elite classes are currently under constant challenge from populist reformers. And 73 years of peace have been hard on Europe, in the sense that the postmodern European cultural ideal is to avoid childbearing, most religion, and national defense.
Snip.
Europe continues to believe that the “Palestinian issue” is key to “peace” in the Middle East — a euphemism for distancing itself from Israel. In truth, the Middle East is undergoing the greatest revolution since the end of colonialism. The worries about Arab security are not the tardiness of Palestinian statehood but the existential threats emanating from theocratic Shiite Iran and the neo-Ottomanism of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. In that sense, a conventionally strong and nuclear Israel is for now allied with an Arab world at odds with both Tehran and Ankara, and is likely in any major war to be on the side of an Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Yet for Europe, the Palestinians are the rusty key to peace, even as the latter are increasingly under suspicion by Arab nations as pro-Hezbollah and pro-Iranian.
Europe for now is on the wrong side of the energy revolution, perhaps best epitomized by the near-suicidal green policies of Germany. As it dismantles coal and nuclear plants, Angela Merkel’s government finds its subsidized wind and solar projects utterly incapable of meeting Germany’s competitive industrial needs. The result will likely be a continual and massive importation of natural gas, increasingly from NATO’s supposed archenemy, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The dream of hydraulic fracturing of shale gas throughout Europe is now largely dead and buried by opposition from radical environmental groups. The result is not a self-sufficient Europe enjoying renewable energy but a continent increasingly dependent for its mounting conventional energy needs on costly imports, with resulting energy costs that are making it uncompetitive with North American industries. Again, the contrast with the United States is telling: The latter went from foreordained, “peak oil” fossil-fuel dependence to becoming the largest oil, gas, and coal producer in the world.
One symptom of European demographic decline, multiculturalism, and military impotence is massive illegal immigration from the Middle East and North Africa. The ensuing crisis of large unassimilated populations is said to be analogous to the influxes of illegal immigrants into the United States from Central America and Mexico. But there are key differences. As an immigrant nation without a hereditary aristocracy, the melting pot of the United States even in postmodern times has far better integrated, assimilated, and intermarried newcomers. Illegal immigrants to the United States are largely Catholic; challenges to assimilation are national, ethnic, and linguistic but not additionally religious as in Europe. Congressional and presidential policy reflects a majority opinion in the United States that now supports secure borders and measured, legal, meritocratic immigration. In Europe, official immigration policy is still at odds with voters.
Woman who was the daughter and granddaughter of women who used men simply as sperm donors wonders why men are suspicious of her. Also, from the comments: “What the writer only lets on, deep into the article, is that she was raised in a lesbian commune.”
This sign was on the door of a restaurant in Kansas. Me and my clients went in and enjoyed a very nice steak dinner. No one was harassed, asked to leave, or in fear for their lives. And I expect 80% of us were carrying. It’s become a regular stop because it is a safe space pic.twitter.com/3bRtPGQvxn
Remember how early reports had newly-hired New York Times editorial board member Sarah Jeong only spewing a few racist Tweets, and only in reaction to trolls?
Now Twitter user @nickmon1112 has gone back through her Twitter timeline, and discovered: Yeah, not so much.
But alas. Here we are. The New York Times put their foot down and "stood by" Jeong. pic.twitter.com/IR8UaQB2cG
And here we have some more from September 2013. (i want to make this next batch of tweets their own separate thing because it's one continuous story) pic.twitter.com/SClNr734ga
At this point I'm confident in accusing @nytimes of not doing an independent assessment of Sarah Jeong and just taking her word at face value. pic.twitter.com/sSFTliLOxf
"white people feelings are like greenhouse gases, if white people have too many feels ice caps will melt and polar bears will die" – Sarah Jeong May 2014 https://t.co/nSNZuJVACxpic.twitter.com/5IWXN2iG1E
"i don’t discriminate against half-souled borg-brained white people, even though my mind is not physically attracted to them" Sarah Jeong, July 2014. https://t.co/15ezY5FitBpic.twitter.com/M8lepG28OF
And now we come full circle to the classic "oh man it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men" from Sarah Jeong in July 2014. https://t.co/hNT4nQwCM1
NOW you can start to see that tweet as part of the bigger picture, here. In Jeong's sea of racism. pic.twitter.com/fA6zCGinuA
These anti-white tweets from Sarah Jeong keep coming.
Because. It's a constant thing.
I'm actually being GENEROUS in HER favor here. And yet even so there's enough of a tweet volume to demonstrate a pattern of racist behavior. pic.twitter.com/V7rCDuPuNv
If her tweets aren't an offense? What about lying to the New York Times? These are thoughts that cross my mind as I navigate through the abyss of Sarah Jeong's anti-white racist tweets. pic.twitter.com/2Zv2cbLRQN
With that said? Here's another one of Sarah Jeong's anti-white racist tweets. "Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants" — Sarah Jeong, November 2014. https://t.co/dkfhXNJrPDpic.twitter.com/dWbftSYvDF
"Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins" — Sarah Jeong. December 2014. https://t.co/9LKFKTKxxt Her rounding off a year full of anti-white racism. pic.twitter.com/lwCFYeNzzP
But let's get to brass tacks. Would Sarah Jeong's anti-white racism impact her work? This tweet points to the answer being yes. https://t.co/XQt4UgjgGA
(I'm actually personally convinced Sarah Jeong is racist against white people at this point.) pic.twitter.com/DracyCeAWR
Yeah we're already at the end of 2015. Sarah Jeong is still racist against white people to a significant degree, but it wasn't as excessive as 2014 was. pic.twitter.com/azfHrEQb0f
Dear @nytimes — I am concerned about a tweet from Sarah Jeong that makes a threat of violence (re: "WANNA CUT") against white people. https://t.co/AYsRkir3lA
I consider it an item that should have come up in your staff review of her tweets. I would like to know why it did not. pic.twitter.com/ITpG8qFuTO
The truth is Sarah Jeong is still racist against white people. As I go through and read 2017's tweets, that much is clear to me. pic.twitter.com/8LEiLdBOJW
"I once went back and forth with a NYT fact-checker over whether I could call someone white since I couldn't *really* be sure" — Sarah Jeong, March 2018. https://t.co/id0jEOPzZx
That really speaks volumes to the current situation. How Jeong's racism impacts her work output. pic.twitter.com/1k0GHtPWKE
https://t.co/8mRSbLApgj <—- if you enjoy this thread i made, feel free to send me money as a thank you. It'll go towards rent. Followed by beer and cigarettes.
Hating someone because they’re white (or black, or Asian) is racism, straight up, no matter how many left-wing intersectionality buzzwords someone throws down to obscure the fact.
Hell, Body Count made this same point almost 30 years ago:
PSA: Do not burn your mother alive and bash her skull in with a baseball bat. Even if she is a racist.
I’m hoping that this week is Peak Busy for me. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:
Rasmussen: “Today’s [President Donald Trump] approval ratings among black voters: 29% This time last year: 15%.” Overall Trump approval rating at 50%.
Related: “President Donald Trump was lauded by inner-city pastors, including one who said he may go down as the ‘most pro-black president’ in recent history, during a White House roundtable on Wednesday that was focused on efforts to reform the prison system.” (Hat tip: Da Tech Guy via The Other McCain.)
At long last, the Trump administration has created a “freedom option” for people suffering under Obamacare. A final rulemaking issued Wednesday reverses an Obama-era regulation that exposed the sick to medical underwriting. The new rule will expand consumer protections for the sick, cover up to two million uninsured people, reduce premiums for millions more, protect conscience rights, and make Obamacare’s costs more transparent. And unlike President Barack Obama’s implementation of his signature healthcare legislation, it works within the confines of the law.
Federal law exempts “short-term, limited duration” health insurance from having to carry the unwanted coverage and hidden taxes Obamacare requires. Many consumers have understandably taken refuge from soaring Obamacare premiums in short-term plans.
Hoping to force those consumers into Obamacare plans, the Obama administration sabotaged short-term plans by stripping them of crucial consumer protections. It cut the maximum plan term from 12 months to three months, and forbade issuers from offering “renewal guarantees” that allow the sick to continue purchasing short-term policies at healthy-person rates. State insurance regulators protested that these restrictions literally stripped sick patients of their coverage.
Wednesday’s rule reinstates and even expands the consumer protections Obama curtailed. It allows short-term plans to last 12 months, and allows insurers to offer them with renewal guarantees.
You read that right. Democrats curtailed consumer protections; Republicans are expanding them.
Is the newest member of the New York Times editorial board, Sarah Jeong, a racist?
From one perspective — that commonly held by people outside the confines of the political left — she obviously is. A series of tweets from 2013 to 2015 reveal a vicious hatred of an entire group of people based only on their skin color. If that sounds harsh, let’s review a few, shall we? “White men are bullshit,” is one. A succinct vent, at least. But notice she’s not in any way attacking specific white men for some particular failing, just all white men for, well, existing. Or this series of ruminations: “have you ever tried to figure out all the things that white people are allowed to do that aren’t cultural appropriation. there’s literally nothing. like skiing, maybe, and also golf. white people aren’t even allowed to have polo. did you know that. like don’t you just feel bad? why can’t we give white people a break. lacrosse isn’t for white people either. it must be so boring to be white.” Or this: “basically i’m just imagining waking up white every morning with a terrible existential dread that i have no culture.” I can’t say I’m offended by this — it’s even mildly amusing, if a little bonkers. (Has she read, say, any Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson?) But it does reveal a worldview in which white people — all of them — are cultural parasites and contemptibly dull.
A little more disturbing is what you might call “eliminationist” rhetoric — language that wishes an entire race could be wiped off the face of the earth: “#cancelwhitepeople.” Or: “White people have stopped breeding. you’ll all go extinct soon. that was my plan all along.” One simple rule I have about describing groups of human beings is that I try not to use a term that equates them with animals. Jeong apparently has no problem doing so. Speaking of animals, here’s another gem: “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.” Or you could describe an entire race as subhuman: “Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.” And then there’s this simple expression of the pleasure that comes with hatred: “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.” I love that completely meretricious “old” to demean them still further. And that actual feeling: joy at cruelty!
Another indicator that these statements might be racist comes from replacing the word “white” with any other racial group. #cancelblackpeople probably wouldn’t fly at the New York Times, would it? Or imagine someone tweeting that Jews were only “fit to live underground like groveling goblins” or that she enjoyed “being cruel to old Latina women,” and then being welcomed and celebrated by a liberal newsroom. Not exactly in the cards.
Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolas Maduro admits that socialism doesn’t work. Just think how much pain could be avoided if he had admitted this before people had to eat their dogs…
Mistaken police call for an active shooter at a McAllen mall turns out to be an illegal alien robbery gang. Result? Seven illegal alien criminal suspects arrested.
Sheldon Silver Sentenced: Seven in Sing Sing. (Actually, it’s not clear the former New York Assembly speaker will be serving his sentence in Sing Sing, but we can only hope, for the sake of the alliteration…)
China cracks down on illegal coffins. Which is to say, any coffins, since cremation is now mandated. Including seizing and destroying coffins old people have spent their entire lives saving for.
When Bill de Blasio became mayor of New York in 2014, things changed drastically. I started to hear rumblings early on. My former colleagues who were dedicated public servants were concerned by a large-scale rollback of Bloomberg’s strategic initiatives. These seemed to be based on partisan politics and black-and-white thinking as opposed to critical analysis. It was very disappointing for me since I had also voted for de Blasio.
Although I was still working in the same social-services agency where I had remained at the end of Bloomberg’s term, my job changed radically. I had no contact with the new commissioner who appeared to be disengaged from substantive discussions about social-services programs for an extremely vulnerable population. In fact, she was much more preoccupied with renovating her office — I heard her new desk alone cost thousands of dollars. She even requested that a private bathroom be built for her. She had the attitude of an oligarch and was disturbed that she had to vet invitations to galas through legal and City Hall. She wanted carte blanche to attend expensive events.
She also refused to meet with the lawyers in her department and she kept the door to her office closed and didn’t know the names of the people who worked in her agency.
Under my commissioner, there were no benchmarks, no goals and she did not hold regular meetings with her general counsel. Under her tenure, the legal unit was gutted. And there were no consequences for failing to meet performance goals because there were no performance goals.
Comics video blogger Jeremy Hambly attacked at GenCon. “The Quartering also provided another update claiming five eyewitness have identified the attacker as Matt Loter, the owner of Elm City Games.” GenCon promptly expelled Loter. Ha! Just kidding!
GenCon is blocking and muting and banning people who talk about @TheQuartering’s assault on their official channels and social media accounts.
It’s almost as if they want to make people angry by censoring all conversation about the topic.
“Millennial Drops Support For Socialism After Learning How Hard It Is To Get Avocado Toast In Venezuela.” The Babylon Bee has just been tearing it up recently. I probably need to add them to the blog roll.
“Say anything you want about this president – I get it, he can be vulgar, he can be crude, he can be undignified at times. I don’t care. I can’t spare this man. He fights.”
Remember the multi-million dollar corruption scandal involving UAW officials? Apparently, it was even more corrupt than previously reported. While the UAW-Chrysler National Training Center is suing both Fiat Chrysler and the union members involved, recent developments point to the money scheme being greenlit by former UAW President Dennis Williams.
As part of a plea agreement filed this week, ex-labor official Nancy Adams Johnson told investigators that Williams specifically directed union members to use funds from Detroit’s automakers, funneled through training centers, to pay for union travel, meals, entertainment, and more. If true, the accusation not only implicates the UAW of corruption at the highest level but also the potential involvement of staff from both Ford and General Motors — something the FBI is already looking into.
I believe the official industry term for something like this is a “shit show.”
Alt-right protestors call black police officers “f**king n****r” in Portland protest. Oh, wait, did I say “alt-right”? I meant “anti-ICE.” (Hat tip: Derek Hunter on Twitter.)
Retired Sgt. Maj. John Canley received a phone call from President Donald Trump telling him he was receiving the Medal of Honor for his heroism in the Battle of Hue in 1968.
Masculine fathers raise strong daughters. Plus this: “A glance at the public figures felled in the #MeToo purges—not to mention Bill Clinton —should cure us of the idea that progressive politics incline men to better treatment of women.”
“Sexual inequality makes marriage work.” Marriages work better when the husband earns more. Also: “The more traditional the division of labor, meaning the greater the husband’s share of masculine chores compared with feminine ones, the greater his wife’s reported sexual satisfaction.”
UK father who raped and fathered three children with his own daughter sentenced to only four years in jail. Guess the ethnicity of the rapist. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
American semiconductor company Qualcomm’s merger with Dutch company NXP collapses after regulatory approval withheld…by China. Earlier this year, Qualcomm’s attempted merger with Broadcomm was blocked by the Trump Administration.
Facebook just lost $120 billion in market cap. How about they stop worrying about censoring the news and stop switching the view from “Most Recent” to “Top Stories”?
Allegations of vote fraud in Mission mayoral runoff in Hidalgo County.
