Dominion Defends Itself

link

   To be clear, I think it's pretty clear there were (was?) widespread shenanigans--mass vote-by-mail schemes are shenanigans in and of themselves, IMO. But I don't believe the election was stolen. Obviously there's prima facie evidence that it was...but there are other explanations, which I expect to more-or-less pan out. The Dems engineered a chaotic election, trading accuracy and security for more Democratic votes. The chaos is a feature, not a bug. The more wiggle room there is, the more influence Democratic operatives (e.g. poll-workers and vote-counters) have. The left's general strategy, so far as I can tell, is to sow disruption and then cheat in the official response. E.g.: allow leftist mobs to rampage through cities...and bring down the fist of the law on anyone who opposes them. This is merely a particular application of the Dems' general tactic: never let a crisis go to waste. (Though they've now begun manufacturing the crises, too...)

   Mostly what I care about is having thorough investigations. The Dems are so loony that there's no doubt that four years of them will be a serious blow--a series of serious blows--to the nation. But that's the system. Tribal allegiance, media propaganda, widespread low-information-ness among voters, Trump's dumbassery/trumpiness--including his repeated shooting of himself in the ass while hogging the spotlight during the COVID pressers--and political correctness seem to have convinced half the country that it'll be better for the operatives of the cult to put 'er in high gear and steer straight for the cliff. So, barring something akin to a miracle, all there really is to do is...well...I'm not sure, actually. Hold on to your hats, don't believe the cultist cant, give money to the Pubs, I guess, so long as they're the less-nutty of the options... Try to talk reason to those with ears to hear. Dunno, man. Trump would have won in a landslide without COVID...we don't want something else like that, obviously. But focusing on it helps me not get too down on the country. Most people have no idea what's going on. Something bad happened, so they voted out the guy who was in office when it happened. Sadly, they voted in the cult. Biden doesn't have the cognitive horsepower to see how crazy the blues have gone, but at least he's less enthusiastically pro-cult than the other blue options. 

Do Vulva-Owners Like Sex?

Women.

The English word for such people is women.

This kind of insanity now pervades the left. And I don't mean merely trans ideology. I mean political correctness--the subordination of facts to leftist dogma. 

There are exactly 0.00 men with vulvas. (Cosmetic-surgery simulations, obviously, don't count.)

This in particular is just one bit of progressive insanity. But it's just a really, really clear case of a general tendency that pervades the regnant antiliberal left. Once the novelty of the jargon wears off, and people begin automatically and seamlessly translating 'transwoman' into man misrepresenting himself as a woman, the terminological demands will change. My money's on: Some vaginas are tubular and protrude far from the body...and are, uh, indistinguishable from penises...bigot. Once you begin pretending that saying so makes things so, all bets are off...:

All I can tell you is I own Fords, and personally I like sex pic.twitter.com/S7XwcUdCh0

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) November 30, 2020

Joseph Epstein: "Pronouns Go Political"

There's so much bullshit about pronouns and "gender" zipping around that it can be difficult for people in my faction in the culture war to admit that we really ought to have a dedicated, singular, non-sex-specific pronoun. 'They' is probably the best option...but it comes with certain costs, obviously. E.g. increased opportunities for misunderstanding. Though that can be said about the non-sex-specific use of 'he', too, of course.

   Anyway, the two biggest problems for me are (a) all the proposed new words sound super stupid, and (b) I don't want to give in to the woketards--nor to appear to be a woketard myself.

   So...someday it'd be good--I'd say--to agree on a new pronoun to do the job...but today is not that day...

A Wave Of "Anti-racist" Teaching Sweeps K-12 Schools Targeting "Whiteness"

 It'd be a miracle if there were nothing in all of this that was worthwhile...but it would be almost as much of a miracle if there were much of it.

" 'The Smartest Man In The Room' Has Joined Sydney Powell's Team"

Still less crazy than Russiagate, no matter how it turns out.

David Brooks: "The Rotting Of The Republican Mind"

The left spirals down into its own delusional whirlpool of crazy.

   Jane's law claims that the devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant, while those of the party out of power are insane. Currently, the left/Dems are all of those things--smug, arrogant and insane. The right is so far out of power culturally speaking that it'd be hard for them to be smug or arrogant. Both parties seem inclined to insanity to me, though--less the religious part--the right less so. Of the two parties, there really can't be any reasonable doubt that the left is currently crazier. It's basically lost its goddamned mind. It's not that the Pubs are any great shakes. But at least their religious faction is somewhat isolated and out of power. The left has its own crackpot religious tendencies--e.g. the subordination of facts to political correctness. But, sadly, those tendencies are not out-of-power and isolated to a subordinate political sect. Rather: they are running the show...on the left, hence in the country. And any violation of their dogma results in shrieking denunciation by their hoards of flying monkeys. Once you get to the point of saying that people can change their sex--or, basically, do almost anything else--just by saying so, you've fallen off the edge of the world, rationally speaking. Saying so makes it so is, except in a few trick cases, the epitome of unreason. This isn't an ad hoc principle. It's practically an axiom of reason. 

   I remain hopeful because Trump is such a shithead in so many ways. He could make the goddamn Pope cuss. One of his superpowers is driving people to the other side...odious as that side may be. I know lots of reasonable people who'd never even consider voting for him. The horribleness of the other side hasn't made itself as manifest to them. And, being reasonable, they chose what seemed to be the lesser evil. I'd say that Trump's shittiness is all up front, whereas the other side's shittiness is much worse...in part because it's so much sneaker. But, then, that's the kind of thing people sometimes say when their preferred side is the shitter. As always, I realize I could be wrong. But my view is the Trump's shittiness is largely manifest and superficial, whereas the other side's shittiness is deep and dangerous. Of course, that's the sort of thing people always say when their side seems shittier. So merely saying it settles nothing. Seems really clear to me that the left--formerly the less-crazy-and-dangerous side of our politics--has become the crazier and more dangerous by far. But, then, people are wrong about such stuff all the time. Maybe the left has merely developed its own religion, with its own dogmas and magical claims and sins and naughty words and whatnot. There's still the problem that Christianity is held largely at bay by the First Amendment, whereas, currently, there seems to be little constraining Woketarianism...which masquerades as a non-religious cult. Or maybe it is non-religious. It's a vague category. Hard to say, really.

   At any rate, it doesn't seem to me that the Republican mind is rotting--though it has its problems, and has rotted at points in the past. It's the leftist mind that's currently rotting before our very nostrils. Conservatives are currently the comparative heroes of the story, as they provide a kind of counterbalance. To mix metaphors. (I'm not sure how you counterbalance rottenness...) It's the left that has slipped into the belief that facts are malleable by fiat, some truths are unspeakable, and honest and open discussion is dangerous and worthy of punishment. It's not that the right doesn't veer in that direction from time to time...but the left has lurched hard to crazy...and it shows no sign of stopping. They believe--in some sense of 'believe'--outright, demonstrable falsehoods, insist that thinking so can make things so, brutally silence dissent, routinely employ political violence, and exercise iron control over most of our important institutions. They're bad enough that Donald Trump is far preferable...if you care about truth and reason...or so I say. 

   Where was I going with this? Does anybody remember? Oh well.

[Gosh...remember when the GOP was the crazy party? I do. [sigh] Those were kinda the days, in retrospect... OTOH, the Dems haven't yet lied us into a major war...OTOOH, they went along with it when the Pubs did it, so... ]

U.S. Media: Politically-Motivated Vaccine Pessimism?

 probably

Patrick Basham: Why The 2020 Presidential Election Is Deeply Puzzling

 To say the very least.

Is Ventilation Key To Battling COVID? These Cartoons Say Yes

 Makes sense / could be true.

Biden Poised To Undo Everything Good That DeVos Has Done

 Dumbass

Wikipedia Has A Leftist Bias

 Astonishing

Your Blue Future: NM Edition:: 2-4 Hour Lines Outside Grocery Stores Due To Shutdown

 link

Gilad Atzmon: "The Interpretation Of (Left) Dreams

This is pretty near the target (even the Zizek bits!?!)? (Beware! Unz Review...superduper wrongthink!)

“Why do we dream? Freud’s answer is deceptively simple: the ultimate function of the dream is to enable the dreamer to stay asleep.” Slavoj Zizek (2006)...

Traditional Left Ideology sets out a vision of how the world ‘ought to be.’ The Left’s view can be summed up as the belief that social justice is the primary requirement for improving the world, and that this better future entails the pursuit of equality in various forms. The Left ideologist believes that it is both ethical and moral to attempt to approach equality in terms of civil rights and material wealth.

   But if the Left focuses on ‘what could be,’ the Right focuses on ‘what is.’ If the Left operates where people ‘could be,’ the Right operates where people ‘are’ or at least, where they believe themselves to be. The Right does not aim to change human social reality but rather to celebrate, and to even maximize it.
   Left ideology, accordingly, is shaped like a ‘dream.’ Aiming for what ‘ought to be’ rather than ‘what is’ induces a level of utopian illusory detachment and depicts a phantasmal egalitarian world often removed from our abusive, oppressive and doomed reality. In this phantasmic future, people will just drift away from greed and gluttony, they will work less and learn to share, even to share that which they may not possess to start with.
   This imaginary ‘dream’ helps explain why the (Western) Left’s ideology rarely appealed to the struggling classes; the masses, consumed by the pursuit of bread and butter, were hardly going to be interested in utopian ‘dreams’ or futuristic social experiments. Bitten by the daily struggle and chased by existence, working people have never really subscribed to ‘the revolution,’ usually because they were just too busy working. This perhaps explains why so often it was the middle-class and bourgeois agitators who became revolutionary icons. It was they who had access to that little bit extra to fund their revolutionary adventures.
...
   Back in 2006, Zizek provided a Lacanian insight into the reality that we currently see in the USA. “Reality,” Zizek wrote, “is for those who cannot sustain the dream.” It is always the hard-working people struggling for bread and butter who can’t sustain the fantasy of social change. It is always the working classes that push for concretization. They want America to be great again (Trump), they want Great Britain to be as ‘Great’ as implied by its name (Brexit), they want France to be French (Yellow Vests). Before it is too late, those who watched the so-called ‘Trumpsters’ yesterday in Washington DC should accept that the patriotic reality embodied by the flag must at least be as meaningful as the Identitarian ‘dream’ of ‘others united.’

Sharyl Attkisson On The New Woke Times

 Known, but still disgusting.

Sowell: If Biden Wins, "That Could Be The Point Of No Return For This Country"

 

Biden can go f*ck himself.

Old (?) CNN Expose On Smartmatic Machines, Venezuela, and Voting Shenanigans

 Was a hard-hitting expose...now an alt-right ultra-fascist conspiracy theory:

Pubs Flip Another House Seat--CA 21

Like the man said, Trump had awfully long coattails for someone who allegedly didn't win...

Of course there are at least two hypotheses that can explain that: (1) Trump won; (2) Trump's personally unlikeable...

Journalism Basically The Least-Trusted Profession

 Seems mostly prima facie reasonable:

Journalists are one of the least trusted professions — only politicians are worse. Congrats guys! pic.twitter.com/bhylmKRSWe

— Kyle Kashuv (@KyleKashuv) November 27, 2020

But, um, we probably need to have a talk about professors...

In fact, that rating of professors makes me wonder whether my judgment above is just the Gell-Mann amnesia effect... 

The MSM Is Truly Loathsome

 LOL these people are disgusting morons. 

The funniest bit is adding in the completely irrelevant bit about Don Jr. having the bat flu. ZOMG! He caught a cold that has a 99.5-99.9% survival rate!!!! RUN AWAY!!!!

Michael Tracey Remembers When Lefties Begged For Electors To Vote For Clinton Rather Than Trump

But this was totally cool, right?

I knew it would be widely denied that prominent liberals floated an Electoral College coup in 2016, which is why I contemporaneously saved a bunch of examples pic.twitter.com/7gvape3ba2

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) November 25, 2020

Kraken: Released

 Powell files lawsuit in Michigan. 

I don't really have a view about this. I just want the truth to out and justice to be done.

Avoiding the wreck of a Biden presidency would be a bonus...but we really shouldn't think about that at all. 

More Evidence Of Widespread Mental Illness Among American Liberals (Esp. White, Female, Young)

This is consistent with my informal observations.

Of course one might respond: they're not actually more mentally ill, they just inhabit a social milieu in which mental illness is fashionable, so they are pulled toward it--or at least to professions of it. OTOH, one could argue that conservatives are hesitant to admit to mental illness--the dreaded STIGMA! 

(What happened to "stigma," anyway? It was briefly--about a year ago--hugely fashionable on the left, and then kinda disappeared. My guess: the terminological competition on the left is fierce. The so love their jargon--esp. that with just the right, nauseating lefty ring to it--that jargon-mongers have to really be on their game if their wares are to succeed. 'Stigma' just couldn't secure an environmental niche...)

Or one could argue that liberals go to psychologists more, and so are diagnosed more. So it's a COVID-like testing effect. ZOMG CASES ARE SKYROCKETING!!!!111

Also: so much of leftism is built on the denial of facts...it's just not all that surprising that it leads to / attracts wackos.

[Don't miss the pic of Pantyfa at the top of the article. Note that their point-man seems to be Gallagher.]

Climate Hysteria, Mission Creep, And The Medicalization Of Everything

 Already posted this. Doing it again.

Shelby Steele: The Inauthenticity Behind BLM

Not sure I agree with some of this, but Steele's opinion on this subject is worth a lot more than mine.

Trump 4-1 Favorite Over Biden For 2024

Supposing it comes to that.

MSM Election Propaganda In A Nutshell

 via insty:

What a difference 4 years makes. pic.twitter.com/vBUcftsKu3

— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) November 25, 2020

Obama Is Increasingly Full Of Shit

link.    

   How can you be so clueless as to not recognize that the progressive left hates white men? They come right out and say it. They re-define whiteness as oppressiveness. Increasingly, they have white women, too. And anyone who's had anything to do with "diversity" hiring knows that white men are in the sub-basement of that particular totem pole. To think that white men are not being victimized by the left, you have to either not be paying attention, or you have to be blinded by political correctness. 

   Increasingly, I realize that my support for Obama was not my smartest political position.

Biden Turns To "Polite And Orderly Caretakers Of America's Decline"

The important thing is that they're polite. Better to put us onto a polite and orderly glidepath into the side of the mountain than to brashly and rudely get us over it and into the sunlit uplands.

Trump Pardons Flynn

 Good. And MSDNC can stick that headline up its ass. Lying sons a bitches. (Not, of course, that Flynn didn't plead guilty. But: anybody who knows anything about this case knows that the headline is intentionally misleading.)

Conservatives Right Once Again?

 Bat flu hysteria refuted?

Message from an expert: "In just one week, we’ve had 4 major peer-reviewed studies refuting masks, asymptomatic transmission, pre-symptomatic transmission and PCR tests . House of cards is falling."

— Denis Rancourt (@denisrancourt) November 24, 2020

Jordan Peterson Makes The Penguin Random House In-House Snowflakes Go Menopausal

The cultists were howling over the company publishing Peterson's next book. I take great joy at the thought of their hysterical fury and their sweet, sweet tears:

   “He is an icon of hate speech and transphobia and the fact that he’s an icon of white supremacy, regardless of the content of his book, I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him,” a junior employee who is a member of the LGBTQ community and who attended the town hall told VICE World News.
   Another employee said “people were crying in the meeting about how Jordan Peterson has affected their lives.” They said one co-worker discussed how Peterson had radicalized their father and another talked about how publishing the book will negatively affect their non-binary friend. 

    “The company since June has been doing all these anti-racist and allyship things and them publishing Peterson’s book completely goes against this. It just makes all of their previous efforts seem completely performative,” the employee added.

   A third employee told VICE World News the company’s diversity and inclusion committee received at least 70 anonymous messages about Peterson’s book, and only a couple are in favour of the decision to publish it.

Lockdowns Are Stupid *Even If We Consider Only Health*

"Lockdowns now present the greatest threat to population health .. plummeting vaccination rates .. not getting diabetes treatment .. not attending for cancer screening, cardiovascular disease outcomes are worsening, and .. a huge strain on mental health.”https://t.co/M0371aWmOd

— Martin Kulldorff (@MartinKulldorff) November 25, 2020

Now add in the economic damage... 

Peak Stupidity = Peak Virtue-Signaling

Hi. I’d like to take this moment to formally disassociate myself from the human race. Thank you. pic.twitter.com/dhpseGMtwk

— Joey B. (@joeybtoonz) November 24, 2020

Greenwald: "Demanding Silicon Valley Suppress “Hyper-Partisan Sites” in Favor of “Mainstream News” (The NYT) is a Fraud"

link

I often think--and sometimes say--that being locked up in the web of lies and delusions spun by the MSM may be the fundamental error on which progressivism rests. But that can't be true, because then we'd need a different explanation of why the MSM is so et up with the crazy...

   More likely: the progressive capture of the MSM is what has enabled the radical left to, in turn, capture almost all of the relatively-more-centrist left. Capturing the MSM is analogous to capturing the universities: they're both critical institutions that control information. And the radical, progressive left has exploited them mercilessly.

   At least liberals have principles that should prohibit them from engaging in outright brainwashing. They do sometimes violate those principles...but at least they have them. The principles put some constraint on liberals (and/including conservatives). Progressives, like several other subsectors of the left, don't have any such principles. They largely don't believe in rationality or rightness or freedom or autonomy. They think that everything is merely a power struggle. They think the ideas of rationality and autonomy and the rest are liberal hangups. So they think that the difference between teaching and brainwashing is, too. So, unlike more moderate/less-crazy factions, they have no compunction about using the institutions they control for indoctrination. Of course those views tend to be held explicitly only on the more extremist edge...but they fade off toward the center, and influence the rest of the left. 

What An Honest Request To Wear Masks Would Be Like

 Yep:

If public health experts wanted to be honest about masks, they’d say:

We’d like you to wear a mask inside. We think it’s neighborly. It won’t protect you, but we hope - on the basis of very marginal evidence - it might slow transmission a little.

That’s not what they’re saying.

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) November 25, 2020

Biden: "I Have A Very Progressive Agenda"

 Shocker

The Sydney Powell Theory Is Starting To Sound Like The Steele Dossier

link

I think it was dumb of me--and of you, if you did, too--to take Russiagate and the Steele Dossier seriously. I can't remember how seriously I took it, but I know I took parts of it very seriously...e.g. the stuff about alleged computer communication with Alfa bank.

   Powell's theory is starting to sound kinda like all that nonsense...though Steele is apparently a kook, and Powell is apparently a person to be taken very seriously. 

   Just to be perfectly clear: the antecedent likelihood of Powell's theory is pretty low. I'll be surprised if there's much truth in it. Pre-Russiagate(gate), I'd probably have dismissed it out of hand. Post- those things, that would be nuts. If Russiagate had just been a crazy conspiracy theory, it wouldn't tell us much about this (apparently) crazy conspiracy theory. But, given that Russiagate was itself a massive conspiracy...and an ultimately successful one, in that it may well have cost Trump the '20 election...well...we can't dismiss even Powell's wild-sounding theory out of hand. Even if she's right, I don't see it would be that much worse than Russiagategate. Except, perhaps, for the fact that Trump was, I think, an objectively alarming figure in '16. And I think that might be a mitigating factor. 

   Though, in response, one could argue: by 2020, any reasonable person not epistemically locked up in the MSM web of delusions should be able to see that Trump is not an objectively alarming character...

   No, wait...that argument actually points in the other direction, no? That's to say: it would actually make the Powell theory...eh...insufficient coffee. I'm not sure what I was thinking there.

James Freeman: The Transition Begins...Though We Still Don't Know What Happened In PA

 I take a liberty with the title. It does seem that we're moving inexorably, incrementally toward a much bluer near-term future, unfortunately.

Bardcore: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" In Classical Latin