VDH: "Conspiracies Too Awful to Imagine?;" The Massive Blue-Team Conspiracy Against Trump

A fair summary, IMO.

Political Correctness and the UK's Massive Pakistani Rape-Gang Horror

I haven't discussed this for a long, long time, but it's back in the news:

What made these horrors even worse – and in some cases what made them possible – was the calculated indifference of officialdom. Across England, local politicians and cops were initially loath to dig into the gangs, lest they stir up ‘sensitive community issues’. They knew very well that gangs of men from Pakistani backgrounds were preying on white girls from the dirt-poor parts of town, but they held back because they didn’t want to be seen as ‘targeting [a] minority group’. In town after town, ‘race relations’ were elevated above the safety and dignity of working-class girls. Protecting the ideology of multiculturalism was seen as more important than protecting girls from rape. The girls were sacrificed to ideology, their humiliation treated as a small price to pay for upholding the edicts of political correctness.

Now Labour officials in the Home Office are refusing to begin an inquiry.

   This is political correctness: maintaining the illusion that "multiculturalism" is an unalloyed good. Of course "multiculturalism" itself is one of those bits of Newspeak used to advance leftist radicalism. Like "diversity" and the rest, it's a happy-sounding term used to give cover to the leftist dream/project of destroying the West. Put so starkly, it sounds crazy--unless you're actually paying attention.

   My rule of thumb: don't pay attention to the happy-sounding words.

   Pay attention to the actual policies implemented under the happy-sounding words.

   Or just mentally replace e.g. "multiculturalism" with "rape gangs and the destruction of Western civilization."

   As Starmer has admitted, the UK has been conducting a "one-nation experiment in open borders."

   As per usual, one of the really striking things about all this is that it wasn't a close call. It's not like these are reasonable policies. They're policies than anyone should be able to see are catastrophic. And many of us have been pointing this out all along.

Robert Knight: Here's How Democrats and the Media Used and Abused the January 6th "Insurrection"

I already linked to this from the Grauniad post, but here it is again.

   Again, my view (FWIW which isn't much) is basically that this sort of take is much more accurate than that of the other piece. But it still means that the riot was a f***ing disgrace, it put the worst tendencies of the brainless right front and center, and it still shows that Trump's behavior didn't meet minimal standards of Presidential-ness.

   The far-ish right's view of the riot is instructive, I think. It's basically: It wasn't that bad in fact it was totally justified but it wasn't really us it was Antifa or the Feds or somebody.

   Their first choice is: We didn't do it.

   But if that doesn't work: Totally justified!

The Grauniad on the Alleged January 6th Insurrection/Coup

This Grauniad woman is an idiot. [WARNING: GRAUNIAD LINK! NOT ACTUAL NEWS SOURCE!]

   I don't know her name, but I recognize her picture, and that's enough.

   Really, if you want to maintain your objectivity about this, such as it may be, that isn't the kind of thing you need to be reading. Find something less...like that is.

   My view on it hasn't changed a lot in the last couple of years. First error: to think that everything fits into neat, dichotomous categories in the actual world. So: determinately either coup or not, insurrection or not.

   The Capitol riot was somewhat like a coup or insurrection...but not very much like one.

   But it was way, way, way too far in that direction.

   The left is hysterical and dishonest about this...like everything else. But they're not completely wrong.

   Of course if there were a real coup--a coup coup--in the USA, you'd know it.

   For one thing, there would have been weapons.

   Real Weapons.

   Not zip dies and fart spray or whatever they found.

   We are, after all, the most heavily-armed society in the world--and those weapons are concentrated on the right.

   What it was was a demonstration that got way, way out of hand.

   That's not to make excuses.

   It did get out of hand--again way, way, way out of hand.

   Though it wasn't "The Deadliest Day," it was appalling. After it, I regretted having voted for Trump, and said I wouldn't do so again.

   But here we are.

   The left continued to get crazier--which a priori I would have thought impossible--and I eventually decided that I had to think more about the future than the past.

   But, anyway.

   I don't have anything particularly interesting to say about this. All I can really say is: you're better off not reading rags like the Guardian, especially on topics like this.

   Here's the much more sober take from the other side.

Booze and Cancer

Well that's just great.

Terrorism by Radical Islamists Show that...the Real Threat is Generic Extremism...Except Really the Right...

I'm strawmanning in the title...but not by much...

IMO we can't believe such stuff because the FBI is part of a network of left-leaning think tanks, academicians, and groups like the ADL that are known to spin things so as to be more in line with their preferred view of things. We know that they took the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting by Omar Mateen and spun it leftward; instead of admitting that Mateen was an Islamist extremist, they turned it into an anti-gay shooting. Can't have people thinking it was a Muslim! Really, it was an anti-gay bigot! That's the real problem here! But that simply wasn't true.

   I'm not claiming to know that the FBI (etc.) is wrong. That would be dumb. I'm just pointing out the rather obvious fact that we can't trust them.

   The linked piece doesn't quite go like this...but...I'm going to say it anyway:

   Hey, you know that crazy Muslim with the ISIS flag who killed all those people in NOLA? Well, that was just one kind of extremism!! And the worst kind of extremism is right-wing extremism!

   I'd Just like to get the facts and get them straight. Or at least: straighter.

Cringetastic Biden Admin Double Feature

I posted the first one a couple of days ago...the second one is less bizarre but way, way more cringe:

Carolina 74 - Notre Dame 73

Nail-biter.

Not so sure that was a foul at the end, but I'll take it.

Maskmania II: Electric Boogaloo

wh...what?

This Is UNBELIEVABLY Creepy

The White House just posted this weird, dark "move forward" video on their YouTube channel showing tons of people in masks while saying things like "the time to trust."

These people are stupid and evil. Their agenda couldn't be any more obvious... pic.twitter.com/WaHtGMDyNk

— Gain of Fauci (@DschlopesIsBack) January 2, 2025

Hayden Ludwig: Trump, E-Verify and Self-Deportation

Yes to all of this.

This problem isn't just due to the Dems. The Pubs have done their part, too:

Yet many blue states go out of their way to discourage E-Verify’s use. California bars private employers from using E-Verify before making a job offer. Illinois penalizes companies that “misuse” the E-Verify system, discouraging them from using the program at all. And in 2021, Colorado Democrats actually repealed the use of E-Verify for state contractors on a party-line vote, calling it a “barrier to certain public opportunities.”
That America hasn’t already mandated this policy everywhere explains a lot about the state of our immigration system. For decades, establishment Republican squishes conspired with far-left Democrats to turn our country into a playground for the world’s poor and privileged alike – so long as those policies lined the right pockets.
In 2010, for instance, the Chamber of Commerce sued to block Arizona’s E-Verify mandate, later losing in the U.S. Supreme Court. (The Chamber now says it supports the measure.)
California Democrat Zoe Lofgren spelled it out in 2018: Mandating E-Verify “would be highly disruptive to restaurants, hotels, and other industries” reliant on illegal labor.
Opening the floodgates to tens of millions of noncitizens, legal or otherwise, proved one of the Beltway’s favorite bipartisan schemes. Corporate “conservatives” got cheap, imported labor; wily “progressives” got future welfare state voters. We the People got the highest percentage of foreign-born residents in American history: over 15%, higher than the mass immigration period of the late 1800s – and steadily rising since the Reagan amnesty mistake 38 years ago.
Cynical Washington elites sold our nation’s culture, jobs, and dignity away and smeared their critics as racist for complaining. For years, that grift worked – until Donald Trump sparked a revival in American self-confidence.

Derangement Watch: Kevin Roose, "How the Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis"

This really is a masterpiece of the genre.

   Obviously he isn't wrong about the stolen election hoax, nor about QAnon.

   What's astonishing is the one-sidedness of the thing--the abject obliviousness to the far greater madness on the left. No mention of gender pseudoscience, race pseudoscience, Lysenkoism generally, Russiagate, Laptopgate, TDS, the ideological capture of our formerly-truth-seeking institutions...all the madness I'm always ranting about. As nutty as the right can be, its current nuttiness pales in comparison to the derangement of the progressive left.

  It's like reading an essay by a Scientologist complaining about a couple of dopey doctrines of the Methodists or something.

  And then there're the proposed solutions!:

[1] The appointment of a "Reality Czar"

[2] “We have to destroy the institutional systemic racism that creates this environment. We have to provide jobs. We have to have access to mental health care and education.”

   (Even the author acknowledges that [1] "sounds a little dystopian...")

   So the solution is: more left-wing totalitarianism! More institutionalized political correctness and thought/speech restrictions--and, of course, addressing the phantom menace of "systemic racism"!!!

   The very idea that the left, the elites and the government could be trusted as gatekeepers of reality...Jesus Christ, you might as well turn the keys over to Trofim Lysenko himself.

   This reminds me of a post I saw the other day--I kinda think it was by the guy who runs Politifact...asserting that one of the biggest lies of the year was that the Biden admin's "Disinformation Governance Board" was a threat to free speech.

   The mind, it reels...

   

They're Eating the Dogs...They're Eating the Cats...

 

Carolina 70 - Louisville 83

So far only one quality win--UCLA--all year.

No frontcourt.

An all-Carolina coaching staff, which we all love...but...sadly...it doesn't seem to be working out.

It was very dumb to give up Coach Rob.

Robbie Soave vs. Politi"Fact": What Was the Lie of the Year? Hiding Biden's Cognitive Decline or "They're Eating the Dogs..."?

Well, Politi"Fact" is a blue-team propaganda outfit, no different from the WaPo "Fact"-Checker, ergo no different than the WaPo. So there's nothing really surprising here.

Soave is pretty clearly right...but, damn, "they're eating the dogs...they're eating the cats..." is a pretty strong candidate. And hilarious.. Also, there's a song, which the other doesn't have at all.

   Harris offered up any number of slow, hanging pitches over the plate that Trump could have cranked out of the park...but noooo.... He couldn't resist shooting himself in the ass yet again by offering up a wild, implausible, unsubstantiated claim...which the Dems (+ the MSM, of course) then giddily cranked out of the park.

   And good on them for doing so.

   That nonsense started falling apart as soon as it hit the news.

   Incidentally, was it even a lie? Trump seemed to really believe it. Lots of people on the right believed it. Chris Rufo posted a picture of somebody grilling chickens as alleged proof of the claim...

   My guess is that in this kind of case, you can and probably play a bit loose with the lie/stupid-belief distinction.

   Clearly Biden's inner circle knew that he was slipping--apparently even before the 2020 election. So they were lying--in order to foist a dementia patient onto the country as President.

   Appalling.

   Others, e.g. rank-and-file Dems, genuinely believed the lie.

   I thought--and said here--that the right was exaggerating the degree of Biden's decline. So I largely/mostly fell for it, too. Though in my defense, the videos the righties were pointing to weren't all that convincing, and some were completely innocuous.

   Incidentally, in the 15 years PolitiFact has designated a lie of the year, it's only gone to the Democrats twice... And this despite the fact that, time, the Dems have not only given us the lie of the century--that women have penises / men can get pregnant--but many other obvious winners for any given year--e.g. Russian collusion, Hunter's laptop as Russian disinfo, cops genociding blacks in the streets, COVID lab-leak as conspiracy theory...maybe the "very fine people" hoax ought to be in contention as well... 

   Then there's the climate apocalypse...hell, that might actually be in the running for lie of the century, too...

 

Conservatives on the New Orleans NYE Terrorist Attack

Conservatives on the Twixxer are losing their minds about (at least...) two things:

First: LEOs on-scene seem to have zip-tied the ISIS flag on the back of the perpetrator's truck.

Second: a black FBI agent initially claimed that it wasn't a terrorist attack.

As for the flag, tons of righties are claiming that it's just COMPLETELY INSCRUTABLE WHY THE FBI WOULD CONCEAL THE FLAG THE ONLY REASON IS AN ATTEMPT TO SUPPRESS EVIDENCE OF ISLAMIC TERRORISM!!!!1111

I mean...this is so absurdly obvious that there just doesn't seem to be any explanation for this wave of mass stupidity other than ideological blindness...

Here's the obvious explanation: the FBI (or whoever) didn't think it was a good idea to give ISIS a PR win by broadcasting pix of an ISIS flag proudly waving in the midst of the carnage. So they zip-tied it. Or whatever.

See?

It may not be the right explanation--in fact, the true explanation could be nefarious.

But it isn't even a little bit difficult to identify a plausible explanation other than TEH FBIZ LUVZ IZIZ!!!111

As for the back female FBI agent:

Jeez, give it a rest. I doubt she was just freelancing. Seemed to me that she might have been trying to say that they weren't yet categorizing it as a terrorist attack...I don't know. I only saw the clip once and I'm not interested enough to go hunt it up.

We've got a lot of examples of failed DEI hires. Kamala Harris. KBJ. Sotomayor. I saw no reason to think this person was one of them...but, again, I haven't been interested enough to look into it much. This is the kind of thing that some want to call "woke right." Not me. But some people.

Oh, and a third thing:

As for Trump basically proclaiming the perpetrator to be an illegal alien...right before we found out that he was a born-and-bred Texan with military service...

Well, Trump is Trump.

We knew what we were getting.

Dumbass.

FFRF Yanks Jerry Coyne's Essay for Wrongthink re: The Transes; Coyne, Pinker, Dawkins Resign

link

Coyne spoke up early about neo-PC/Woketarian madness, esp. re: race.

In this case, Coyne merely noted that women are female. FFRF initially published his essay, then yanked it and issued a semi-groveling mea culpa--not as bad as some, granted.

Coyne, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins resigned from FFRF.

Two groups people seemed to think were immune to PC: scientists and atheists.

Turns out, neither was/is.

In fact, atheism was one of the first sheep to fall in line--calling woke atheism "Atheism+"

shudder

How revolting...

Anyway, note that even Jerry Coyne is not permitted to question even the most outlandish lefty Lysenkoism even in a publication of a group that sees itself as maximally devoted to rationality.

To paraphrase a now-common sentiment on the right: you don't hate woke nearly enough.

SF Chronicle: It's Difficult to Determine If* [sic] "Transwomen" are Faster or Stronger

*whether

But anyhoo: pure "trans" pseudoscience.

   This is a common strategy in such public discussions, though only the left really has the institutional resources to pull it off effectively: when you're busted dead to rights, just drag your feet, dissemble and delay. All you really need to concentrate on in the short terms is not admitting error and not letting your opponents' arguments go unanswered. Your goal is keep your own true believers onboard, and prevent all the fair-minded uncertains from abandoning ship.

   And the left always has scientists and people who can plausibly be represented as scientists to go along with even its most harebrained schemes.

   None of this really matters because boys cannot be girls and men cannot be women. So boys and men should not be allowed to participate in girls and women's sports, use their restroom and locker room facilities, etc.

   But, yeah: boys and men generally have an athletic advantage over girls and women. Only political correctness prevents people from admitting that.

PC AI: IQ; Only Grok Admits Racial IQ Differences

"Give the average IQ for each of the primary racial groups. Do not give any interpretation or commentary."

From first to last: Gemini 1.5 Pro (Google), GPT-4o (OpenAI), Claude 3.5 Sonnet (Anthropic), Grok (Elon) pic.twitter.com/LLxKtDqgOe

— Justin Murphy (@jmrphy) December 16, 2024

Gabe Kaminsky: Obama's Censorship Office Goes Bankrupt

good

Political Disagreement: The Old Way and the New

In the old days, political disagreement went roughly like this:

Republicans: "Democrats are full of shit about x"

Democrats: "Republicans are full of shit about x"

Now it goes like this:

Republicans: "Democrats are full of shit about x"

Democrats:  Create university x-studies departments, staffed entirely by leftists, implementing and advocating the view that Republican are full of shit about x; create committees, government departments, NGOs and think tanks to transmit the idea that Republicans are full of shit about x; infuse public schools and universities with the view that Republicans are full of shit about x, representing this as incontrovertible expert opinion; announce "whole-of-government" / "whole-of-society" efforts to establish the view that Republicans are full of shit about x as "settled science"; media immediately treats "Republicans are full of shit about x" as the common sense of educated people, ergo the only acceptable view of x; media "fact-"checkers uniformly rate the Republican position on x as "full of shit," one notch below "pants on fire"; Wikipedia entry on Republican views of x begins "The full-of-shit view that..."; government mis-/dis-/mal-/non-/quasi-information offices write white papers on the topic of the full-of-shit-ness of the Republican view of x...

WSJ: By Blocking Gaetz Confirmation, Senators Helped the Country--and Trump

What a blockhead nomination.

Trump seems to just go for fame/notoriety.

I withheld judgment on Gaetz, given the left's routine character assassination of its opponents. But sounds like they were right this time.

I'm basically a libertarian about such stuff in theory--I don't care about people taking drugs, nor about adults exchanging money (or anything else) for sex. But what's ok in theory often has prohibitively negative unintended consequences. E.g.: drug cartels, sex trafficking, the destruction of neighborhoods... As for the statutory rape charge, we're not told what the age of consent is wherever that allegedly happened...but it's hard to believe they'd let him get away with that if it was below 18...dunno whether 18 is being used there as a rule of thumb or what...

Anyway: yes, dumb nomination. I didn't expect it to go through. Let's move on.

WSJ: Trump is Right on H1-b Visas

Seems reasonable, but I really don't know anything about it.

Coulter says that legal immigration needs to be throttled back some.

Which, again, I don't know much about--but that needs to be on the table. The left will shriek racism, of course, because the left shrieks racism about everything that runs against their general view in any way. So I take the left shrieking racism to actually be an indicator that we're on the right track.

But, prima facie, and acknowledging my vast ignorance here, it sounds like these are exactly the kinds of immigrants we need.

But, by Sowell's law, we know that in every case we're opting for a tradeoff of some kind. Like many on the right, I don't want to import a bunch of brainiacs who are basically anti-American...that doesn't sound like such a great tradeoff... But this is pretty speculative/hand-wavy. Not exactly sure how we filter out such folk.

In general, seems like Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy are right about this.

Jimmy Carter Dies at 100

A good man and an excellent former President.

link

The National Archives Belatedly Releases Photos Showing That Biden Lied About Meeting With Hunter's Business Partners

link

Trump didn't collude with Russian, but the Biden family did collude with the Chinese...and, almost certainly, others.

Trump was impeached the first time for investigating such collusion--influence-peddling--though specifically the Ukrainian manifestation, not the Chinese manifestation.

This is how the deck is stacked against the Republicans.

The Coming Backlash

Just to be clear one more time: I have no doubt that there will be a conservative backlash to the recent madness of the left. In fact, I think you can already hear the rumblings. At some point, the right will again become our biggest domestic political problem.

   But it hasn't been our biggest problem over the course of the last decade.

   And it's unlikely to be our biggest problem again for awhile.

   Seems to me that we should remain allied with conservatives in order to beat back political correctness/Woketarianism...recognizing that there will undoubtedly come a point where we have to switch alliances again.

   Maybe that's the wrong way to think about it.

   Maybe rather: people like me are always allied with both extremes and fighting both extremes. It's just that, every now and then, the threat from one extreme is so eclipsed by that from the other that it appears that we're allied just with the former side against the latter.

   I'm generally averse to the religious right in particular, so that's what I tend to be concerned about.

   Also, I see that a lot of the generally secular anti-woke folks have become more friendly toward religion and, in some cases, have actually declared themselves Christians. (E.g. James Lindsay, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.)

   I'm certainly less hostile to religion generally and Christianity in particular than I was when younger. As I even said back in the day, seems to me that Christianity has largely been tamed by liberalism (in the broad sense, not the progressive sense). Islam generally remains dangerous. Christianity generally not. Generally...

   Discussing the inevitable backlash irritates me because it's one of the tactics the left uses to deflect criticism. But you can't let your crazy opponents dictate your responses.

   None of this means that I think we should take our eye off the PC left. That left, built as it is around Marxism, has ensconced itself deeply in universities, and it will not disappear in our lifetimes, if ever. Marxism is like a permanent, malevolent force seeking the destruction of liberalism and the West. Even if the anti-PC/anti-woke movement manages to push it back to something approaching the status quo ante--which I think is unlikely--it'll just fester, like Sauron in Mirkwood, building its power, becoming crazier and more evil, and exploring new lines of attack against humanity. Multiculturalism, DEI, (trans)gender ideology and the sexualization of children...I certainly didn't see any of these particular manifestations coming. We can guess at possibilities. Maybe it'll manifest itself as religion/superstition. I long argued that if political correctness came back, so would "New Age" woo. Sweet hypothesis...turned out false. But maybe that's the form the next wave will take. Neo-PC has taken over many churches...maybe a powerful religious left will emerge. Or maybe the conversion-to-Islam fad among the neo-Tumblrite women will catch on. Maybe transhumanism will go hard left. Transgenderism, after all, can be seen as a kindred view. Early on in the rise of NPC, there was something called "Atheism+," i.e. woke atheism.

   OTOH, maybe PC is now so firmly ensconced in the sciences that that will become its base of power.

   Maybe there'll be a really deadly pandemic more akin to the Spanish Flu. People like me will cantankerously refuse to wear the mask, take the vax, cower in place...and we'll all die out, ceding the field to the lefties...

   Or some other kind of game-changing disaster... (how's that for unspecific...?)

   We need an organization inside universities (etc.) to keep its finger on the pulse of the Orwellian left in order to predict its direction.

Blah, blah, blah.