As always, Pie’s shtick is a left-leaning reporter who nonetheless calls out his fellow lefties on their obtuse blindness in their own narrow, insular view of the world. Some quotes:
“How could we possibly have lost? Everyone I know voted the same way I did!”
“‘How could that be? Everyone I know spent election day same as me: Posting amusing pro-Labour memes on Instagram, and spending the preceding six weeks calling anyone who voted Leave, or was thinking of voting Tory, thick as shit! How could we possibly have lost?’ Once again, the strategy of calling everyone who was thinking of voting differently to me self-serving, inward looking, stupid, racist, Leave-voting scum, paid absolute dividends, didn’t it?”
“When are we going to get it into our thick skulls that the country voted to leave the European Union? Twice now!”
“Refusing to talk to people you disagree with whilst assuming the motives behind their voting decision is a recipe for disaster!”
And the real money quote that can’t be repeated too many times:
“When will we learn that the real world is not on your Facebook feed?”
About 3:15 in starts he repeating various talking Labour cliches rather than dissecting them, but it’s still worth watching.
This piece on the UK elections ties together a lot of arguments I’ve been making about how Social Justice Warrior “wokeness” alienates the left’s traditional working class constituents, both here and in the UK:
This was a victory, above everything, for decency; a rejection of every strain – not just the Corbynite variety – of the linguistic and psychological thuggery that Labour has dressed up as virtue and forced down your throat since 1997. The political map is redrawn, and the Tory Party entirely re-invented. The consequences of that reinvention deserve many articles – it is literally a new party. But first let’s pick over the brittle, dusty bones of a dead one.
The Labour Party (not “The Left”) is history. Even when Blair reduced the Conservatives to their heartlands in the 1990s, the party still had heartlands. Labour, in 2019, doesn’t. It’s a collective noun for student Marxists, trades union hard-men, and spiteful anti-Semites. That’s not a political party: it’s a pathogen. A pathogen with nowhere to replicate.
The Blairite leftovers in Parliament have no sociological constituency to give them hope. Were some miracle to strike the planet and, for example, Yvette Cooper to become leader: do you think her approach to immigration, or those robotically-repeated platitudes about equality, sprung from the deathly pages of an identity-politics HR manual, could win back the good people of, say, Sedgefield?
Neither will intellectual renewal come from the fourth estate for ‘moderate’ Labour (the scare quotes around ‘moderate’ are apposite, because I’m unclear how MPs who willingly empowered a hard-Left, terrorist-succouring leadership, and wanted you to vote it into power, could label themselves thus). The columnist cheerleaders of ‘moderate’ Labour, social democracy, whatever – they’ll keep coughing up their pro-EU yawn pieces, laced with their Boris hatred, until economic reality catches up with their increasingly un-read newspapers, and The Guardian closes its doors.
Could the Left’s future come from the gut, rather than the brain? Perhaps a mission can be discerned within the screech-sheet manifesto of Jess Phillip’s Twitterfeed: Boris-is-a-racist, Boris-hates-women, Boris-eats-your-kids, I’m authentic, me, I care therefore you can’t.
Phillips is only one example of this category error made by so many Labour MPs, this conflation of the needs of human beings with their own desire for power. All that bleating in the concession speeches of defeated Labour candidates about their “real fear” for the ill, the old, the unemployed in their seats — the very voters who had just rejected them. As though no-one who isn’t Labour could either care or devise a politics to help the troubled souls in our midst. They have no idea why they lost.
I do. He’s called Keith, and he’s my husband. He’s never been political — once or twice in the distant past, when we lived in Hackney, I dragged him out leafletting with me. He loathed it, and told me to stop asking. He’s a working-class Plymothian, an electrician, but with a capable brain and a heart every bit as large as Jess Phillips’s.
Do you think men and women like Keith don’t notice, Jess, when you claim that only socialists like you care about people? That his vote in the Brexit referendum was tarnished, because he doesn’t have a degree? Do you believe him so arithmetically incapable that he couldn’t predict what your policies would do to the savings accrued from decades of average-income work?
And do you think he was deaf to the anti-Semites in your movement, blind to your party’s tolerance of them? He’s an unexamined Anglican, and the only Jewish people we know are the married couple next door; did you assume, therefore, he would swallow all that guff about Labour being the sole repository of moral virtue, that he couldn’t draw a line between your leader’s “friends” and the fear we could smell on our street?
Labour treated Keith – and the millions like him – like a fool, Jess, like your property, to be told what to think and how to speak and how to vote. How to feel shame for his instinct for Leave. He saw your Twitterfeed, and Hugh’s, and Richard Osman’s, and that of every smug ex-footballer with a gig pushing junk food to children, so he understands that you think he’s either ignorant, or wicked, for not being Labour.
The result? Keith hates your party, Jess, at a much more visceral (and therefore irrevocable) level than the intellectual dislike I feel for socialism in general. You – and all those sleb out-riders – might feel better for the constant display of Tory-hatred you share on social media. One of the many mistakes you make about men like Keith is to confuse the fact that he’d never dream of mentioning his feelings about the Labour Party in public, with the idea that somehow those feelings don’t exist, that they can’t have consequences.
But they can, and do, have consequences. On Thursday, without telling me, Keith took time off work. For the first time in his life, he went to the Tory office on the High Street, picked up lists of names, and walked round the homes of our neighbours, in the rain, in the dark, encouraging Conservatives to come out and vote.
The dramatic irony! Labour finally achieved its ambition to empower and politicise the working-class: Keith walked 15 miles on Thursday, but he’d have crawled over broken glass to keep people like Corbyn from winning seats like Barnet.
The hat tip for that comes from this Rod Dreher piece. Dreher, who is, shall we say, “#NeverTrump adjacent,” starts by talking about the tranny madness that’s swept up the left, then offers further thoughts on how the woke left absolutely despises the normal peoplethat it used to claim was its base:
A lot of people who don’t like Trump really hate being treated by the media, by many Democrats, and by liberal spokespeople as if they’re ignorant, or wicked, or bigoted, because they aren’t Woke. The New York Times earlier this year undertook a big project with the goal of rewriting American history around the claim that the whole point of America was … slavery. Remember this from the leaked transcript of a Times internal meeting with executive editor Dean Baquet?:
I just feel like racism is in everything. And therefore should be systemically worked into all stories in the paper! And get this — Baquet didn’t challenge this. This is par for the course for our media today. I’m not going to go into a long list here; I talk about this a fair amount on this blog anyway. The point is, you don’t have to love Donald Trump to get sick and tired of being told by these people that to prove yourself a decent person, you have to hate yourself, hate the country, hate your traditions, hate your dad, hate your sons (especially the unborn ones), hate your religion, hate your pronouns, hate your people, hate the cops, hate what was just fine five minutes ago, hate your happiness, hate your penis, and hate your life — and oh, you also have to vote Democratic. Otherwise, you’re a HATER!
All the Democrats would have to do to get rid of Donald Trump is just be normal. They can’t do it. Just cannot do it. Even old Uncle Joe, the most normal of them, if he steps out of line, the wokesters whip him back into shape. Bernie doesn’t really care about that stuff, not like he cares about economics, but let’s not kid ourselves: under any Democratic president, the woke will be in charge, and will not compromise on any of it.
I don’t think Donald Trump is anywhere close to normal. He’s a freak, in his way. But then, in the way he lives, Jeremy Corbyn is far closer to the average Briton than the toff Boris Johnson, graduate of Eton and Oxford. But who did the working class trust more with their futures? The Old Etonian. Why do you suppose that is?
Unlike Keith with Labour, I can’t say that I hate the Democrats, and I certainly don’t love the Republicans. But I know that the kind of people running movement liberalism really do think people like me are a problem to be solved. Don’t tell me it’s not true. I read their papers and magazines. I listen to their newscasts. I hear every day, in my e-mail and on this blog, from people who are having to live with their oppressive spitefulness in the workplace, or who are scared to death for their kids because of the gender ideology revolution in their schools.
Snip.
The point is, ordinary people are feeling besieged in concrete ways all the time, and nobody talks about it openly, because the kind of people who lead the Democratic Party and its activist allies would happily seen them stigmatized and professionally destroyed. This is not a supposition. We see it happening around us. Last week, a Republican normie friend told me that he didn’t vote Trump in 2016, but having seen how far left the Democrats have gone on the culture since 2016, he’s going to vote Trump without any regret.
The hard left has made it clear that they despise, absolutely despise members of the working class, or even anyone without a college degree. They especially hate that ordinary people resist their Social Justice Warrior “wokeness,” and refuse to let transsexual madness and victimhood identity politics get shoved down their throats. The woke can’t hide their naked contempt for those inbred redneck freaks of JesusLand, even when it costs them elections. And their self-imposed reality bubbles prevent them from realizing just how unpopular and distasteful their attitudes and policies have become to ordinary people.
I’ve been saying this over and over again for longer than Trump’s been President. Remember this Jonathan Pie video from just after Trump’s election?
The left is responsible for this result, because the left has now decided to any other opinion, any other way of looking at the world, is unacceptable. We don’t debate anymore because the left won the cultural war, so if you’re on the right you’re a freak! You’re evil! You’re racist! You’re stupid! You are a basket of deplorables! How do you think people are going to vote if you talk to them like that? When has anyone ever been persuaded by being insulted or labeled? So now if you’re on the right or even against the prevailing view you are attacked for raising your opinion. That’s why people wait until they’re in the voting booth, where no one’s watching anymore, there’s no blame or shame or anything, and you can finally say what you really think, and that is a powerful thing.
The left has learned nothing in three years, and feel that rising minority demographics (you know, the same minorities that disapprove of gay marriage and tranny madness) are going to save them at the ballot box in 2020.
One wonders: If Trump wins a landslide victory in 2020, will they be willing to change course then?
I rather doubt it. They didn’t learn from 2010, 2014, or 2016. All evidence suggests that they’ll cling to their wokeness, and their naked contempt for those they feel are beneath them, no matter how many elections it costs them.
Although I know much of the Midwest has already been blessed with several feet of global warming, winter doesn’t officially start until tomorrow. In the meantime, finish up your Christmas shopping (if you haven’t already) and enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm!
Brexit bill passes by huge majority. Britain is set to leave the EU by January 31, 2020. I’m putting this first because Brexit is far more important in the long run than the impeachment farce.
The amazing psychic powers of Instapundit. From 2017: “Trump knows that the press isn’t trusted very much, and that the less it’s trusted, the less it can hurt him. So he’s prodding reporters to do things that will make them less trusted, and they’re constantly taking the bait. They’re taking the bait because they think he’s dumb, and impulsive, and lacking self-control — but he’s the one causing them to act in ways that are dumb and impulsive, and demonstrate lack of self-control.”
But then again, no president in modern memory has been on the receiving end of such overwhelmingly negative media coverage and a three-year effort to abort his presidency, beginning the day after his election.
Do we remember the effort to subvert the Electoral College to prevent Trump from assuming office?
The first impeachment try during his initial week in office?
Attempts to remove Trump using the ossified Logan Act or the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution?
The idea of declaring Trump unhinged, subject to removal by invoking the 25th Amendment?
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month, $35 million investigation, which failed to find Trump guilty of collusion with Russia in the 2016 election and failed to find actionable obstruction of justice pertaining to the non-crime of collusion?
The constant endeavors to subpoena Trump’s tax returns and to investigate his family, lawyers and friends?
Now, frustrated Democrats plan to impeach Trump, even as they are scrambling to find the exact reasons why and how.
Most presidents might seem angry after three years of that. Yet in paradoxical fashion, Trump suddenly appears more composed than at any other time in his volatile presidency.
Ironically, Trump’s opponents and enemies are the ones who have become publicly unhinged.
If you want to know how it’s playing out in America, check out this tweet from PolitiBunny, who was so hardcore #NeverTrump she voted for Egg McMuffin in 2016:
No amount of persuasion, begging, or even outright harassment could convince me to vote for Trump in 2016.
Democrats not only made me a Trump voter last night, but I’m officially ready to do what I can to help him get re-elected.
The House passes the USMCA free trade deal, and I expect senate approval to be quick. USMCA will have longer and more lasting consequences than the silly theater the Democrats put on Wednesday.
Of the 65 deadliest cities in America, over 90% have Democratic mayors, and over 70% have not had Republican mayors in a long, long time. The last Republican mayor of New Orleans left office in 1872… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Clearly Greta Thunberg is being exploited by her cynical puppetmasters, but equally clearly she’s a tiresome, bizarre Marxist scold whose exploitation of the hapless dummies who buy into the climate change hoax is part of what is an increasingly violent plot to undermine capitalism and freedom. Recently, the cretins at TIME, which shockingly still exists in 2019, named her “Person of the Year.” That’s appropriate, since 2019 has been a very annoying year.
In 2029, after the world hasn’t ended but her usefulness has, she’ll be a Jeopardy question and probably shacked up with an unemployed performance artist named Björn in an Oslo suburb. Fun fact: “Greta Thunberg” is Swedish for “Cindy Sheenhan.”
But today, we’re all supposed to fall over ourselves over Pippi Longnagging – at least that’s what our betters command – yet it’s unclear why. Teenagers are notoriously ignorant, and ones spewing recycled Marxism are the worst of all. But the idea is not that this tiresome truant is some visionary thinker. The idea is to leverage her youth and awkwardness to keep you from speaking the indisputable truth that she’s a weird brat who presses for an ideology that butchered 100 million people in the last century. And now, she is hinting she wants to run up that score.
Snip.
The other day, this malignant muppet “told cheering protesters … ‘we will make sure we put world leaders against the wall’ if they fail to take urgent action on climate change.” Now, maybe her English is bad, or maybe she’s just ignorant, but then again the murder of opponents is the Marxist way. Marxist? St. Greta? Well, let’s take a look at what was carved on the tablets she recently brought down from Mount Socialism:
“Schoolchildren, young people, and adults all over the world will stand together, demanding that our leaders take action, not because we want them to, but because the science demands it,” she said. “That action must be powerful and wide-ranging. After all, the climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will. Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all. Our political leaders can no longer shirk their responsibilities.”
Wait, “the science demands” that we “dismantle” all our “[c]olonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression?” Now, what science exactly is that? Is it geology? Physics? Phrenology maybe?
How stupid do they think people are? Very. And to judge by the judges at TIME, they’re often right. Maybe Greta never heard of Siberia or Cambodia, but we have. Screw that – if she wants to impose her masters’ Marxist fantasies on us, she’ll need to be packing something deadlier than “How dare you!”
Muslims across India staged angry protests over new legislation that grants citizenship rights for refugees fleeing Islamist persecution in the neighboring countries.
The Citizenship Amendment Bill, passed by the Lower House of the Indian parliament by 293 to 82 votes, opens the path to naturalization for the followers of six faiths, including Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians, but excludes Muslims.
Muslim mobs took to streets in several Indian cities, setting fire to vehicles, throwing stones, and hurling home-made bombs at security forces called in to restore order, Indian newspapers report. Left-wing student groups joined the protesters. They blockaded campuses in India’s capital New Delhi.
On the one hand, 95% of the time it is in fact Muslims who are persecuting the members of other religions. On the other, the trend in India under Modi has been toward a Hindu religious-ethno state, and things there could turn very bad, very quickly for the Muslim minority there. Muslims constitute only 14% or so of India’s population, but 14% of 1.3 billion is still some 182 million people. And by “very bad” I mean “possibly Rwanda-level bad,” only at 10 times the scale…
“Poland may have to leave EU, Supreme Court warns.” Hey, I bet I know at least a couple of countries who would be happy to sign free trade deals if they did…
I do not think it is a secret that Vox Media’s employment model has long been unsustainable. They use “contractor” designations to avoid all sorts of labor laws, including providing minimum wage and benefits — and they well exceed the intended use of “contractor.” I’ve published 1,304 articles in 8 years at Clips Nation. That’s not contract work. When I am on the site every day and have day-to-day oversight from corporate, that’s not contract work. Everyone, including SB Nation, has known that this model is unsustainable. While I won’t publicly disclose the numbers, and SB Nation limits our access to a lot of data, I am certain that Clips Nation generates enough revenue to support multiple employees, even when you account for the money that needs to support other aspects of the site (marketing, software, etc).
The state of California is cracking down on companies like SB Nation who are exploiting the “contractor” loophole, as it well should. Unfortunately, Vox Media is predictably unwilling to cease being greedy. In order to attempt to protect their disproportionate and exploitative revenue share from team sites, Vox has decided to eliminate about 200 of these contractor positions — every contractor in California, including myself, Robert, and our staff writers, editors, and podcasters in paid roles — and replace them with a handful of full-time employees who are going to work as a team to run SB Nation’s 25 team sites in California.
I doubt he knows how profitable Vox is. It’s entirely possible it loses money, like many online “media empires.” But I sincerely doubt Vox held a gun to his head those eight years. If he feels exploited for work he voluntarily agreed to do at the wages offered, he only has himself to blame. This is not to say that Vox doesn’t suck; it does. But this situation sucks not due to Vox, but due to the California state laws of which this freelancer so obviously approves.
Here’s an interview with Burt Ward, Robin on the 1960’s Batman TV show, about some of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans. Nowadays he and his wife run a dog rescue center, where they’ve eventuality saved the lives of more than 15,000. Good on you, Burt.
There are lots of conclusions to be drawn and lessons learned from Boris Johnson’s Conservative landslide victory over Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, especially for the American left, who I suspect will learn none of it.
“Only Socialism Can Defeat Trumpism,” by Nicole Aschoff and Bhaskar Sunkara, The Nation, November 2016
“The past year has shown that millions of ordinary people are ready for an alternative, one pointed to by the success of Sanders and the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in Britain …
As with the collapsing social democrats in Europe, the Democratic Party’s best bet is to move left and embrace a platform that speaks to the real needs, fears, and aspirations of working people …
For the Democrats, no less than their peers in Europe, where the neoliberalization of social democracy has opened up space for a populist right, the choice on offer might well be either socialism or irrelevance.”
“Jeremy Corbyn’s Success is a Model for American Progressives,” by James Downie, Washington Post, June 2017
“Corbyn’s success provides a model for U.S. progressives in 2018, 2020 and beyond: If you need turnout to win — as liberals in the United States do — you need a bold, uncompromising platform with real solutions …
Why was turnout so high? Because Corbyn was able to generate excitement among Labour voters, especially the young. That’s in no small part because of this year’s Labour manifesto (the British equivalent of a party platform). Unlike other recent versions, mostly incrementalist documents that tweaked what came before, the 2017 edition is the boldest in decades: more money for the National Health Services and other major initiatives, a “jobs first” Brexit and free university tuition, financed by taxing corporations and the wealthiest. The manifesto and the campaign were summed up by their elegantly simple slogan: “For the many, not the few.”
There’s lots more where that come from, but it’s striking that even his boosters boil down Corbyn’s appeal to the left as socialism, free stuff and hoary cliches. (Hat tip: wretchardthecat.) Like their embarrassing support for Hugo Chavez, I suspect their support for Corbyn will be memory-holed as quickly as possible.
Andrew Sullivan offers up (mostly) keen insight into Johnson’s win and Corbyn’s fall:
The sea of Tory blue seats that now envelop Labour’s heartlands on the electoral map of Britain is one kind of future for Western democracies. Unleashed by a revolt by ordinary people to take back control of their own laws and rebuild national sovereignty, and by their insistence that their decision to leave the E.U. be respected and implemented, it may have changed Britain’s politics in a structural way. Three political parties were decimated yesterday: the Labour Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, and the Brexit Party. Each party’s defeat tells you something more about a potential realignment of new politics.
The revulsion at Jeremy Corbyn was a big factor — especially, it seems, in the safest Labour seats in the north. The British people, after giving him the benefit of the doubt in 2017, turned on him. On his expansive, super-ambitious plan for massive investment in infrastructure and public services, they just didn’t believe the math. On his rancid long history of sympathizing with terrorists, they feared what he might do to the security services. On his anti-Semitism, they righteously humiliated the old codger. It tells you a lot about him that he still hasn’t resigned after the Labour Party’s worst showing since 1935. He has only promised not to lead the party into the election. He will stay on to control the succession battle and try to keep his faction in power. His goal was always controlling the Labour Party, not winning elections. He has lost two elections, but his grip on the party is going to be very hard to break. It took Labour 18 years to return to power after its drubbing at the 1983 election. It may take as long to recover from an even worse shellacking.
The Liberal Democrats collapsed for two core reasons. They epitomized the London liberal elites. A key promise was simply: We will revoke Brexit altogether, you dumbass voters. No second referendum, just a parliamentary program to nullify the referendum of 2016. Hard to think of a more elitist project than that. Then they embraced wokeness. In the last week of the campaign, their leader, Jo Swinson, got caught in long discussions about what she believes a woman is. She didn’t just lose the election, she lost her own seat. It is clearer and clearer to me that the wholesale adoption of critical race, gender, and queer theory on the left makes normal people wonder what on earth they’re talking about and which dictionary they are using. The white working classes are privileged? A woman can have a penis? In the end, the dogma is so crazy, and the language so bizarre, these natural left voters decided to listen to someone who does actually speak their language, even if in an absurdly plummy accent.
But the Brexit Party’s extinction may be the biggest deal. In last summer’s European elections, the Brexit party won 32 percent of the vote, and the Tories won a mere 9 percent. Six months later, the Brexit party is at 2 percent, and the Tories won 45 percent of the entire vote. It took a special kind of political genius to pull that off — and Dominic Cummings, the brilliant strategist behind the Leave campaign, should take a few minutes and take a bow. There is a chance now to harness the populist tide, rather than be drowned by it.
Here are the big gambles Johnson took to turn what was a nadir in Tory fortunes — plummeting to 22 percent this summer — into a landslide. He realized, unlike his peers, that ordinary people were close to revolt, and backed the cause of those left behind by the global economy, by grasping the Brexit issue. Without Johnson, the referendum would have been won by Remain. If he’d lost that referendum, his political career would have been over. The second big risk was quitting his own government when its Brexit plan seemed too soft, which he did by resigning as foreign secretary in the summer of 2018. And then, as the May deal failed to pass Parliament, he struck again — winning the leadership contest. In office, he rewrote the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement which the E.U. had said was nonnegotiable, and got his deal passed by a 30-vote majority.
Then the real gamble: Instead of sticking to getting Brexit done in Parliament, he called an early election to give himself a clear mandate for it. By fighting on the genius and simple slogan “Get Brexit Done,” he exposed the deep divides on the left, unified the right, and knocked his opponents for six (if you will forgive a cricket metaphor). But just as important, he moved the party sharply left on austerity, spending on public services, tax cuts for the working poor, and a higher minimum wage. He outflanked the far right on Brexit and shamelessly echoed the left on economic policy.
All this is so on-point that you know Sullivan must be saving up some Trump-bashing to sooth the outrage of his remaining leftwing readers. And indeed he throws some up in the next paragraph (snipped, along with the Disraeli “One Nation Conservatism” comparison).
What does this remarkable result mean for the U.S.? Here are some thoughts: Many will dismiss any lessons are applicable. They’ll say Britain is a very different place, Brexit is a unique issue, and Corbyn was exceptionally unpopular. There’s truth in all that. But take each point. Britain actually is very much like the U.S. right now. It too has become divided between liberal urban elites and everyone else, between nationalists and internationalists, between big cities and everywhere else, between those favoring a crackdown on new immigration and those who revel in open borders with 28 other countries. The polarization, tribalism, legislative gridlock: It’s uncanny how similar the places feel these days. And there’s a historical pattern in which Britain echoes the U.S. in political shifts: Thatcher and Reagan, George H.W. Bush and John Major, Blair and Clinton, Obama and Cameron, Brexit and Trump. I guess you can say this time it’s different. I suspect not.
And is Brexit that unique? Brexit was fueled by fears of mass immigration, globalized trade, cultural fragmentation, demographic shifts, and liberal overreach. So no, it’s by no means unique. It’s very much the same movement of left-behind people expressing their views on the same issues, who, tragically, put their trust in Trump. What we’ve seen is how tenacious a voting bloc that now is, which is why Trumpism is here to stay. If we could only get rid of the human cancer at the heart of it. [Told ya. -LP]
How much can be blamed on Corbyn? A lot, but what kind of politics does Corbyn represent? He was endorsed by AOC, love-bombed by Left Twitter, and favors proposals like borrowing massively to finance a Green New Deal that is as much about socialism as environmentalism. He’s deeply hostile to the Jewish state, wants to abolish NATO, declared he would never use a nuclear weapon, larked around the Soviet bloc for decades, and admired the regime in Venezuela. Hmm. Remind you of anyone?
Even on health care, which should have been Corbyn’s strongest issue, his spending plans were so fantastically huge that he lost credibility. Johnson wisely heaped praise on socialized medicine and proposed a big increase in investment but came nowhere near Labour’s proposals. And yet he won. It seems to me that the difference between Johnson and Corbyn is somewhat like that between Buttigieg and Bernie. A push left is essential. But a huge and unaffordable shift left? The British working classes said no. The same, I suspect, will happen here. If the Democrats go with Sanders or Warren’s Medicare for All, the Democrats could be obliterated. If the Democratic candidate cannot persuade people he or she wants to halt mass illegal immigration, ditto.
The political sweet spot in the next few years will be a combination of left economics and a celebration of the nation-state.
I sincerely doubt that the American center lies between “Buttigieg and Bernie.” The UK has had socialized medicine for a long time, making it impossible to dislodge. But I believe that his critique of the 2020 democratic presidential contenders going too far left on socialized medicine and open borders is spot on. As for “a combination of left economics and a celebration of the nation-state,” there’s a vein of truth embedded in a larger load of implied falsehood that needs to be unpacked at a greater length than I have time to undertake right now. (But see previous posts on how that sort of thing is playing out in Europe.)
I’m omitting most of his discussion of Labour’s cozy relationship with antisemitism to focus on this paragraph:
Why this relative indifference? Perhaps for the same reason I didn’t see it coming: So many of us thought this kind of thing was done with, we dismissed some of this news from our minds. But perhaps too it is a function of the race of these particular anti-Semites. We easily recognize — as we should — the familiar and ugly anti-Semitism of the far right, which remains much more of a threat than the far left. There was a telling tweet by Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, when she first heard the Jersey City news: “This is heartbreaking. White Supremacy Kills.” But the anti-Semitism of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement doesn’t as well? Remember the last time the Black Israelites were in the news — for taunting and lobbing racist insults at the white schoolboys from Covington. Adam Serwer, who sees white supremacy everywhere, reassured us that there was nothing really to see here: “Its members stand on crowded street corners with bullhorns and yell vile things, including racist, sexist, and homophobic slurs, at anyone who passes by. D.C. residents do not respond to these provocations with confrontation. They ignore them.” If those same insults were delivered by members of the Klan on street corners, would Serwer have said the same thing?
And that helps expose how the social-justice movement has diminished anti-Semitism as a threat. Since racism has been redefined to mean “structural racism” — as opposed to prejudice against others because of the color of their skin — the Black Israelites or groups of young black men in Brooklyn as agents of bigotry doesn’t compute for many of the woke. Under the new orthodoxy, people of color are almost by definition incapable of manifesting racial hatred, because it is merely a form of power. We were told by Tamika Mallory, former co-president of the Women’s March, that “white Jews, as white people, uphold white supremacy.” That is, Jews are victims but also victimizers according to these rules. The social-justice response to targeted murders of Jews qua Jews is thereby qualified.
The idea that “white supremacy” more of a threat to Jews than left-wing Islamic grievance mongers and the perpetual toleration of jihadism in the name of victimhood identity politics is a long-enduring myth on the left not backed up by 21st century facts. But the bit on the social justice warrior corruption of the left is spot-on.
[Johnson] was fortunate, of course, in finding himself up against Jeremy Corbyn rather than Justin Trudeau. Whether this was a referendum on Corbynism or on Brexit I leave for the exit pollsters, but either way Labour looks set to be reduced to fewer than 200 seats [Actually, 203. – LP] for the first time in eighty-four years. As I write, there appears to have been, in pure psephological terms, a swing away from Labour of about ten per cent. Six per cent of that went to the Brexit Party, not that it was enough to win them any seats, with the rest being split between Tories and the Liberal Democrats. So, put crudely, historically Labour working-class constituencies in northern England that voted Leave and were then screwed over by the subversives of a Remainer Parliament abandoned century-old tribal loyalties to Labour and shifted to pro-Brexit parties.
On the other hand, in leafier southern territory middle-class Remainers weary of Corbyn’s equivocation on the subject shifted in smaller numbers to the LibDems, as the party most upfront about its willingness to subvert the result of the referendum (“Bollocks to Brexit”). As a result, Labour has been reduced to a pantomime horse of urban redoubts – immigrant enclaves in the North and Midlands and upscale champagne-socialist quartiers of London, either indifferent or rather partial to Jeremy Corbyn’s particular baggage.
The only bad news for Boris came from Scotland, where the Scottish National Party is on course to win 55 of 59 seats. So that was naturally the straw the otherwise gloomy BBC panjandrums clutched at: The Union is in trouble; also the Irish “Troubles” will be back. Bombs away! The leader of the Democratic Unionist Party at Westminster, Nigel Dodds, lost his seat to Sinn Féin, suggesting Brexit is somewhat straining the loyalties of Ulster Loyalists. In that sense, Brexit is realigning British politics: in Wales and Northern England, working-class constituencies prioritized Leave over Labour, while, in southern England, prosperous suburban voters shrugged off traditional Tory inclinations for their Remainer opponents. And for the SNP the logic of Brexit is that, as Scotland and Northern Ireland were the only two of the “Awesome Foursome” (in Boris’ words) to vote to Remain, Scotland should either get the same deal Ulster does or a second crack at an independence referendum.
Whether this is a permanent realignment remains to be seen: It could be that if Boris lives up to his slogan and “gets Brexit done” – however defined, but enough at least that it fades from the headlines – then perhaps normal politics will resume. Or perhaps the peculiar Jeremy Corbyn, IRA-lover and appeaser of Jew-hate, a closet Leaver leading a Remainer party, has mortally wounded Labour. Can you have a United Kingdom whose constituent parts all have their own political parties and only the Tories’ seats in eastern Wales make it more than an English organization? Conversely, if you can’t, who cares? Many English supporters of the “Conservative and Unionist” party would be happy to cede the latter as the price of Brexit.
But those are questions for the long term. For now, Boris can contemplate half-a-decade at Number Ten, and no rivals on the opposition benches in the Commons: the LibDem leader who was supposed to be a bright young star lost her seat, the DUP leader who broke with Johnson over his Brexit deal is gone, the Labour leader is inclined to linger awhile to further damage his own party, and Tony Blair’s constituency went Tory. A triumph for Boris by any measure.
A few tweets on the subject:
Massive numbers of working class, traditional Labour voters, have switched to the Conservatives, just as blue collar workers now vote for Trump.
Leftwing Twitter is buzzing with these kind of hot takes. Anything to avoid the hard truths that Labour has lost four elections in a row, and that it fought the last two election under a leader with terrible approval ratings and a history of supporting antisemites and terrorists. https://t.co/SvhtWMJCDG
Too many to embed, but also see this thread on everything Labourites blame their defeat on…except, of course, Corbyn and their policies.
85% of Democrats tweeting about how you can’t apply lessons from the UK to the Democratic primary would be applying lessons from the UK to the Democratic primary if Corbyn had won
The primary change accomplished by The Independent Group for Change was to change the occupiers of the seats previously held by the group. (Previously.)
The British Left has reacted to their loss in the usual calm manner:
Happy Friday the 13th! Going to be a short one, since I spent most of the week finishing up the book catalog I sent out yesterday. And there are a lot of big news topics (like the Horowitz report) I want to do longer posts on. Maybe this weekend…
Boris Johnson’s Tories won a huge general election victory, winning an absolute majority projected at 364 seats, a net gain of 47 seats. By contrast, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour lost 59 seats, down to 203. That’s the largest majority Tories have enjoyed since Margaret Thatcher’s 1983 majority following the Falklands War. The combination of Corbyn and absolute opposition to Brexit has halved the number of seats Labour holds since Tony Blair’s first term. You know that second referendum Remainers were always nattering about? They just had it.
Howard County, Maryland is bringing back forced busing. Crime, rampant drug use, forced busing: It’s like Democrats are trying to turn the areas they control into The 70s Sucked theme parks.
“Austin Council Wants Even More Homeless Hotels.” Of course they do. The more homeless hotels, the more opportunity for graft…
Ann Althouse reads the latest entry in that time-honored genre, New York Times Profile Of Woman We’re Supposed To Find Sympathetic That Actually Makes Us Hate Everyone Living In New York City.
Another week of the impeachment farce, another week of an embarrassing nothingburger and bombing ratings for Democrats:
Week one impeachment farce summary: “None of those three witnesses were have met with the President, none of them were on the July 25th phone call, and none of them have firsthand information, and none of them are aware of any criminal activity or impeachable offense. In short, why are we here?” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The half dozen seminal columns I published for The Hill on Ukraine were already supported by overwhelming documentation (all embedded in the story) and on-the-record interviews captured on video. They made three salient and simple points:
Hunter Biden’s hiring by the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma Holdings, while it was under a corruption investigation, posed the appearance of a conflict of interest for his father. That’s because Vice President Joe Biden oversaw US-Ukraine policy and forced the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor overseeing the case.
Ukraine officials had an uneasy relationship with our embassy in Kiev because State Department officials exerted pressure on Ukraine prosecutors to drop certain cases against activists, including one group partly funded by George Soros.
There were efforts around Ukraine in 2016 to influence the US election, that included a request from a DNC contractor for dirt on Manafort, an OpEd from Ukraine’s US ambassador slamming Trump and the release of law enforcement evidence by Ukrainian officials that a Ukraine court concluded was an improper interference in the US election.
All three of these points have since been validated by the sworn testimony of Schiff’s witnesses this month, starting with the Bidens.
Schiff and Pelosi are racing two clocks: The narrative clock for dropping the Horowitz IG report into FISA, etc. abuse, and the judicial clock against three different court cases that might derail the farce. And since they just went into their Thanksgiving break, the House only has eight voting days in December to do it and pass a budget before leaving for the Christmas brealk.
“[Democratic] Former Baltimore Mayor Pugh indicted on 11 counts of fraud, tax evasion in ‘Healthy Holly’ book scandal.” (You only have to get six paragraphs in to learn that Pugh is a Democrat. Progress!)
Federal prosecutors have charged former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh with 11 counts of fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy in what they allege was a corrupt scheme involving her sales of a self-published children’s book series.
In a grand jury indictment made public Wednesday, prosecutors allege Pugh defrauded area businesses and nonprofit organizations with nearly $800,000 in sales of her “Healthy Holly” books to unlawfully enrich herself, promote her political career and illegally fund her campaign for mayor.
Though her customers ordered more than 100,000 copies of the books, the indictment says Pugh failed to print thousands of copies, double-sold others and took some to use for self-promotion. Pugh, 69, used the profits to buy a house, pay down debt, and make illegal straw donations to her campaign, prosecutors allege.
At the same time, prosecutors said, she was evading taxes. In 2016, for instance, when she was a state senator and ran for mayor, she told the Internal Revenue Service she had made just $31,000. In fact, her income was more than $322,000 that year ― meaning she shorted the federal government of about $100,000 in taxes, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
The charges Pugh faces carry potential sentences totaling 175 years in prison. Prosecutors are seeking to seize $769,688 of her profits, along with her current home in Ashburton, which they allege she bought and renovated with fraudulently obtained funds.
Uncle Sam is not omniscient, but if you’re a public official and you’re taking in ten times as much money as you declare, yeah, I bet they’re gonna figure that one out, Crooked Kathy.
Speaking of Democratic Party mayors being indicted, Mayors Against Illegal Guns member Dennis Tyler, mayor of Muncie, Indiana, was arrested by the FBI as part of a corruption probe. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Last January, former Muncie Building Commissioner Craig Nichols pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering. He was sentenced to two years in federal prison.
Others charged in the federal corruption probe include Muncie Sanitary District Administrator Debra Nicole Grigsby, Muncie Sanitary District official Tracy Barton; and local businessmen Jeffrey Burke, Tony Franklin and Rodney A. Barber.
The Russian government has for the past four years been fighting to keep 29-year-old alleged cybercriminal Alexei Burkov from being extradited by Israel to the United States. When Israeli authorities turned down requests to send him back to Russia — supposedly to face separate hacking charges there — the Russians then imprisoned an Israeli woman for seven years on trumped-up drug charges in a bid to trade prisoners. That effort failed as well, and Burkov had his first appearance in a U.S. court last week. What follows are some clues that might explain why the Russians are so eager to reclaim this young man.
On the surface, the charges the U.S. government has leveled against Burkov may seem fairly unremarkable: Prosecutors say he ran a credit card fraud forum called CardPlanet that sold more than 150,000 stolen cards.
However, a deep dive into the various pseudonyms allegedly used by Burkov suggests this individual may be one of the most connected and skilled malicious hackers ever apprehended by U.S. authorities, and that the Russian government is probably concerned that he simply knows too much.
There seem to be very few elite Russian hacking organizations Burkov, AKA “K0pa,” didn’t have a key administrative role in.
Speaking of hacking: “Ghost ships, crop circles, and soft gold: A GPS mystery in Shanghai.” Somebody in Shanghai has been spoofing GPS signals to make ships (and anything else using GPS) appear they’re someplace else, and GPS experts don’t understand how they’re doing it. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Foreign-born researchers working at U.S. agencies secretly joined China’s payroll, sending sensitive U.S.-funded research to the country while U.S. government agencies took almost no defensive measures against a major recruitment operation, a Senate investigation found.
Researchers linked to the Chinese government formed a Chinese cell within the Department of Energy, attained access to American genomic data, and recruited other U.S. researchers to join, the bipartisan report stated.
China’s Thousand Talents Plan (TTP) aims to get foreign governments to finance the communist power’s military and economy by buying off researchers who are doing work abroad. The experts apply to the program, and if approved by the Communist Party, they join China’s payroll and sign secret side agreements that the experts will share their research with that country, according to the investigation.
The Clinton Foundation suffered a $16.8 million loss in 2018. It’s a great mystery how that could have happened…
The upcoming UK election is no longer an election about Brexit, it’s an election about how incredibly unpopular Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson enjoys a mere plus 4% favorability rating. Corbyn has a minus 43% favorability rating. “This election is no longer primarily about Brexit, it’s primarily about Corbyn and his extreme socialist policies! Corbyn is rightfully getting clobbered.”
The sudden move by the oil-rich regime to ration gasoline and hike fuel prices is a direct result of President Donald Trump’s strategy of “maximum pressure” against Tehran. While the regime thrived under the Obama administration, which handed billions of dollars to Tehran for signing the nuclear deal, the current administration has reinstated stiff sanctions against the ruling Mullahs.
After President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 deal, the sanctions have crippled Iran’s state-run oil, shipping, and banking sectors. The U.S. government implemented the sanctions against the regime’s top brass and the IRGC, which controls critical sectors of the Iranian economy.
“Reuters Deletes Story Meant to Make Trump Look Bad After Realizing it Made Obama Look Bad.” The Ministry of Truth confirms that this story has been rectified.
Like the garbage French elite of long ago, our American garbage elite of today has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. For four years, it has been focused entirely on deep sixing Donald Trump for his unforgivable crime of demanding that our ruling caste be held accountable for its legacy of failure. Instead of focusing on not being terrible at their job of running America’s institutions, our elitists have decided that the real problem is us Normals being angry about how they are terrible at their job of running America’s institutions. So, let’s imagine that they finally vanquish Trump, though every time they come up against him they end up dragging themselves home like Ned Beatty after a particularly tough canoe trip.
What happens then?
What happens then is that it’s back to business as usual, and for decades, business as usual for our garbage elite has not merely been running our institutions badly but pillaging and looting our country for power, prestige and cash.
The difference is that in the future they will be much more careful to ensure that no one who is not in on the scam will ever again come anywhere near the levers of power. You can already see it – the demands that we defer to the bureaucrats they own, the attacks on the idea of free expression, and the campaign to disarm us. Their objective is no more Trumps, just an endless line of progressive would-be Maduros with the march toward despair occasionally put on pause for a term by some Fredocon Republican who hates us Normals just as much as the Dems, but won’t admit it until after he’s out of office.
So #NeverTrumpers are upset because Trump called them scum? Well boo freaking hoo:
If you were involved in the 2016 election and, at any point, decided that Hillary Clinton was very bad for the nation and that Evan McMullin was a f***ing bug-eating tool and that Donald Trump was not Beelzebub incarnate, then you became the target of abuse. In my personal experience, there are people who I’d considered friends for several years who I would no longer pee on if they were on fire today because of the abuse and scorn the heaped upon people who disagreed with them and the cheap bullying that they engaged in. Trumpkin. Trumptard. Trumpaloo. Trumphumper. And all manner of other cute names.
Snip.
For three years these people have degraded, demeaned, and libeled anyone who simply decided that, for all his flaws, Trump was better than any Democrat. No grace was offered to people who had considered them friends and colleagues. No common cause was allowed to be made. They stopped being conservatives and Republicans who simply disliked the candidate and then the president and became active Democrat partisans who simply called themselves something else. Every hoax and bad faith allegation made against the President and his administration, from the Russia bullsh** to defending illegal FISA warrants to the “Muslim ban” to “kids in cages,” was spearheaded by NeverTrumpers flagellating themselves with their principles and yodeling “we’re better than that.”
In 2020, these people have a choice to make. They can either earn their way back in–Prodigal Son, and all that–or they can stay gone. I don’t care who they vote for because Trump won last time without them and he’s in a much stronger position today than he was in November 2016. But, no matter what path they choose, there should be no forgetting of how these people have acted and what they’ve done. No one should allow them to forget why no one–right or left–wishes to have anything to do with them. No one should ever forget that they are dangerous, timorous and unfaithful allies and should not be allowed to do any more than hold the coats for the rest of us.
President Donald Trump begins process to formally withdraw from the Paris climate accord. I’m not sure this is strictly necessary, as it was never binding on the U.S. because it was never submitted to the senate for ratification. As opposed to being nonbinding on the rest of the world because they’re just lying about following it anyway.
Sanctions against Iran really biting into its oil revenues, especially as the U.S. becomes more sophisticated about counter attempts to evade it.
As recently as mid-2019, Iranian leaders openly boasted of selling its oil to foreign customers despite the 2017 sanctions. At the time of that boast, Iran was getting a million BPD (barrels per day) out to export customers. In contrast, before the sanctions, Iran exported two million BPD. But by July 2019 exports had been reduced to 365,000 BPD and in August it was a record low 160,000 BPD and that did not change much in September. What the Iranians don’t issue press releases about is how well sanction enforcement efforts have been at reducing those illegal exports to record lows.
The UK is finally having a general election after essentially a year of deadlock. If history is any guide, parties promising to deliver Brexit will win, then not deliver Brexit…
Related: Sanctuary city proposition goes down in flames in Tucson. Funny how not enforcing laws against illegal aliens enjoys crushing defeat when actual voters get a chance to chime in.
Meanwhile, the illegal alien debate in the Democratic Party is between the hard left and the loony left. “While the rest of America frets about illegal alien criminals escaping authorities with the eager help of liberal politicians, liberals are more concerned about proving to each other how wonderful and tolerant they are by opening the border and allowing anyone and everyone with a sob story to be welcomed and cared for.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
A recent string of high-profile comments brought “Cancel Culture” to the fore. Stand-up routines by Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr and Sebastian Maniscalo forced the subject back into the limelight.
“No Safe Spaces,” a documentary about the Left’s serial attacks on free expression, debuts this weekend at the near-perfect time. Comedian Adam Carolla and syndicated radio star Dennis Prager unite to explore how universities are clamping down on healthy debate, and why that woke sentiment is leaking into society at large.
“Joker” director Todd Phillips, who previously helmed the “Hangover” series, amplified the cause. He told Vanity Fair he created “Joker” because making comedies is no longer fun.
“Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture,” he says. “There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore—I’ll tell you why, because all the f***ing funny guys are like, ‘F*** this s***, because I don’t want to offend you.’
Science Fiction tries to erase its past over crimes against Social Justice Warrior orthodoxy. To be fair, the people who handed out the (now being renamed) James Tiptree Award were always far-left radical feminist lunatics. The question is why have the theoretically more sober people behind the John W. Campbell and World Fantasy Awards also given in to this Orwellian, history-erasing lunacy?
Is anyone really surprised when a progressive treats institutional charity money as a personal slush fund?
The former head of the L.A.-based anti-poverty nonprofit Youth Policy Institute improperly used the organization’s funds to pay the property taxes on his house, buy furniture for his home office and make national political donations, the group alleged in court documents filed this week.
Dixon Slingerland, who was fired as the group’s chief executive in September, spent the nonprofit’s money on an array of unauthorized and personal expenses, including private tutoring for his children, contributions to his wife’s pension, and “lavish” dining, travel and entertainment, according to a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing lodged by the nonprofit in federal court.
Texas candidate Jessica Cisneros has been one of the most high profile candidates backed by Justice Democrats, the liberal group seeking to defeat incumbents they perceive as insufficiently progressive. While Cisneros has received praise from freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), local residents appear more skeptical. She has received just $3,585 of her $190,000 (1.8 percent) in itemized contributions from inside the San Antonio district she hopes to represent.
Cisneros is primarying Democratic incumbent Henry Cueller for the Texas 28th Congressional District. She does not appear to be former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros’ daughter.
“Democrat Elizabeth “Eliz” Markowitz and Republican Gary Gates are headed to a runoff to decide who will fill the unexpired term of State Rep. John Zerwas (R–Richmond)” for Texas House District 28. Gates is a seven time loser, the founding money behind the “Texas Citizens Coalition” (whose mailers I have not seen recently), and was last seen running a dishonest campaign against Wayne Christian for the Railroad Commission. Still, I can only imagine that he’ll be preferable to a Democrat, and even though Markowitz garnered more votes in the election, all the other candidates were Republicans for a Republican-leaning seat, giving Gates a good chance to retain it.
“Plastikov 3D printed AK. 900 rounds on the front receiver, 550 on the rear – with no signs of damage. 7.62×39 goodness in a 7 dollar PLA receiver.” Not quite a revolution, since he used metal parts for the ejector and rails, and spent a total of $393 for all the parts, but definitely interesting, since the receiver is what the federal government counts as the “gun.” Caveat: 7.62x39mm evidently generates lower firing pressure than 5.56 NATO. But I’m hardly an expert here. Still: interesting. (Hat tip: Sal the Agorist.)
Lebanon is burning over the ruling coalition’s decision to impose higher taxes.
Nationwide protests paralyzed Lebanon on Friday as demonstrators blocked major roads in a second day of rallies against the government’s handling of a severe economic crisis and the entire country’s political class.
The protests were the largest since 2015, and could further destabilize a country already on the verge of collapse and with one of the highest debt loads in the world.
The protests could plunge Lebanon into a political crisis with unpredictable repercussions for the economy, which has been in steady decline for the past few years. Some of the protesters said they would stay in the streets until the government resigns.
Time and again, the protesters shouted “Revolution!” and “The people want to bring down the regime,” echoing a refrain chanted by demonstrators during Arab Spring uprisings that swept the region in 2011.
“We are here today to ask for our rights. The country is corrupt, the garbage is all over the streets and we are fed up with all this,” said Loris Obeid, a protester in downtown Beirut.
Entire Des Moines Register-sponsored charity bike rideresigns over their handling of Carson King story. That’s the “hey, this guy just raised millions for charity, let’s destroy his life over an eight year old Tweet because we can, then refuse to admit we did anything wrong” story.
Chinese develop helicopter flying saucer? Color me skeptical that it actually works. And if it does work, it’s less a helicopter than a flying turbofan.
If you think Wayne Messam’s longshot presidential campaign is embarrassing, it’s a veritable juggernaut next to Republican congressman Mark Sanford’s longshot presidential campaign launch. One person showed up: the story’s reporter. And if Sanford’s name rings a faint bell: “It’s been more a decade since Sanford, now 59, faced potential impeachment, was censured by his own legislature, and got slapped with dozens of ethics violations after that infamous rendezvous in Buenos Aires. While the then-married governor was out of the office, his staff initially said he was just out ‘hiking the Appalachian Trail,’ a phrase that became the 2009 version of a meme and was used as a euphemism for anything related to politics and sexual escapades.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
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…
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…
