Enjoy this roundup of links on the Islamic State in specific, and Syria, Turkey and the Kurds more generally, after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s timely demise:
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the hirsute rapist whom hundreds of thousands of Islamic State supporters considered their absolute leader, died yesterday during a U.S. military raid in northwestern Syria’s Idlib province, President Donald Trump announced on Sunday morning. Baghdadi became the head of ISIS in 2010 but was not seen in public until 2014, when the group designated him caliph and he addressed the world in a florid speech from the pulpit of the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul, Iraq. Since then he has shown himself only once, on a dull video filmed in a windowless room and released in April.
As with Osama bin Laden, the most intriguing fact about Baghdadi’s assassination was its location, deep in what was considered enemy territory. The dominant force in Idlib is not ISIS—which is no longer dominant anywhere—but Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an affiliate of al-Qaeda. Recall that ISIS broke from al-Qaeda in 2013, and since al-Qaeda’s leaders rebuffed Baghdadi’s invitation to bow before him, the groups have traded nonstop insults and their members have tried to kill one another. Some of these insults do not strike me as the type that either side could easily take back: accusations of apostasy, disloyalty, cowardice, and idiocy. For Baghdadi to seek refuge among people who want to kill him probably means that the places where he had more support, such as within his home country of Iraq or near its border with Syria, could no longer provide him with any measure of safety. Finding him in HTS territory is like finding Derek Jeter hiding out in South Boston, or Martin Bormann living quietly by a synagogue on the Upper East Side.
Snip.
Baghdadi was special. By calling for the allegiance of all Muslims—and actually being taken seriously by a large number of them—he accomplished something no previous terrorist leader had done. He channeled, for the masses, a collective sense of connection to a glorious fantasy of an Islamic past. Bin Laden had asked Muslims to rise up in defense of Islam. But his concerns were distinctly 20th-century: overthrowing Arab despotisms, snuffing out the Jewish state, knocking over skyscrapers.
Baghdadi possessed a dramatic vision, one that any Muslim could partake in, that placed himself and anyone brave enough to join him in a line of warriors that extended back to the Prophet Muhammad himself. He noted, ostentatiously, that he hailed from the tribe of Quraish, the Prophet’s own. Historically, Muslims have counted membership in that tribe as one of about half a dozen criteria required of a valid caliph. That criterion had lapsed in importance for literally centuries, with numerous caliphs having no plausible claim to Quraishi ancestry. But Baghdadi claimed that he was a caliph, sensu stricto, in the classical tradition going back to the Abbasids. Furthermore, he would bring back a version of classical Islamic law, including legalized sex slavery and other abominations, in which he partook personally.
And now, like the Abbasids, he is dead—smashed to bits, according to Trump, by a self-detonated suicide vest. (His death was less tidy than that of his immediate Abbasid predecessor, al-Musta’sim Billah, 1213–58. The Mongols who deposed him believed that splattering his blood on the streets of Baghdad would bring bad luck, so they wrapped him in a carpet and stampeded their horses over it until his corpse was nicely tenderized.) Killing al-Musta’sim ended a dynasty. The Islamic State will likely name a successor to continue Baghdadi’s line. But the second caliph of the modern Islamic State will begin his reign in an even more impotent and pathetic state than Baghdadi left it.
When I began speaking with ISIS supporters five years ago, they parroted all the points of propaganda that the group has since made famous. But they included one point that the Islamic State has since de-emphasized. To be a valid caliph, they said, one must have control over territory and implement Islamic law within it. A pledge of allegiance to a caliph (called bay’ah, both classically and by ISIS), they stressed, is a contract, an agreement between parties in which each offers something to the other. The caliph offers an Islamic state; his subject offers obedience. The contract evaporates when the caliph stops providing a state.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has not provided a state for quite a while. Within the Islamic State, members have grumbled that he has been an absentee caliph, gone for months at a time, and not even clear in his instructions about whom to follow in his absence. The group long since stopped promising a paradise, and downgraded its territorial offering to a hellscape soon to be overrun by its enemies. It became ideologically split, with hard-liners accusing others of being softies, and both the softies and the hard-liners trying to kill one another. Baghdadi, it seems, was gone for much of this debate, and provided only vague guidance and little in the way of security or leadership. Some former supporters have felt abandoned, and have voiced their disgust.
His death will therefore definitively end an era that had already, in a sense, ended, if not with a whimper then with an inglorious bleating of complaints from his own flock. For years now, the hardest thing for outsiders to understand about the Islamic State has been its ability to inspire—to get some Muslims to leave comfortable circumstances to fight and die. For the past year, even as the world has diverted its attention from ISIS, the group’s ability to inspire has been severely diminished, and almost no one is leaving home to die for ISIS, or choosing to die in suicide attacks for ISIS at home. The inspiration is gone, and the party is over, for now. And although Baghdadi has obtained the martyrdom he sought, he got it in the end not as a caliph but as just another bloody hairball in a pile of rubble.
Legacy media outlets responded to President Trump’s announcement of the U.S. military’s successful mission against ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi with their trademark hostility and anger. That’s because the inarguably good news threatens corporate media goals for shaping foreign policy, impeaching the president, and defeating Trump in 2020.
Snip.
Corporate media have moved from at least projecting concern for reporting the actual news into unembarrassed political actors. That enables them to flamboyantly spin — as opposed to their previous method of subtly spinning — even major news with indisputable facts.
The 2016 campaign was a humiliating defeat for Hillary Clinton, but also for political media. Media outlets never understood the electorate they were paid big dollars to write and broadcast news about. They confidently asserted Trump had no chance to win, and convinced themselves that casting off journalistic standards was defensible because of the certain ruin Trump would bring.
Instead, President Trump’s administration has been marked by success in the domestic and foreign spheres. The economy is humming, including job and wage growth the media had previously said was unlikely to impossible to achieve. This is due to tax cuts, tax reform, and unprecedented deregulation. No new wars have been launched, much less the apocalyptic nuclear wars the media predicted. A long overdue recalibration with China is taking place.
What is good news for the country is bad news for the media and their political allies.
One of the tools they can utilize in their war on the president is to deny him honest media coverage of his successes, making it more difficult to clip news of them discussing those successes in an honest fashion. It’s not a conspiracy so much as a shared mindset that kicked into action this weekend.
Snip.
Trump Foreign Policy Successes Undermine Media Impeachment Drive
The biggest champions of impeachment are the media, seeking to save face after their 2016 and Russia collusion hoax failures. They have all but forced the Democrats to launch the proceedings even though their path is fraught with difficulties.
Yesterday’s Sunday Morning shows — no matter the outlet or the particular host — were all scheduled to throw more fuel on the impeachment fire. Instead, they were forced to cover a major success in the battle to defeat the Islamic State.
Impeaching the president who oversaw the operation looks even worse than just impeaching the president who has survived a non-stop, years-long campaign from the media, Democrats, and other Resistance members. For impeachment to have any chance of survival, the media need to both downplay and move quickly from the story back to their uncritical repetition of Democratic Party talking points.
Elsewhere, Syrian and Turkish forces are reportedly slugging it out with one another near Ras al-Ayn on the Turkish-Syrian border. Evidently that’s actual Syrian regulars engaged against actual Turkish regulars, not just their respective proxy forces (which are also involved), though I’m not sure that’s been verified. I fail to see how having a small contingent of U.S. troops there in harm’s way would improve the situation. (See here for my previous update.)
Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died in a U.S. raid in northwestern Syria, President Donald Trump announced Sunday, describing in detail a daring mission by Army Delta Force commandos that he said had been planned for five months.
Baghdadi, whose self-declared caliphate once covered large swaths of Syria and Iraq, detonated a suicide vest, killing himself and three children after he was cornered in a tunnel.
“The thug who tried so hard to intimidate others spent his last moments in utter fear, in total panic and dread, terrified of the American forces bearing down on him,” Trump said from the White House. “Baghdadi’s demise demonstrates America’s relentless pursuit of terrorist leaders and our commitment to the enduring and total defeat of ISIS and other terrorist organizations.”
More details of Baghdadi’s death:
“He died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming,” Trump said. “The compound had been cleared by this time, with people either surrendering or being shot and killed. Eleven young children were moved out of the house un-injured. The only ones remaining were Baghdadi in the tunnel, who had dragged three children with him to certain death. He reached the end of the tunnel, as our dogs chased him down. He ignited his vest, killing himself and the three children. His body was mutilated by the blast, but test results gave certain and positive identification.”
He was a sick and depraved man, and now he’s gone,” Trump said, adding at one point that he would support making public Baghdadi’s final moments.
Trump, using language also said that Baghdadi “died like a dog. He died like a coward.” The reference particular could anger Islamist extremists because they view the animals as unclean.
Well, we wouldn’t want to offend Islamic extremists, now would we?
No U.S. personnel were lost in the raid.
Here’s President Trump’s complete speech:
Some reactions from around the Twitterverse. The Washington Post took an early lead in the “worst take headline” derby:
They had it right the first time.
The Washington Post changed the headline on its Al-Baghdadi obituary from “Islamic State’s terrorist-in-Chief” to “austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State.” pic.twitter.com/cs243EVz7W
U.S. special forces killing Baghdadi at the direction of @realDonaldTrump is a warning to all who seek to harm the United States. It may not be today or tomorrow but if you seek to spread terror like ISIS, the very best we have will find you and you will die for what you’ve done.
Trump's reference to Baghdadi as a "coward" who "died like a dog" is much stronger in tone when translated into Arabic, especially due to the cultural connotations of dogs being haram in Islam.
It’s actually quite amazing that the Media and Democrats are actually openly furious that Trump just knocked off ISIS’ leader, Baghdadi. It’s Trump Derangement Syndrome taken to a whole new level.
Entire world: Good riddance!@AndrewFeinberg: We can’t celebrate the death of a genocidal jihadist deathcult’s leader because it might reflect well on Trump.
The United States military has conducted a special operations raid targeting one of its most high-value targets, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), Newsweek has learned. President Donald Trump approved the mission nearly a week before it took place.
Amid reports Saturday of U.S. military helicopters over Syria’s northwestern Idlib province, a senior Pentagon official familiar with the operation and Army official briefed on the matter told Newsweek that Baghdadi was the target of the top-secret operation in the last bastion of the country’s Islamist-dominated opposition, a faction that has clashed with ISIS in recent years. A U.S. Army official briefed on the results of the operation told Newsweek that Baghdadi was killed in the raid. And the Defense Department told the White House they have “high confidence” that the high-value target killed was Baghdadi, but further verification is pending.
Members of a team from the Joint Special Operations Command carried out Saturday’s high-level operation after receiving actionable intelligence, according to sources familiar with the operation. The location raided by special operations troops had been under surveillance for some time.
On Saturday night, after the operation had concluded, President Trump tweeted: “Something very big has just happened!” The White House announced later that the president will make a “major statement” Sunday morning at 9:00 a.m.
May Baghdadi rot in hell. Syria, Iraq, Kurds, Shiites, the Middle East, the United States, and the entire world are better for his death.
Idlib is in northeast Syria, in territory that’s never been controlled by the U.S. allied, Kurdish-lead Syrian Democratic Forces, in territory currently held by Turkish-allied forces.
I’m guessing permission to operate there may have been part of Trump’s accord with Turkey to give them a buffer zone in northeast Syria.
Do you think we’ll see the MSM lavish praise on President Trump for al-Baghdadi’s death the way the praised Obama for weeks after Osama bin Laden’s death? I rather doubt it. Instead, I suspect their main story Monday will be more leaks from Adam Schiff’s star chamber impeachment farce.
My first post here on BattleSwarm was October 14, 2009, following Dwight’s lead, and only a day after my non-political blog. (Funny how Dwight and I and Borepatch all started blogging within a year of each other. Almost as if something happened around that time that compelled us to jump in…)
Here’s a quick Whitman sampler/greatest hits list from those halcyon days of yore:
Following the withdraw of a small number of U.S. troops in the area (I’ve seen estimates range from 25 to 100), Turkey has launched it’s threatened offensive against Kurdish held Syrian territory along the border (which seems to bear the Orwellian name “Peace Spring Operation“). Lots of airstrikes and shelling, but so far actual ground forces seem to be primarily Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (AKA The Army Formerly Know As The Turkish-Backed Free Syrian Army, which is different than the previous Free Syrian Army, which revolted against Assad) supported by small units of Turkish armor, plus artillery and air power. They’ve thus far made five modest incursions from Tell Abyad (AKA Tall Abiad and half a dozen other variations) to Ras al-Ayn. Thus far they haven’t exceeded the 20 mile buffer zone, and the deepest incursion seems to be about 12 miles in toward the Syrian M4 road.
The president at least has a cogent position that is consistent with the Constitution and public opinion. He wants U.S. forces out of a conflict in which America’s interests have never been clear, and for which Congress has never approved military intervention. I find that sensible — no surprise, given that I have opposed intervention in Syria from the start…The stridency of the counterarguments is matched only by their selectiveness in reciting relevant facts.
I thus respectfully dissent from our National Review editorial.
President Trump, it says, is “making a serious mistake” by moving our forces away from what is described as “Kurdish territory”; the resulting invasion by superior Turkish forces will “kill American allies” while “carving out a zone of dominance” that will serve further to “inflame and complicate” the region.
Where to begin? Perhaps with the basic fact that there is no Kurdish territory. There is Syrian territory on Turkey’s border that the Kurds are occupying — a situation that itself serves to “inflame and complicate” the region for reasons I shall come to. Ethnic Kurds do not have a state. They live in contiguous parts of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Most are integrated into these countries, but many are separatists.
The Kurds have been our allies against ISIS, but it is not for us that they have fought. They fight ISIS for themselves, with our help. They are seeking an autonomous zone and, ultimately, statehood. The editorial fails to note that the Kurds we have backed, led by the YPG (People’s Protection Units), are the Syrian branch of the PKK (the Kurdistan Worker’s Party) in Turkey. The PKK is a militant separatist organization with Marxist-Leninist roots. Although such informed observers as Michael Rubin contend that the PKK has “evolved,” it remains a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under U.S. law. While our government materially supports the PKK’s confederates, ordinary Americans have been prosecuted for materially supporting the PKK.
The PKK has a long history of conducting terrorist attacks, but their quarrel is not with us. So why has our government designated them as terrorists? Because they have been fighting an insurgent war against Turkey for over 30 years. Turkey remains our NATO ally, even though the Erdogan government is one of the more duplicitous and anti-Western actors in a region that teems with them — as I’ve detailed over the years (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, and in my 2012 book, Spring Fever). The Erdogan problem complicates but does not change the fact that Turkey is of great strategic significance to our security.
While it is a longer discussion, I would be open to considering the removal of both the PKK from the terrorist list and Turkey from NATO. For now, though, the blunt facts are that the PKK is a terrorist organization and Turkey is our ally. These are not mere technicalities. Contrary to the editorial’s suggestion, our government’s machinations in Syria have not put just one of our allies in a bind. There are two allies in this equation, and our support for one has already vexed the other. The ramifications are serious, not least Turkey’s continued lurch away from NATO and toward Moscow.
Without any public debate, the Obama administration in 2014 insinuated our nation into the Kurdish–Turk conflict by arming the YPG. To be sure, our intentions were good. ISIS had besieged the city of Kobani in northern Syria; but Turkey understandably regards the YPG as a terrorist organization, complicit in the PKK insurgency.
That brings us to another non-technicality that the editors mention only in passing: Our intervention in Syria has never been authorized by Congress. Those of us who opposed intervention maintained that congressional authorization was necessary because there was no imminent threat to our nation. Contrary to the editorial’s suggestion, having U.S. forces “deter further genocidal bloodshed in northern Syria” is not a mission for which Americans support committing our men and women in uniform. Such bloodlettings are the Muslim Middle East’s default condition, so the missions would never end.
A congressional debate should have been mandatory before we jumped into a multi-layered war, featuring anti-American actors and shifting loyalties on both sides. In fact, so complex is the situation that President Obama’s initial goal was to oust Syria’s Assad regime; only later came the pivot to fighting terrorists, which helped Assad. That is Syria: Opposing one set of America’s enemies only empowers another. More clear than what intervention would accomplish was the likelihood of becoming enmeshed, inadvertently or otherwise, in vicious conflicts of which we wanted no part — such as the notorious and longstanding conflict between Turks and Kurds.
Barbaric jihadist groups such as ISIS (an offshoot of al-Qaeda) come into existence because of Islamic fundamentalism. But saying so remains de trop in Washington. Instead, we tell ourselves that terrorism emerges due to “vacuums” created in the absence of U.S. forces. On this logic, there should always and forever be U.S. forces and involvement in places where hostility to America vastly outweighs American interests.
I disagree with McCarthy’s contention that Obama didn’t help create ISIS: Some of our funding of anti-Assad elements helped create it, along with the vacuum of not getting a status of forces agreement with Iraq (you know, the country we actually did invade and conquer).
The easily foreseeable conflict between Turkey and the Kurds is at hand. We are supposed to see the problem as Trump’s abandoning of U.S. commitments. But why did we make commitments to the Kurds that undermined preexisting commitments to Turkey? The debate is strictly framed as “How can we leave the Kurds to the tender mercies of the Turks?” No one is supposed to ask “What did we expect would happen when we backed a militant organization that is tightly linked to U.S.-designated terrorists and that is the bitter enemy of a NATO ally we knew would not abide its presence on the ally’s border?” No one is supposed to ask “What is the end game here? Are we endorsing the partition of Syria? Did we see a Kurdish autonomous zone as the next Kosovo?”…
The easily foreseeable conflict between Turkey and the Kurds is at hand. We are supposed to see the problem as Trump’s abandoning of U.S. commitments. But why did we make commitments to the Kurds that undermined preexisting commitments to Turkey? The debate is strictly framed as “How can we leave the Kurds to the tender mercies of the Turks?” No one is supposed to ask “What did we expect would happen when we backed a militant organization that is tightly linked to U.S.-designated terrorists and that is the bitter enemy of a NATO ally we knew would not abide its presence on the ally’s border?” No one is supposed to ask “What is the end game here? Are we endorsing the partition of Syria? Did we see a Kurdish autonomous zone as the next Kosovo?” (We might remember that recognition of Kosovo’s split from Serbia, over Russian objections, was exploited by the Kremlin as a rationale for promoting separatism and annexations in Georgia and Ukraine.)
It is true, as the editors observe, that “there are no easy answers in Syria.” That is no excuse for offering an answer that makes no sense: “The United States should have an exit strategy, but one that neither squanders our tactical gains against ISIS nor exposes our allies to unacceptable retribution.” Put aside that our arming of the Kurds has already exposed our allies in Turkey to unacceptable risk. What the editorial poses is not an “exit strategy” but its opposite. In effect, it would keep U.S. forces in Syria interminably, permanently interposed between the Kurds and the Turks. The untidy questions of how that would be justifiable legally or politically go unaddressed.
President Trump, by contrast, has an exit strategy, which is to exit. He promises to cripple Turkey economically if the Kurds are harmed. If early reports of Turkey’s military assault are accurate, the president will soon be put to the test. I hope he is up to it. For a change, he should have strong support from Congress, which is threatening heavy sanctions if Turkey routs the Kurds.
Americans, however, are not of a mind to do more than that. We are grateful for what the Kurds did in our mutual interest against ISIS. We should try to help them, but no one wants to risk war with Turkey over them. The American people’s representatives never endorsed combat operations in Syria, and the president is right that the public wants out.
Donald Trump came into office promising to not start any new wars and to get us out of the old ones our feckless elite had dragged us into, and now that he’s doing it in Syria the usual suspects are outraged. How dare he actually deliver on his promise not to have anymore of our precious warriors shipped home in boxes after getting killed on battlefields we can’t even pronounce, while refereeing conflicts that began long before America was a thing, in campaigns without any kind of coherent objective?
Conservatives like me still think of ourselves as hawks, but after hard experience we have learned to be hawkish only where America’s interests are directly at stake. We’re not doves. We’re just not going to spill our troops’ blood when we do not absolutely have to. The elite may not like our attitude, but then it’s generally not the elite that ends up having to bury its sons, daughters, husbands and wives. We do.
I generally like the Kurds. I generally dislike the Turks. But they’ve been killing each other for a long time and no one has yet offered a sufficient reason why America should stick its troops in the crossfire between them. We hear words like “betrayal” tossed around, often by people whose track record re: honor is (charitably) lacking, but that assumes America had a say in this latest round ramping up. If the Turks are intent on invading, a firm “No” from the Oval office is not going to stop a battalion of Leopard tanks. If you want to stop them, you have to be prepared to stop them. That means war, and the president – along with millions of us – say “No thanks.”
Some solid conservatives who I respect disagree with the president’s take. They point out that the Kurds have fought with us and that they’ve had a raw deal. They also point to the Turks’ sordid history of genocide, like with the Armenians. These are good points – I spent 16 months away from my family deployed helping Muslims avoid a genocide in Kosovo – but they are not good enough to justify us doing the only thing that can stop the Turks if they are committed to their threatened aggression, i.e., being willing to have American troops fight them.
Let’s have some real talk, because the Orange Man Bad side of the debate – the side that suddenly is all hopped up on war juice – offers nothing but hack clichés to support its amorphous position. The Kurds helped destroy ISIS, true. It’s also true that the Kurds would have fought ISIS anyway, since the psycho caliphate was right next door. Let’s be honest – the Kurds didn’t show up for us at Normandy or Inchon or Khe Sanh or Kandahar. The Syrian Kurds allied with us in their homeland because we shared a common interest in wiping out the head-lopping freak show that was ISIS. Moreover, all Kurds are not equal. The PKK – the Kurdistan Workers’ Party – are a bunch of commie terrorists who have been fighting the Turks for a long time. Those reds are no friends of ours, and it’s their antics that seem to be inspiring the Turkish campaign. I have little use for the Turks, but they aren’t just picking this fight for Schiffs and giggles. The fact that it’s all so confusing is a really, really good reason for us to stay the hell out of it.
Most of the counterarguments to this position seems to be “Turkey would never dare invade if American troops were there, no matter how few!” Maybe. But American troops abroad are there to serve defined purposes, not to act as a living tripwire to force America into war should a random dictator decide we’re bluffing.
Before getting into the latest developments in Syria, let’s not forget that the entire reason we’re there is the Obama Administration’s foolish decision to try to overthrow Assad’s government on the cheap, actions that precipitated us showering pallets of money onto various jihadi groups and (along with the failure to achieve a status-of-forces agreement with a still wobbly Iraq) engendering the rise of the Islamic State, all with very little to show for our efforts except some eight years of Syrian bloodshed.
Unless you’ve been keeping up with every twist and turn of that very long war, it’s hard to understand how Syria has come to the current pass, since there were over a dozen different factions at various points in the civil war, including Hezbollah, Iran, Israel, and Russia. Basically, Syria ended up crushing just about all rebel forces in the south (thanks to a goodly amount of Russian help), while stalemating with jihadist groups and the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army in the north. Meanwhile, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces crushed the Islamic State with American/allied logistical backing and airpower, leaving them in control of Syria east of the Euphrates, all the way up to the Turkish border.
….the captured ISIS fighters and families. The U.S. has done far more than anyone could have ever expected, including the capture of 100% of the ISIS Caliphate. It is time now for others in the region, some of great wealth, to protect their own territory. THE USA IS GREAT!
Is this concerning? Yes it is. Recep Tayyip Ergodan’s jihadist regime deserves no support from America, and the safety of our Kurdish allies is a legitimate issue. But the news also brought about a number of wild overreactions from all points of the political spectrum.
The first overreaction is “Oh my God, Turkish ground troops will be entering Syrian territory! This is unprecedented!” No, Turkish ground troops have been fighting in Syria since 2016.
The second overreaction is “Oh my God, the Islamic State will spring back to life!” In truth, the Islamic State was already going to live on in some form as a transnational jihadist terrorist group, but is effectively finished as a territory-holding Caliphate, no more viable a state than Biafra or the Don Republic. And even if the SDF is forced to abandon some or all the Syrian territory they currently hold, I don’t see Turkey or Syria letting the Islamic State stage a serious comeback.
Fourth, while we are pulling back troops, and it sucks for the Kurds, I doubt this is the “betrayal” some are making it out to be. I sincerely doubt we ever said to the Kurds “Hey, take out the Islamic State, and we promise that we’ll use America’s military power to protect you until the end of time!” I also highly doubt we promised the Kurds we would support an independent Kurdish state no matter what the four states with significant Krudish ethnic minorities (Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran) might say in the matter. I suspect the Kurds came to us and said “Give us arms, training and support and we’ll destroy the Islamic State for you.” We did and they did. It’s been six months since the last of the Baghuz pocket was mopped up. Since there’s no plans or appetite for a permanent U.S. protection force in Syria, we were always going to pull our troops out sooner or later. Sooner or later turns out to be now.
Fifth, we are not consigning the Kurds to annihilation. If we are to believe Turkey (a dubious but not entirely impossible proposition) the goal of their incursion is to establish a 20 mile buffer zone, mainly aimed at preventing the PKK from launching attacks into Turkish territory. The PKK itself is indeed bad news, a communist-rooted terrorist organization that never really reformed. (The flip side is that the Turkish government loves to call any Kurdish Party in Turkey an arm of the PKK, which is mostly a lie.) When it comes to Turkish statements on the Kurds, there are half-truths, quarter-truths, eighth-truths, all the way down to quasi-semi-demi truths, where the remaining grain of truth is so tiny it’s a homeopathic tincture. I suspect there are PKK units among the SDF, but far fewer than Turkey claims.
If there’s a reason to believe Turkey’s aims actually are limited at this time, it’s because their existing incursion into northern Syria is already very unpopular with the Turkish people. An actual war against the entirety of the SDF is probably not in the cards for all sort of political, military and logistical reasons.
Also, in the event of such an all-out war, there’s very little reason to believe that Turkey could take out the entire SDF (and the Iraqi Kurdish Pershmerga, who would probably come to the SDF’s aid) before bogging down into quagmire of counterinsurgency warfare the way American forces in Iraq did following the 2003 invasion. The Kurds are no pushovers, and Turkey is already losing Leopard 2 tanks at an alarming pace in their existing Syrian deployment. (Turkey has a newer, locally produced (with South Korean help) main battle tank called the Altay, that hasn’t seen combat yet. Looks good on paper, but I bet it can’t stand toe-to-toe with an M1A2.) Finally, keep in mind that there’s still significant British and French military presence back-filling for withdrawn U.S. troops.
So why did President Trump accede to Turkish wishes? Is there any of that 4D chess going on here? Maybe. Trump seems to approach things through a persuasion/negotiation lens, using both carrots and sticks, and Turkey has already seen the stick in the F-35 order cancellation. Also, Trump may be leveraging Turkey to take a more active role against Iran, such as enforcing economic sanctions (and Iran is currently far more regionally disruptive). The majority Sunni Turkey has longstanding linguistic and ethnic differences with its Persian Shia neighbor, and (in the form of the Ottoman Empire) fought a series of wars with Persia between the Sixteenth and Nineteenth centuries, the last ending in 1823 (which is practically yesterday as far as Middle Eastern blood feuds are concerned). Finally, there’s the possibility that Trump is simply going to Yojimbo every Muslim nation in the Middle East against every other Muslim nation, keeping all of them too busy to make trouble for us…
Kurt Schlichter has a succinct summary:
I support the Kurds and I think the Turks are in the wrong.
That is not the question. The question is what we are going to do as a country, because the Kurds and the Turks are about to fight.
Do we put American lives on the line for some unspecified objective there?
Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.
Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset” and it would be viewed as election meddling and “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations” to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.
What’s really going on here? Why have the Democrats, to put it bluntly, gone berserk? Why are they risking a backlash of cosmic proportions (other than appeasing their psychotically-inflamed base, of course)?
One, distraction. They live in absolute fear of the coming revelations about the Russia probe, from Inspector General Horowitz but even more from the DOJ’s John Durham, who can actually put people in jail. The Dems know — if they have a brain (and a few do) — these revelations are likely to point up the line at the leaders of the Democratic Party all the way to President Obama. They were all involved to one degree or another with illegally spying on or undermining Trump and his administration and supporters before and after the election. The extent of this we are only beginning to understand.
To put it mildly, not good. Whether you call this treason is up to you, but you can be sure Middle America (i. e. those elusive independent voters) will not appreciate it.
But there’s something worse — and Pelosi’s knows it. The only hope for Democrats to defeat Trump is, remote and quixotic as it may be, impeachment. In the midst of the current brouhaha, Joe Biden — their great (alas white male) hope — is being exposed as not just a senile plagiarist, but a senile, corrupt plagiarist with a freaky family out of a Southern gothic novel with tentacles reaching into China and Ukraine. Again, not good.
Unfortunately, the rest of the Dems have tacked so far to the left that they wouldn’t be able to win an election in Shenyang. Sanders, speaking of senility, is almost risible. He wants to restrict population for reasons of “climate change” when every one of the myriad social programs he so vehemently urges depends on strong continued population growth for economic survival, irrespective of taxes. (Is he that stupid? I don’t think so. He’s just a liar.)
As for his somewhat subtle clone, Ms. Warren, her proposals are if anything more extreme because she fails to acknowledge (though Colbert did his best to encourage her) that they are going to cost a ton of taxpayer money that approaches national bankruptcy. Even taxing the rich at one hundred percent won’t come near supporting her ideas. Wait until Trump gets ahold of that.
What’s the magic word that made Democrats go extra apeshit over the Ukraine meeting? Crowdstrike:
To understand how important this is, we must remember the foundation for the entire Russian election interference narrative, ‘Muh Russia – writ large, is built on the claim Russians hacked the servers of the Democrat National Committee (DNC), and subsequently released damaging emails that showed the DNC worked to help Hillary Clinton and eliminate Bernie Sanders.
Despite the Russian ‘hacking’ claim the DOJ and FBI previously admitted the DNC would not let FBI investigators review the DNC server or cloud-based network. Instead the original claim was that the DNC provided the FBI with analysis of a technical review done through a cyber-security contract with Crowdstrike.
According to the original FBI statements made by James Comey: Crowdstrike did the captured imaging of the DNC network (servers/cloud), then conducted analysis, then provided a report to the DNC with their findings; and that report was given to the FBI. At least that was the original 2017 claim. However, during court filings in the case against Roger Stone, the DOJ/FBI later admitted they never even saw the Crowstrike final report.
Lawyers representing Roger Stone requested the full Crowdstrike report on the DNC hack. When the DOJ responded to the Stone motion they made a rather significant admission. Not only did the FBI not review the DNC server or cloud data, the FBI/DOJ never even saw the final Crowdstrike report.
The narrative around the DNC hack claim was always sketchy; many people believe the DNC email data was downloaded onto a flash drive and leaked. Crowdstrike was a private contractor holding a strong conflict of interest over Clinton and DNC interests. With this FBI court admission the scale of sketchy increased exponentially.
There was, and still is, absolutely no evidence the DNC was “hacked” (WikiLeaks claims the information was an inside job of “leaking”), and even John Podesta admitted himself he was a victim of an ordinary “phishing” password change scam.
This admission meant the FBI and DOJ, and all of the downstream claims by the intelligence apparatus; including the December 2016 Joint Analysis Report and January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, all the way to the Weissmann/Mueller report and the continued claims therein; were based on the official intelligence agencies of the U.S. government and the U.S. Department of Justice taking the word of a hired contractor for the Democrat party….. despite their inability to examine the server and/or actually see an unredacted technical forensic report from the investigating contractor.
If politics were regulated the way that consumer goods are, Nancy Pelosi might be charged by the FTC with deceptive packaging for her ridiculous announcement yesterday that an “official” impeachment inquiry is underway. It is pure theater, designed to appease the radicals like Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, who two days ago denounced the failure to impeach as worse than Trump’s “crimes.” With radical primary challengers and a San Francisco constituency given to backing lunatic schemes and politicians, she fears for her political career.
The only way that impeachment begins is with a floor vote of the House, after which time subpoenas can be issued and the facts assembled for Articles of Impeachment to be presented to the House, and, if voted by a majority, submitted to the Senate for trial, which requires a two-thirds majority for conviction. What Pelosi offered was deceptively packaged oversight hearings by six committees. All she is doing is adding five more committees to the hearings already underway by Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s Judiciary Committee.
The obvious is that they are fishing for votes. Warren has a putative weakness with African American voters. Tom Steyer is unknown to them (as he is to a lot of people). Harris is sinking fast and needs to shore up her rep and Julián Castro’s campaign has barely been registering enough to keep him on the debate stage.
But beneath this are more disturbing beliefs, one of which is on the edge of disgusting and actually racist: that African Americans prefer to be lied to than told the truth. The corollary to this is that they are easily lied to if you stir them up. The level of disrespect in this is off the charts.
Also at play here, as it is everywhere in Democratic precincts, is Fear of Trump. African Americans are doing better under Trump than they ever have been in this country with unemployment at record lows and salaries up.
Further, Trump really did something never done before — spearheaded and signed criminal justice reform legislation. Better not remind black people of that. Distract them or lie to them instead. Call Trump a racist, though why would a racist do such a thing?
Man starts a program to help other men get off heroin. The Southern Poverty Law Center called him a white supremacist. Now he’s suing their ass for $4.8 million, and a district judge just gave the green light to start discovery.
“What’s Wrong With Chinese GDP Data?” “Since 2013, GDP figures look suspiciously smooth.”
If proven, this deserves serious prison time: “California Sheriff Under Investigation For ‘Pay To Play’ Concealed Carry Permits.” Namely to campaign donors. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
“Some 600,000 vacationers were stranded when Thomas Cook, a travel company that has been in business for 178 years, collapsed on Sunday.”
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I thought fall started tomorrow, but various reference sources say the fall equinox doesn’t actually occur until Monday, September 23.
What happens when a political party is hijacked by fanatics, ideologues, and hysterics who don’t care whether they win or lose an election?
They lose elections.
That’s where the Democrats are headed because they’d rather be “right” than clever. And when it comes to the issue of race, Democrats think they have a corner on “right.”
They’ve got a small problem, though. In order to appeal to the fanatics, ideologues, and hysterics to tap them for money and support, they have to at least give lip service to their warped views on race. And that includes calling you and me and about 70 percent of the American voters “racist.”
Not only did Christine Blasey Ford’s key witness and friend — Leland Keyser — state that she didn’t recall the party where Ford claimed she was assaulted, she also says she doesn’t remember “any others like it.”
Her words were strong: “It would be impossible for me to be the only girl at a get-together with three guys, have her leave, and then not figure out how she’s getting home,” she said. “I just really didn’t have confidence in the story.”
Even more, Pogrebin and Kelly uncovered a pressure campaign to get Keyser to alter her testimony, to back Ford. Keyser told the writers, “I was told behind the scenes that certain things could spread about me if I didn’t comply,” and they report on group texts containing ominous language about Keyser’s allegedly “f***ed up” life.
While the reaction to the allegations against Kavanaugh was almost uniformly partisan (Republicans rejected the claims; Democrats either believed them or thought they cast enough doubt on Kavanaugh to deny him the nomination), there is — in fact — a truth of the matter here. Kavanaugh did or did not assault Ford, and in any fair proceeding Keyser’s testimony would detonate like a bomb. Remember, this wasFord’s witness and friend. She’s a Democrat. And, moreover, there was now evidence of a pressure campaign that looked a lot like an attempt to suborn perjury.
Pogrebin is at the center of a discussion of gross journalistic malpractice after publishing a story Saturday night with colleague Kate Kelly that failed to mention that a woman who, according to a man named Max Stier, had Kavanaugh’s penis pressed into her hand at a campus party by multiple friends of his has said she recalls no such incident. That woman has also declined to talk about the matter with reporters or officials. Why even publish Stier’s claim, which was discounted by Washington Post reporters who heard about it a year ago, that he witnessed such an incident during a Yale party in the 1980s? Because of the narrative, Pogrebin says. “We decided to go with it because obviously it is of a piece with a kind of behavior,” she said on WMAL. Pure confirmation bias.
Though the woman at the center of the story wants no part of it, Kelly and Pogrebin published her name anyway (in their book, albeit not in the Times). “You’re kind of directing attention at a victim and she’s gonna be besieged,” Pogrebin said on the radio show, in explaining why the Times piece left the name out. “Even if people can ultimately find her name, it’s not necessarily important to make it easier for them to do so.” Oh, so publishing her name in a book does not constitute making it too easy for people to find this private citizen? It’s a separate but serious scandal. This woman has been made a public figure in a national story without her consent. Even if she were the victim of sexual misconduct, the Times would ordinarily take steps to protect her identity. Yet she has made no claim along these lines, and Pogrebin and Kelly outed her anyway. Is there no respect for a woman’s privacy? Is every woman in America to think of herself as potential collateral damage should she ever cross paths with any Republican whom Times reporters later tried to take down?
In her WMAL interview this morning, Pogrebin repeatedly refers to the woman as a “victim.” This word choice is instructive about Pogrebin’s thought process. Calling her a victim would be begging the question if the woman claimed this status for herself. She would then be only an alleged victim. But she isn’t even that. She has made no claim to be a victim, yet Pogrebin describes her as one anyway. This is a case of a reporter overriding her reporting with her opinion. Pogrebin then impugns the woman by saying she was so drunk that her memory can’t be trusted. She also says that “everyone” at the party was massively drunk and that their memories are therefore unreliable.
Does she hear herself talking? If this is true, it means Max Stier was also drunk and his memories also can’t be trusted. (Someone should ask Pogrebin whether she was present at this party about which she knows so much.) By what journalistic standard does a reporter discount what is said by the person with the most direct and relevant experience of a matter — the woman in question at the Yale party — in favor of a drunken bystander? If both the woman and Stier were drunk, why is his memory more credible than hers? If something like this had actually happened to her, wouldn’t she be more likely than anyone else to remember it? Maybe Stier is remembering a different party. Maybe he’s remembering a different guy. Maybe he made it up.
A new America supposedly is marching forward under the banner of ending fossil fuels, curbing the Second Amendment, redistributing income, promoting identity politics and open borders, and providing free college, free health care and abortion on demand.
An insomniac Trump fights all of the above nonstop and everywhere. In the past, Republican presidents sought to slow the progressive transformation of America but despaired of ever stopping it.
No slugfest is too off-topic or trivial for Trump. Sometimes that means calling out former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick for persuading NFL stars to kneel during the national anthem. Huge, monopolistic Silicon Valley companies are special Trump targets. Sometimes Trump enters cul-de-sac Twitter wars with Hollywood has-beens who have attacked him and his policies.
Trump variously goes after antifa, political correctness on campus, the NATO hierarchy, the radical green movement, Planned Parenthood, American universities and, above all, the media — especially CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
For all the acrimony and chaos — and prognostications of Trump’s certain failure — a bloodied Trump wins more than he loses. NATO members may hate Trump, but more are finally paying their promised defense contributions.
In retrospect, many Americans concede that the Iran Deal was flawed and that the Paris climate accord mere virtue signaling. China was long due for a reckoning.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation proved fruitless and was further diminished by Mueller’s bizarrely incoherent congressional testimony.
Some of the most prominent Trump haters — Michael Avenatti, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Antony Scaramucci and Rep. Adam Schiff — either have been discredited or have become increasingly irrelevant.
Trump has so enraged his Democratic adversaries that the candidates to replace him have moved further to the left than any primary field in memory. They loathe Trump, but in their abject hatred he has goaded the various Democratic candidates into revealing their support for the crazy Green New Deal, reparations for slavery, relaxed immigration policies and trillions of dollars in new free stuff.
In a way, the left-wing Democratic presidential candidates understand Trump best. If he wins his one-man crusade to stop the progressive project, they are finished, and their own party will make the necessary adjustments and then sheepishly drift back toward the center.
Democratic megadonor Ed Buck finally arrested after overdosing a third black man. This one, unlike the previous two, survived. He’s also been charged with running a meth ring.
So evidently TWO dead black men is the absolute limit for rich gay white Democratic Party donors to get away with before attracting the attention of California law enforcement! THREE times is just one too many!
JFK, even Clancy Wiggums would have slapped the cuffs after death #2
The real issue is far older and more important than whether 52 percent of Britain finally became understandably aggrieved by the increasingly anti-democratic and German-controlled European Union.
England is an island. Historically, politically and linguistically, it was never permanently or fully integrated into European culture and traditions.
The story of Britain has mostly been about conflict with France, Germany or Spain. The preeminence of the Royal Navy, in the defiant spirit of its sea lords, ensured that European dictators from Napoleon to Hitler could never set foot on British soil. As British admiral John Jervis reassured his superiors in 1801 amidst rumors of an impending Napoleonic invasion, “I do not say, my lords, that the French will not come. I say only they will not come by sea.”
Britain’s sea power, imperialism, parliamentary government and majority Protestant religion set it apart from its European neighbors — and not just because of its geographical isolation.
The 18th century British and Scottish Enlightenment of Edmund Burke, David Hume, John Locke and Adam Smith emphasized individualism, freedom and liberty far more than the government-enforced equality of result that was favored by French Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is no accident that the American Revolution was founded on the idea of individual freedom and liberty, unlike the later French Revolution’s violent effort to redistribute income and deprive “enemies of the people” of their rights and even their lives.
Hillary Clinton blames her 2016 presidential defeat on “voter suppression.” Which is a weird way to say “refusing to campaign in the Midwest.”
Poll of Palestinian opinions. I’m sure many will point out the 37-50% (depending on the question) who support war against Israel. I’m more interested in the 48% who believe in possession by djinn or demons. (To be fair, the percentage in America would probably be similar in 1973…)
Israel’s election is still up in the air. The liberalish Blue and White faction appears to have edged Likud 33 to 31, but 61 votes are required to form a government. Current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he has 55 votes to form a coalition government with orthodox religious parties that Blue and White vows not to join a coalition with.
Although meat has been a central component of the diet of our lineage for millions of years, some nutrition authorities—who often have close connections to animal rights activists or other forms of ideological vegetarianism, such as Seventh-Day Adventism (Banta et al., 2018 Banta, J. E., J. W. Lee, G. Hodgkin, Z. Yi, A. Fanica, and J. Sabate. 2018. The global influence of the Seventh-day Adventist Church on diet. Religions 9 (9):251. doi: 10.3390/rel9090251.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar])—are promoting the view that meat causes a host of health problems and has no redeeming value. We contend that a large part of the case against meat is based on cherry-picked evidence and low-quality observational studies. The bald claim that red meat is an “unhealthy food” (Willett et al., 2019 Willett, Walter, Johan Rockström, Brent Loken, Marco Springmann, Tim Lang, Sonja Vermeulen, Tara Garnett, David Tilman, Fabrice DeClerck, Amanda Wood., et al. 2019. Food in the anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet 393 (10170):447–92. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) is wildly unsupported.
Based on misrepresentations of the state of the science, some organizations are attempting to influence policy makers to take action to reduce meat consumption. Simplification of complex science increases persuasive power but may also serve ideological purposes and lead to scientistic approaches. According to Mayes and Thompson (2015 Mayes, C. R., and D. B. Thompson. 2015. What should we eat? biopolitics, ethics, and nutritional scientism. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 12 (4):587–99. doi: 10.1007/s11673-015-9670-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), manifestations of nutritional scientism in the context of biopolitics can have various ethical implications for “individual responsibility and freedom, concerning iatrogenic harm, and for well-being”. Well-meaning yet overemphasized and premature recommendations may eventually cause more damage than benefit, not only physiologically but also by unjustifiably holding individuals accountable for their health outcomes. We believe that a large reduction in meat consumption, such as has been advocated by the EAT-Lancet Commission (Willett et al., 2019 Willett, Walter, Johan Rockström, Brent Loken, Marco Springmann, Tim Lang, Sonja Vermeulen, Tara Garnett, David Tilman, Fabrice DeClerck, Amanda Wood., et al. 2019. Food in the anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet 393 (10170):447–92. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), could produce serious harm. Meat has long been, and continues to be, a primary source of high-quality nutrition. The theory that it can be replaced with legumes and supplements is mere speculation. While diets high in meat have proved successful over the long history of our species, the benefits of vegetarian diets are far from being established, and its dangers have been largely ignored by those who have endorsed it prematurely on the basis of questionable evidence.
Heh: I seem to have my own Fark logo now: . Fark used to be more-or-less balanced between left and right posters, but that went away several years ago (long before Trump), and now it’s overwhelmingly left-wing trolling. Every time the Clown Car update gets linked, there’s a tsunami of hate posting, “your blog sucks,” accusations of paying off admins, etc. Honestly, I suspect that all the rageposting is precisely why the admins greenlight the links…
Saudi Arabia’s oil production has been severely disrupted by drone attacks on two major oil facilities run by state-owned company Aramco, reports say.
Sources quoted by Reuters and WSJ said the strikes had reduced production by five million barrels a day – nearly half the kingdom’s output.
The fires are now under control at both facilities, Saudi state media say.
A spokesman for the Iran-aligned Houthi group in Yemen said it had deployed 10 drones in the attacks.
The spokesman, Yahya Sarea, told al-Masirah TV, which is owned by the Houthi movement and is based in Beirut, that further attacks could be expected in the future.
Snip.
Aramco is not only the world’s biggest oil producer, it is also one of the world’s most profitable businesses.
The Khurais oilfield produces about 1% of the world’s oil, and Abqaiq is the company’s largest facility – with the capacity to process 7% of the global supply. Even a brief or partial disruption could affect the company, and the oil supply, given their size.
There was a sharp intake of breath as analysts I spoke to today digested the information that reports suggest that half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production could have been knocked offline by these attacks.
The country produces 10% of the world’s crude oil. Cutting this in half could have a significant effect on the oil price come Monday when markets open.
However, Aramco has yet to confirm the scale of the damage.
The success of the drone strike shows the vulnerability of its infrastructure, at a time when it is trying to show itself in its best light while gearing up to float on the stock market.
And it raises concerns that escalating tensions in the region could pose a broader risk to oil, potentially threatening the fifth of the world’s supply that goes through the critical Strait of Hormuz.
It’s burning pretty well:
My tabula rasa expectation is that, absent gross Saudi mismanagement, all those facilities will be back online in a few weeks. The global oil industry is extremely robust at recovering from disasters, either natural or man-made.
The situation in Yemen will remain intractable as long as the Iranians continue to fund the Houthis and Saudi Arabia is unwilling (or unable) to expend the resources to crush them completely. The quickest past to peace in Yemen is continuing the pressure of sanctions until the Islamic Republic regime gives up their meddling or collapses.
Welcome to a Friday the 13th LinkSwarm! Try to avoid hockey-mask-wearing serial killers today.
Although I feel slightly dirty putting up a link to Vox, this piece on how Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend warps the politics of the state is worth reading, even if you have to factor in Vox’s anti-conservative bias. And I was unaware that Alaska now has the highest unemployment rate in the country…
Chicago, Los Angeles and New York are among the worst-run cities in the country, and residents are leaving. If only there was one single common (D)enominator to all those cities…
President Trump seeks a ban on flavored vaping. This is a very stupid approach to something that is largely a non-problem. It’s not the government’s purpose to protect people from themselves, even if it were vaping is several orders of magnitude less dangerous to your health than smoking, and this is appropriately handled at the state or local (not national) level. Plus there is a sufficient framework of laws to making sales to minors illegal anywhere they’re not already illegal. President Trump is simply wrong here.
Brexit is already changing the British economy. For the better.
The economy overall expanded by 0.3 per cent in July, significantly faster than the 0.1 per cent expected, and better than most of our main rivals. Next, we found out that the trade deficit narrowed slightly as imports fell. Finally, we learned that employment was at record highs and that wages were still growing at record rates. Add in a Chancellor who is about to start spending money with carefree abandon and there is no reason why it shouldn’t improve from here. It isn’t fantastic. But it is a decent performance from a mature economy facing what is meant to be its biggest economic challenge in a generation.
The best data we have suggest that the vast majority of Americans view political correctness as a problem, and that, contra the claim of many progressives, this is not a battlefield consisting of resentful ranting whites on one side and oppressed people on the other, the latter simply asking to be treated and spoken of with decency. In fact, the people most enthusiastic about intense forms of language-policing tend to be more privileged and more white, according to a national political-correctness survey conducted by the firm More in Common that made headlines last year. As Yascha Mounk wrote in his writeup in The Atlantic, “While 83 percent of respondents who make less than $50,000 dislike political correctness, just 70 percent of those who make more than $100,000 are skeptical about it. And while 87 percent who have never attended college think that political correctness has grown to be a problem, only 66 percent of those with a postgraduate degree share that sentiment.” Moreover, “Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness.”
Now, people have criticized that survey on the grounds that if you ask people whether “X is a problem,” where X is a culture-war buzzword, you’re likely to get a lot of positive responses. I think there’s something to this critique, but the numbers are too overwhelming to fully discount it. I also think that if you’re going to argue that PC is just a synonym for “being a decent person” you should then explain why so many Americans think that concept is a problem. Are Americans that invested in indecency?
Plus, it would be one thing if this survey were some sort of strange outlier, but if you look at the data we have on specific culture-war blowups of relevance to the PC and/or cancel-culture debates, you find the same pattern over and over. Almost always, the opinions most commonly represented in mainstream progressive outlets are not held by the masses, including by the groups seemingly with the most at stake. I’ve written about this before: On issues ranging from Ralph Northam’s blackface scandal to the Washington football team name to what term(s) should be used to refer to people of recent Latin American descent, woke-progressive opinion is often very out of line with that of the majority of members of the groups in question. Not only do the wokest progressives not speak for Americans; they don’t speak for the groups they’re claiming to want to protect. A 40-year-old American Indian from Oklahoma — that paragon of wealth and privilege and white resentment, of course — made this point pretty succinctly when he was interviewed for a focus group which accompanied the release of the More In Common survey: “It seems like everyday you wake up something has changed … Do you say Jew? Or Jewish? Is it a black guy? African-American? … You are on your toes because you never know what to say. So political correctness in that sense is scary.”
“It’s new,” Stone says of cancel culture, the term used to refer to boycotts started (usually via social media) when a person or group is offended by a star or brand. “I don’t want to say it’s the same as it’s always been. The kids are fucking different than us. There’s a generational thing going on.” Currently, Dave Chappelle is in the crosshairs for his latest Netflix stand-up special, Sticks and Stones. “I know some people have been canceled for genuinely, like, personal behavior, but Dave is not getting canceled anytime soon,” Stone says, joking that South Park and Chappelle are “grandfathered” out of the culture.
Stone also shared his theory as to why critics were so hard on the latest Chappelle special, while viewers seemed to enjoy it far more. “I feel bad for television critics and cultural critics,” he explains. “They may have laughed like hell at that, and then they went home and they know what they have to write to keep their job. So when I read TV reviews or cultural reviews, I think of someone in prison, writing. I think about somebody writing a hostage note. This is not what they think. This is what they have to do to keep their job in a social media world. So I don’t hold it against them.”
Also:
One of the most notable aspects from last season was the lack of any political dealings, specifically the nearly total absence of Donald Trump via the Mr. Garrison persona. “It was nice for us,” Parker says. “It was nice to not come in and talk about Donald Trump. And I think it was nice for people to watch and go, ‘Oh, yeah, there is still comedy outside of fucking Donald Trump. There is still funny shit as the world goes on.’ And you can get your Trump comedy on so many other shows.”
Every segment they air is selected because they think/hope it will damage President Trump and disenfranchise the tens of millions of Americans who voted for and support him. They don’t report news. They select only stories that they think will damage President Trump, and ignore or otherwise downplay and dilute the stories that don’t.
MyPayrollHR, a now defunct cloud-based payroll processing firm based in upstate New York, abruptly ceased operations this past week after stiffing employees at thousands of companies. The ongoing debacle, which allegedly involves malfeasance on the part of the payroll company’s CEO, resulted in countless people having money drained from their bank accounts and has left nearly $35 million worth of payroll and tax payments in legal limbo.
Snip.
Financial institutions are supposed to ignore or reject payment instructions that don’t comport with precise formatting required by the National Automated Clearinghouse Association (NACHA), the not-for-profit organization that provides the backbone for the electronic movement of money in the United States. But Slavkin said a number of financial institutions ended up processing both reversal requests, meaning a fair number of employees at companies that use MyPayrollHR suddenly saw a month’s worth of payroll payments withdrawn from their bank accounts.
Fake influencer exposed. Oh wait, let me rephrase that: More fake than usual influencer exposed. I’m not on Instagram, and I’m incredulous that “influencer” is even a thing. Maybe I could start an “anti-influencer” channel, with just videos of me reading a book while occasionally sipping from a can of off-brand diet root beer. Maybe I could get famous brands to me not to wear their clothing…
Permit me to list just a few of the more troubling accounts I was privy to during the committee’s meeting. Far more times than I would care to mention, the name “Indiana Jones” (the adopted title Dr. Jones insists on being called) has appeared in governmental reports linking him to the Nazi Party, black-market antiquities dealers, underground cults, human sacrifice, Indian child slave labor, and the Chinese mafia. There are a plethora of international criminal charges against Dr. Jones, which include but are not limited to: bringing unregistered weapons into and out of the country; property damage; desecration of national and historical landmarks; impersonating officials; arson; grand theft (automobiles, motorcycles, aircraft, and watercraft in just a one week span last year); excavating without a permit; countless antiquities violations; public endangerment; voluntary and involuntary manslaughter; and, allegedly, murder.
(Hat tip: Greg Benford on Facebook.)
Poland frowns on Greenpeace’s shenanigans:
No messing about 💪
Armed Polish border guards board Greenpeace 'Rainbow Warrior' ship blocking the delivery of coal to the port of Gdansk.
Greenpeace have accused Polish authorities of using excessive force.
. Fark used to be more-or-less balanced between left and right posters, but that went away several years ago (long before Trump), and now it’s overwhelmingly left-wing trolling. Every time the Clown Car update gets linked, there’s a tsunami of hate posting, “your blog sucks,” accusations of paying off admins, etc. Honestly, I suspect that all the rageposting is precisely why the admins greenlight the links…
