Jussim and Bernstein: The Macro-Subjectivity Of "Microaggression" Studies

No surprise--but props to them for doing this. 

Subjectivity, of course, is part of what makes postmodern progressive PC insanity possible. Pomo says that all interpretations are equally good/bad, and pomo-prog PC survives on interpreting everything as what they want it to be. And what they mostly want things to be is racist.  Or, y'know, some rough equivalent thereof--misogynist, "trans" "phobic," etc. 

"Liberal science" to use Rauch's term, wants, y'know, science. Interpretation is hypothesis at best--and hypothesis without testing is basically useless. Or worse. Since they're allowed to interpret everything however they like, of course they're winning. Anybody allowed to do that will win. 

Postmodernism is the paradigm of what Peirce called "studying in a literary spirit."

Schlichter: What If They Hadn't Lied To Us For The Last 18 Months?

this.
Exactly this.

   But trust is earned, and these people act like it is their right to have our trust, that we owe them to take it on faith that whatever these people say is the Gospel. Except they are wrong all the time, and instead of owning up to it, they treat you like some sort of idiot for noticing. When you don’t trust people who are perpetually wrong, that’s not denying science. That is science – you are making observations, and drawing reasonable conclusions. In this case, the observation is that our establishment sucks, and that it can’t be trusted.
   How far would a little humility gone? Very far. Imagine, and this will be hard, these masterminds getting up and saying, “America, we were wrong about something. We thought it was right, but we tested it and we found we were not right. Here is the data, and now that we have better information, we are changing our recommendation.”

Thomas Hogan and Kevin Dykes: I, Criminal

Why criminals flourish in the age of BLM, anti-cop propaganda, and progressive prosecutors.

Med School Lecturer Apologizes for Saying 'Pregnant Women'

He also apparently says that offending people is the worst thing a person can do...

I often find myself unable to say anything coherent beyond the obvious: this is madness.

NSA "Unmasks" Carlson; Whitmer "Kidnapping Plot" Was An FBI Op

It has become impossible--even for an obsessive like me--to keep up with all this insanity.

CDC Delta/India Variant Chaos

I again have no idea what to think.

   I'd rather that we could just basically accept whatever the CDC told us about such things. But we can't.

   The CDC has, seemingly, been corrupted/colonized by the unhinged postmodern-progressive worldview. And, apparently for a couple of different reasons (including chance), that worldview is committed to panic about a lot of different things. Including the COVID. 

   Alternatively: the CDC is overly risk-averse...possibly because they can't risk saying things are ok in case disaster strikes. That's probably the stuff of their nightmares.

   And, of course: they just seem to be in a serious knowledge deficit about this damnable bug.

   But, in general, the pomo-progs love the fear. And the CDC has clear ben influenced (it seems) but the prevailing worldview. Pomo-progs are addicted to panic. Panic about COVID, panic about the climate, panic about racism and police violence, panic about Trump, panic about "right-wing extremism" and "white supremacy," panic about "transgender" toddlers committing suicide on account of not getting immediate hormone injections and simulated-sex-change surgery, panic about nanoaggressions, panic about scholarly journals printing naughty, naughty badthought wrongstuff...

   Panic, as they've admitted several times, is also a tool. Panic about x is a precursor to more pomo-prog government control of x. That's just how they roll.

Read more »

Katherine J. Wu: COVID: How Did It Come To This?

Worthy of consideration.

One might snarkily summarize part of the argument like so: vaccines make the delta variant worse...so get your vaccine! But that's not quite fair.

A fairer spin: WOLF! WOLF!...AND THIS TIME FOR REALZ!!!

This prompted me to go re?-read The Boy Who Cried Wolf. (Was I actually re-reading? Or have I only heard the fable and never actually read it? I'd bet on the latter, I think.):

There was once a young Shepherd Boy who tended his sheep at the foot of a mountain near a dark forest. It was rather lonely for him all day, so he thought upon a plan by which he could get a little company and some excitement. He rushed down towards the village calling out “Wolf, Wolf,” and the villagers came out to meet him, and some of them stopped with him for a considerable time. This pleased the boy so much that a few days afterwards he tried the same trick, and again the villagers came to his help. But shortly after this a Wolf actually did come out from the forest, and began to worry the sheep, and the boy of course cried out “Wolf, Wolf,” still louder than before. But this time the villagers, who had been fooled twice before, thought the boy was again deceiving them, and nobody stirred to come to his help. So the Wolf made a good meal off the boy’s flock, and when the boy complained, the wise man of the village said:

“A liar will not be believed, even when he speaks the truth.”

A point we might keep in mind: eventually, the wolf did come.

Also maybe worth saying: I guess I thought the wolf ate the boy. The case could be made more relevant like so: the wolf eats a lot of the villagers. 

Also let's make the wolf into a bat...

Reich: COVID Is Facing A Resurgence, And So Is Trumpian Politics

I think Reich is wrong about almost everything--but this isn't unreasonable. 

I don't see any way around the conclusion that the contemporary radical progressive left is responsible for the vast majority of the politicization we see in our public disagreements. For one thing, their intellectual vanguard explicitly endorses the politicization of science and inquiry generally. And that clearly trickles down to their epigones and groupies. 

   But there's no doubt that the other guys are doing it, too. It was the left, as usual, that started it, with prominent Dems including the Veep saying that they wouldn't take the "Trump vaccine." Then the sides switched once Biden was in the White House. 

   But also: conservatives have good reason to be concerned about progressive politicization of...well...just about everything. They've politicized climate change, policing, incarceration, Russiagate, transgenderism, history, voting, education...well, the list goes on... Politicization is a bug on the right; on the left, it's a feature. They explicitly accept the Rahm Emanuel dictum: never let a good crisis go to waste. They used COVID to cheat the election in their favor, and now use bogus accusations of racism (their current all-purpose trump card). Note that Reich can't resist bringing up the BLM thesis and CRT in the midst of his rant...

   Progressives might as well be saying: look, we know we politicize everything, weaponizing it against everyone to our right (and that's almost everybody...)...but our motives are pure this time. And you are obligated to be perfectly objective about the matter--you must view it as purely a matter of medical costs and benefits, and see all our arguments, and those of the public face of medicine, has being honest and pure. And you don't get to take into account that we have been wrong and alarmist and hysterical about COVID the whole time. And are using it to advance our socialist and global warming agendas.

   I got the vaccine almost as soon as I could. But you've got to be deeply locked in progressive groupthink to be unable to see why people are skeptical. Hell, I'm skeptical. The stories we get from the MSM are always progressive and only occasionally true. 

   But: there's no doubt that they other side is contributing to the politicization as well. They're right to be skeptical, and probably right to see and argue that there are sound considerations of personal liberty that must be taken into account--and progressive politicization makes those considerations more salient.

Everybody Get Off Simone Biles

I don't pay much attention to the Olympics, but I sort of like some stuff. One thing I sort of watch sometimes is women's gymnastics--which I find pretty damn amazing--way more amazing than men's, in case you care about such comparisons. After Biles bowed out, I immediately saw some people (esp. on conservative sites) giving her grief. My pretty-much-immediate thought was: WTH? It's hard to believe that anyone can do that stuff anyway. That stuff is literally impossible from my personal athletic frame of reference. And there's no way anybody could convince me that it isn't dangerous as all hell. If she has doubts at all, bowing out is more than merely permissible. What do you want her to do? End up a quadriplegic?

   Anyway, I was glad to see people making that point.

   Turns out there is--entirely unsurprisingly--a general phenomenon that athletes call "the twisties" Cute name for what must be the utterly terrifying loss of the concentration / proprioception that makes it possible to do that impossible stuff. Other athletes are weighing in on this--and that, of course, constitutes expert opinion. 

   Case closed, IMO. Get off her back.

   In fact, she deserves credit for having the good sense to bow out. What? Do these critics think she's not committed? Really? How many less-than-maniacally-committed Olympic athletes are there? Ya think Biles just doesn't care? When she was predicted to win six (gold?) medals? What clearly happened was that her fear + good sense were strong enough to outweigh what is undoubtedly her burning, superhuman desire to win/succeed. 

   I guess it's possible that she should have realized this sooner or somesuch. But it seems pretty clear to me that people should get off her back and give her some support.

Your Blue Future: Open Borders

link          If you're surprised, you haven't been paying attention.

Concerns About Skyrocketing Crime Rates Are...Can Ya Guess?

Sure ya can...

Stay tuned for similarly insightful analysis about skyrocketing inflation rates...

Political Correctness And Fish

Two of many idiotic things about political correctness:

1. Its arguments are bullshit

2. Its obsession with allegedly offensive terminology is bullshit.

Oh, hai, we sat around until we could think of a phrase that is imperfectly Pollyannaish, and then we made a BFD about it and pretended that there was something substantive there that require that you change your attitudes and speech in order to ostentatiously advertise your political correctness...

   Now...I could go through this thing and shred it in detail...or I could just say: STFU you morons.

   Guess which one I decided to do?

[I'll add: you know you can do this shit with almost anything, right? And that's because your standards of argumentation are so low...if you want to count them as standards of argument, even...]

Police Officers Testify On Violence Of 1/6

I haven't watched the hearings yet. This thing is from The Nation (which not an actual news source unless Aaron Mate is on the byline). I wanted to post something from the blue team--in I have no idea whether these officers represent the general sentiment among the USCP. I don't even have a settled view about the riot--I've seen footage that was repulsively insane, and other footage that does, indeed, show "peaceful protesters" being ushered into the Capitol. There were clearly innocent people involved, there were clearly some repulsive psychotics. I'd like to know the truth--which we, needless to say, will not get from basically anything involving the contemporary Democrats. At least we might get it from the Pubs in some cases--though likely not this one. 

   Speaking of the shittiness of The Nation--did you realize that Jim Jordan is a "wingnut sociopath"? Hey, me neither!

   Anyway: I just want the truth. It's hard to remain objective when leftist mobs have been left basically free to loot and burn and murder, with no similar effort to get the ugly facts in front of Congress and the nation. But we're better than they are, so we have to care about this. It wasn't as bad in real terms as the BLM/antifa riots, obviously. But symbolically it was worse--and that matters, too. All the levers of power are now radically slanted left--as these hearings will be. Not to mention the MSM reporting on them. Everything will be spun in the worst possible way--even as the other half of the relevant story is not told. The BLM/antifa rioters attacked the people; repulsive as I find the attack on the Capitol, no one could possibly have really doubted the future of the Republic. 

   As I've said before, Trump f*cked us by calling for this demonstration. He might well have saved the country if he could have taken just the very craziest edge of crazy off his crazy. But he couldn't. So what he did was come yeeeah close to calling for disruption of the certification...and then stand by while it happened. Even leaving aside the question of Trump's well-deserved personal ignominy for the time being, he strengthened the hand of the hand of the anti-liberal, anti-rational left as effectively as he possibly could have--short of actually refusing to leave office or actually calling for a coup.

   Dumbass.

1619 Project Defenders: Defeated And Desperate

Jeez, this attempt to refute Sean Wilentz's criticisms of the 1619 project are desperate. It's all guilt by association--He kind of agrees with some conservatives!!!! and Trump!!!!!!! Then there's: He wants to make himself the leader of the anti-1619 "brigade"!!!  Though even worse is: He takes attention away from younger scholars!!!!!  To be fair, the author adds ...who are actually experts in the "field" of slavery, race, and "anti-blackness"... But that part would be the real objection: he ignores the work of people with more expertise than himself in this area of specialization. I mean...if true... What it probably means is: he ignores the writings of younger pomo-prog "scholar"-activists.

   The author of the post does admit that there are errors in the "project"--good for the author. And I mean that. Though the reason for this admission seems to be, at least to some extent, that a more judicious "project" could advance the relevant political agenda more effectively. But anyway--props for the admission.

   Perhaps I've just become too cranky about all this. There's just so much bullshit coming from the "scholar"-activists on such issues that it's becoming difficult for me to take it seriously. I don't necessarily think that's irrational...it's got an element of induction in it. Still, it's suboptimal. 

Larry Elder for CA Governor!

How great would this be?

Actually, probably, not great. Nobody can turn that sinking ship around fast enough to avoid disaster. 

He'd probably just get blamed for the Democrats' mess.

Even As Innumerable Papers and Books Containing Hatefacts and Badtruths Are Retracted, This Bullshit In The Lancet Declaring The Lab-Leak Thesis A "Conspiracy Theory" Lives On

 Without so much as an editorial note expressing embarrassment.

Soros Catspaw Kim Gardner: The Scandal Gets Scandalier

Among the many things I used to make fun of conservatives for was their obsession with George Soros. 

Unfortunately, as with so many other topics: they were right.

Ward Carroll: The Time An F-14 Shot Down A USAF RF-4 During A Training Exercise

 

"Concerns We're Heading For 'Misgendering Crisis' As 61% Of Brits Never Ask About Pronouns"

facepalm

I can pretty much guarantee that 39% of Brits don't ask about such nonsense even sometimes.

Because it's, y'know, bullshit.

In English, some pronouns are sex-specific; none, however, have anything to do with "gender." Pronouns have genders--but they refer on the basis of sex. People have genders, too: masculine, feminine, or androgynous. These are behavioral categories that have nothing to do with either (a) pronomial reference or (b) declarations. You can declare that you're masculine if you like--but if your actual behavior isn't masculine, then you aren't. Declarations about your sex or gender have no more rational force than declarations about your height and weight. I've encountered many guys well under 6' tall who claim to be 6' 2". They may speak of themselves as if they were, but talk is cheap. And non-constitutive of height. Also: of gender. 

Anyway: that article is a goldmine of facepalmerific bullshit. If facepalms were bitcoins, you could get rich mining that thing. I read it last night, and I remember that there are all sorts of specifics worth excerpting and ridiculing. But in the light of day, I realize that I've wasted too much of my life doing such stuff.

This pronoun bullshit is just one more undeniable indicator that contemporary progressivism has a broken bullshit-detector. Rational people have a reaction to bullshit that's similar to "cognitive dissonance": it generates aversion (or is a kind of aversion in the case of CD). Progressives have adopted a cracked complex of theories and dogmas that confound the operation of their innate bullshit-detectors. In fact, many of them cultivate this--actually working to dampen their aversion to bullshit in order to subordinate rational thought to the dictates of their new religion. People who adhere to old religions do the same thing. But complaining about them seems churlish in current year--the new religion is far more powerful and dangerous.

Tom Chivers: A Fair-Minded Review Of Koonin's *Unsettled*

link

Leighton Woodhouse: Magic Words: Stop Apologizing

link

Tell the woketarian cult to go fuck itself.

My gloss; not his words.

The sociological BS about the self being a "performance" and whatnot is ridiculous. But much of the rest is pretty good.

He's especially right that, by apologizing, you're increasing the power of the crazies. I mean, you shouldn't be abasing yourself to crazy assholes anyway. But, also, in terms of consequences: you have an obligation to not make the crazies more powerful.

DC Police Chief: You Cannot Coddle Violent Criminals

word

"Dallas Justice Now" Tells Parents To Pledge To Keep Their White Kids Out Of The Top 50 Schools In Order To Make Room For Non-Whites

Faaaaaaake

I mean...of course it's hard to tell. This isn't really much crazier than leftist stuff we know to be for real. But I'm confident it's fake.

Tucker's Getting To 'Em

This guy's an idiot, obviously. The worst human being known to mankind??? You have to be massively ignorant and/or irrational to say something like that. 

Carlson has actually been doing great work. 

Of course progressivism has become unhinged--and one way in which that's manifested itself is in progressive's spittle-flecked harassment of those who disagree. 

Hatescience: University of Minnesota

via Instapundit:

   As a result, it appears that the School of Public Health removed a reference to COVID-19’s origin in China.
   The College Fix filed a public records request with the University of Minnesota system for all COVID bias reports for the past year. This is the first response to the request.
   “A student reported that an article by the School of Public Health’s [Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy] website used language that suggested that COVID-19 started in China and questioned if this was biased language,” a November 23, 2020 complaint said. “Responded to the reporter and shared that their email was forwarded to CIDRAP so they can address the matter.”
   It appears that the university did remove the language after the complaint.
   A March 5, 2020 archived version said “CIDRAP is tracking and analyzing the rapidly evolving worldwide outbreak of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) disease that originated in China.”
   That has now changed.
   “CIDRAP is tracking and analyzing the rapidly evolving novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic,” the website now reads.

This is a natural extension of pretending that terms like 'Wuhan virus' and 'China virus' are impermissible. 

Robert Smalls, Badass

Your occasional reminder.

Dropping The SAT and ACT: The University Of California Is Lying To Us

link

I barely graduated high school; my GPA was abysmal. If I'd have missed one more day of my senior year, I wouldn't have graduated. (I think it was one; it might have been a couple.) But I scored in the 99th percentile of the ACT. 

Now, I attended a fourth-tier university that was, in effect, open admissions. (It was really cheap, and nearby, and my family didn't know any better, me being the first person in the family to attend college.) Incidentally: that institution did right by me, IMO, inter alia getting me into a fair number of extremely good graduate programs. So I don't mean to bash the place. It deserves significant credit. The point is just: my high ACT score was wasted.

The other point being: it needn't have been. That score could have gotten me into a lot of schools--though many of them would have been unaffordable. The next point being: standardized tests save a lot of people like me--people who were bored and contrarian and disengaged in high school, but who then flourish in college.

To be clear: the UC system won't even consider ACT/SAT scores anymore--they're not even just making them optional.

We're doing a lot of extremely stupid things in the name of "anti-racist" fanaticism. This is one of them.

The Coming Collapse Of The Developing World?

maybe. Horrific if a real possibility. I'm generally skeptical about such catastrophism, though. But what do I know?*

* Answer: not much.

The Great Unhingening: Violent Crime Encroaches On The Other D.C.

The progressive left's gaslighting powers are so great that they even gaslight themselves...It's all the new legal guns! Because criminals love background checks and always prefer legal firearms for doing teh crimez! It's Republicans and their push to 'defund the police'!" It's teh COVIDZ because...erm...when you get out a' teh lockdownz, you just gotta shoot somebodyz!! 

I guarantee you, somebody out there on the left is saying that it's global warming...

I don't like this kind of argument, but it's actually right: progressives have these zany, boutique, luxury beliefs because they don't have to live with the consequences. They live in ritzy neighborhoods--often gated. They aren't going to be victims of crime. What they have to worry about is being cancelled for wrongthink. Best to go ahead and support BLM, defunding, decarceration, and the rest of the crazy package.

Tunku Varadarajan: How Science Lost The Public's Trust

This is excellent.

   One motivation: Pessimism sells. “You don’t get blamed for being too pessimistic, but you do get attention. It’s like climate science. Modeled forecasts of a future that is scary is much more likely to get you on television.” Mr. Ridley invokes Michael Crichton, the late science-fiction novelist, who hated the tendency to describe the outcomes of models in words that imply they are the “results” of an experiment. That frames speculation as if it were proof.
   Climate science is already far down the road to politicization. “Twenty or 30 years ago,” Mr. Ridley says, “you could study how the ice ages happened and discuss competing theories without being at all political about it.” Now it’s very hard to have a conversation on the subject “without people trying to interpret it through a political lens.”
   Mr. Ridley describes himself as “lukewarm” on climate change. He accepts that humans have made the climate warmer, but doesn’t subscribe to any of the catastrophist views that call for radical changes in human behavior and consumption. His nuanced position hasn’t protected him from attack, of course, and the British left is prone to vilify him as a “denier.”
   Climate science has also been “infected by cultural relativism and postmodernism,” Mr. Ridley says. He cites a paper that was critical of glaciology—the study of glaciers—“because it wasn’t sufficiently feminist.” I wonder if he’s kidding, but Google confirms he isn’t. In 2016 Progress in Human Geography published “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.”
   The politicization of science leads to a loss of confidence in science as an institution. The distrust may be justified but leaves a vacuum, often filled by a “much more superstitious approach to knowledge.” To such superstition Mr. Ridley attributes public resistance to technologies such as genetically modified food, nuclear power—and vaccines.

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WaPo: Dozens Of "Nooses" Have Shown Up On U.S. Construction Sites. The Culprits Rarely Face Consequences.

Oh, WaPo... Remember when you used to do journalism?

Or, as we say here on the interwebs: pics or it didn't happen.

Spoiler alert: there are no pics.

In fact, there are few links.

There is one link such that, if you click through and do some more clicking and scrolling, you can find a pic of what is definitely a noose. 

My WAG is that that's another fake hate crime...FHCs possibly being more common than the non-fake kind.

Of course we know from previous encounters with this issue that we're dealing mostly with what are commonly called "loops"... 

Read more »

Larry Elder Leads Race To Replace Newsome??

Oh please oh please

Pop Star You've Never Heard Of Bashes Magazine You've Never Heard Of For Referring To Her As 'She' Rather Than 'She/They'

She's pissed.

Woman Busted For Anti-Asian Assault Spree In Queens, NY

Don't forget: the politically correct explanation of such crimes is:  white supremacy.

Cleveland Indians Adopt Extremely Lame New Name

Wow that's a terrible decision.

I have no link to Cleveland nor the Indians...but there have to be like about 10,000 better names than "Guardians."

Laaaaaaaaame

Oh, sorry, I mean: Differently Aaaaaaaaaaabled....

In their defense:

(a) It's like an order of magnitude less lame that the commercial announcing the name change (see link).

and

(b) Their options are narrowed down to names that seem immune to future Woketarian REEEEEjection.

The last survey data I saw in this question indicated that actual American Indians didn't mind the name 'Indians,' but, rather, kinda liked it. In fact, they were more pro- than anti-'Redskins,' too. 

Oh, sorry: I mean: District of Columbia Football Concern.

But, of course, its mainly the fee-fees of the white activist-academician class that drives this sort of thing.

Anyway: it would make the change less stupid if they'd picked something less egregiously generic and crappy. 

Everything Is Climate-Change: Bootleg Fire Edition

Not actually climate-change.

Also:

The extent of global fires has been trending significantly downward.

Of course we know how this game is played: anything that can be attributed to climate-change--temperature increases, temperature decreases, more fires, fewer fires (climate-change --> more rain!), less snow, more snow, illegal immigration--is attributed to climate-change by progressives (which, of course, includes the media). Any time conservatives play the opposite version of this game ("lots of snow--guess it's global warming!"), they're ridiculed. Now, the latter is, by itself, much more reasonable: weather is not climate, as you may have heard. It's the former that's bullshit.

MO Teachers Conspired With CRT Advocate To Hide Radical Teachings From Parents

No surprise.

   We already know this is going on. The relevant group of teachers keeps flip-flopping around among several different positions in a way that makes it clear they are lying, cheating and indoctrinating. We're not teaching CRT...It's impossible to teach CRT to kids...What we're teaching is not technically CRT...We're teaching "CRT," but that stands for "culturally responsible teaching!"...We'll fight to keep teaching CRT!...We'll stop teaching CRT when you pry our copies of Delgado and Stefancic from our cold, dead hands...

   To be clear: there's nothing wrong with teaching CRT in an objective way to students who are capable of thinking about it. What's objectionable is indoctrination, biased presentation of views, refusal or inability to discuss both strengths and weaknesses of views that are taught, dishonesty about what's being taught, teaching radical ideas as if they were well-established, teaching mere opinion as if it were knowledge, using public schools to advance partisan/factional agendas, using classrooms as soapboxes, and so on.

   Remember, we're dealing with an anti-liberal view here. It's part of the view itself that objectivity is impossible, and social change (to the left, as goes without saying) is the goal--not education. Fairness, objectivity and intellectual autonomy are liberal values, not illiberal leftist ones. One should predict that the very people who accept CRT should aim to covertly indoctrinate students; one should be surprised if they didn't.

Trump As Speaker Of The House Is Not As Crazy As It Sounds

Well it hardly could be, could it?

On the one hand, Trump should never be in any position of governmental power. On the other, neither should the contemporary Dems. 

As Woody Allen didn't quite say: We are at a crossroads. One path leads to government by chaotic, narcissistic Twitterstorm. The other to government by the institutionalization of ideas cooked up in the gender studies department last Tuesday. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Recoveries, Red and Blue

What could possibly explain people modifying their behavior in predictable ways in response to dumb incentives provided by the government?

It's a mystery.

God bless the laboratories of democracy. I'd like to see more of this sort of thing...y'know...if we'd actually pay attention to the experimental results.

Is The Pope Catholic?

One wonders...

More Gaslighting From The Blue Loonies

WE DIDN'T SAY "DEFUND THE POLICE"--REPUBLICANS DID!!!111

The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition Cover Model Is A Dude

So, first off, Sports Illustrated still exists.

So that's news in itself.

Second off, the cover model is a dude representing himself as a woman.

Stunning and brave!

Because, bigot, it's not enough that you pretend that dudes pretending to be women are women just, y'know, casually. You are now expected to be perfectly cool with dudes pretending to be women in the Sports Illustrated (which I would like to stress: still exists) swimsuit edition... That is to say: under conditions that specifically exist in order for you to be able to look at and admire attractive women. It's not enough that you pretend that Caitlyn (nee Bruce) Jenner is a woman. Noooo! You are now expected to pretend that this dude in a bikini is a woman--and to be ok with his having been specifically chosen because he is a dude and specifically put in a context reserved for attractive women in swimsuits that you would like to look at and admire. The phrase "shoved in your face" comes to mind.

   Now, honestly, I'd be less put off had SI chosen to just put ordinary dudes in their swimsuit edition. That would be more honest and less political--and less crazy. If they'd have said that they'd decided that it is somehow wrong to show only scantily-clad women, so they decided to show scantily-clad dudes as well, I'd think they were kinda dumb, and pawns of a stupid set of ideas spawned by a stupid philosophical worldview... But I'd find that less stupid than this. I can at least imagine being convinced that, if a major publication shows cheesecake, it ought to show beefcake, too. Though this seems to me to be a bit like guys insisting that they be welcomed into a lesbian bar...

Read more »

Did COVID-19 Cost Americans 5 Days Of Life On Average? Did The CDC Cheat To Bump The Estimate Up To 1 Year?

Maybe and maybe.

(via Reason via Instapundit.)

[Did somebody (Bach? CDC?) confuse (a) the amount of life we lost directly from batflu infections and (b) the amount of life we lost from 2020 (including at least batflu + lockdowns)?] 

That's not my idea, and I'm in too big a hurry right now to read again and think.]

Peter Savodnik: The Faith Of Systemic Racism

Right on target.

To just pick out a couple of points:

Yes, one of the main problems about the systemic racism conjecture is that it tends toward untestability. It needn't be untestable--but that's how it's handled by the progressive left. It's basically an assumption treated as if it were a conclusion--i.e., as if it were supported by evidence. To some extent, it is a conclusion--but it's based on a different assumption: that "inequities" can only be caused by discrimination/oppression. Which is, of course, ostentatiously false. 

Second point, which I'll make the last word here:

But then there is the Plurality of the Unwell. Those who are the loudest and most desperate and dangerous. Those behind the new discourse. Those who corner or lobby the people who make the decisions—the CEOs, university presidents, studio chiefs and so on—to pretend that there is a ghost in the machine. That we are being orchestrated by an unverifiable hate. That it is their role, their mandate, to overthrow the veil of false consciousness and lead us to the light. These people, one suspects, are true believers. Their faith is real, but they do not realize it is faith. [my emphasis]

Rove on Biden

This is overly-generous, but still damning. Rove's right that Biden has, at least, returned a kind of normality and dignity--or, at least, lack of crass buffoonery--to the office. I think that's extremely important...and yet it pales in comparison to his mind-bogglingly awful policies and initiatives. As Rove notes, he's governing far to the left of how he ran; that alone outweighs the tone/demeanor advantage he has over Trump. His biggest single error--though there's a lot of competition for that title--is probably having created a border crisis basically out of thin air by undoing Trump's practical, wildly successful, multi-dimensional purely on the basis of hard-left progressive quasi-open-borders ideology. 

   Well, I'm not going to go on. This is not your father's Democratic party. This is a party such that, if anyone had described it to Dems of 2000--or even 2010--they'd have angrily laughed it off as a conservative fabrication. But here we are.

Russia Unveils "Checkmate" Fighter--LCD Is Unimpressed

The Checkmate.

LCD discussion.

Bonus Binkov.

I thought the same thing as several commenters: (a) Seems like nothing more than a mock-up, and (b) even if it works and even if it's good, Russia will probably never make it. If they do, they won't be able to make many of 'em. That's just how they roll...

Incidentally and obviously: thing looks like somebody put an F-16, an F-35, an X-32, and maybe a dash of Raptor together into a malfunctioning transporter.

Max Eden On Catherine Lhamon

link

To be clear, Ms. Lhamon might be a perfectly lovely person for all I know. But she advocates highly-politicized, disastrous, far-left policies.

WSJ: The Senate's Lhamon Test

Catherine Lhamon should not be allowed anywhere near education policy. Nor, I suspect, power of any kind.

Your Blue Future: Yet Another *Brazen Crime In CA* Video

Is there any possibility that this is sustainable? 

Taibbi: NPR's Self-Own

God, those people are painfully insufferable.

There's just no excuse for public funding of progressive propaganda operations like NPR. 

Make 'em hawk more goddamn tote bags to keep the lights on.

Or, y'know...go back to doing something at least vaguely resembling journalism. That's--y'know, at least theoretically--an option too.

Dems On Illegals: Citizenship Is Infrastructure

This is a lie:
"Warren, Castro, Padilla, Lieu: Citizenship for Essential Workers is Infrastructure."

Lindsey Graham is right:

That may be the dumbest idea in the history of the Senate.

Hey, fixing my leaky basement is infrastructure! Gimme some goddamn money!

Also Head Start and school lunches are infrastructure because they're metaphorically foundational for future academic success!

Also transgender bathrooms are infrastructure because without the ability to take a whiz you can't really do anything else!

Also gun control is infrastructure because some optics are infrared and have structure!

Orwell: "Politics and the English Language." 

No reason.

How Long Before Making Fun Of This Is Declared Rainbow-Dildo-Butt-Monkey-Phobia?

link

Reuters' Lies About CRT, or: Who Will Fact-Check The Fact-Checkers?

This, from Reuters, doesn't link to the actual survey questions, so I recommend that we just consider it lies unless/until we see the actual survey. The post itself contains obvious lies about CRT, e.g.:

The poll showed that a bipartisan majority of Americans say that high school students should learn about slavery and racism in America. Yet respondents were more opposed to teaching critical race theory, which maintains that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow racial segregation laws continues to create an uneven playing field for nonwhite Americans.

That's a shameless, thermonuclear distortion that's the moral equivalent of a lie, so I'll just refer to it as such. This is like saying: 

Most people think we should be concerned about our economic future, but they "were more opposed" to the Green New Deal, which maintains that climate change will wreck the near-future economy.

Agreeing with theory T about one uncontroversial bit of T does not entail agreement with the controversial parts of T. And it doesn't show that there's some inconsistency involved in rejecting T, especially if T is largely composed of insane sub-theories (or sub-policies) that you've been careful not to mention--as do both the GND and CRT. 

   Of course this is a major part of many of our problems: the MSM is now a full-blown progressive propaganda operation. On top of that, they get to fact-check themselves. This is like asking a known liar whether he's lying in the case at hand. In my experience, if you ask someone whether he's lying, on rare occasion he'll fess up. But usually, of course, not.

   And of course the very fact that the whole progressive-industrial complex has gone into high gear to lie about CRT...We're not teaching it in K-12! It's impossible to teach it in K-12! It's impossible to teach it outside of law schools! No, wait, we are teaching it! In fact, we're going to fight to teach it! In fact it's impossible to teach K-12 without teaching it! But that's ok because it's just a "lens"! So it's neither true nor false! Because truth is a "white way of knowing!" But CRT is true! In fact, it's impossible to teach about slavery and racism without teaching it! ALSO TEH MATHZ IS RAZIZT!!!!!!1111111

   This, again, is almost entirely the fault of progressives. The conservative reaction to this insanity is well between the ditches given the nature and importance of the problem. They may not get CRT exactly right every time--in fact, there's no such thing as getting it exactly right, since there are different accounts of what it is even among its proponents. And it'd be a miracle if the anti-CRT laws didn't overstep in some cases. But progressive are indoctrinating kids with some of the craziest and most destructive ideas out there--and that's saying something. And, of course, it's not an aberration: progressives are not liberals. They are not committed to reason and intellectual autonomy. They seek to indoctrinate and--Marx-wise--don't care about understanding the world, but only care to change it. And the changes they seek would be for the very much worse.

Richard Samuelson: How Should Slavery, Jim Crow, And Racism Be Taught In Schools?

This seems balanced and reasonable. I somewhat disagree with his claim that conservatives are misusing the term "critical race theory," for reasons I've stated a couple of times. Technically, he's partially right, though. 

   The main anti-progressive point is: (a) kids should not be taught a radical, anti-liberal, anti-American set of philosophical opinions, and (b) they should not be indoctrinated, and (c) they damn well shouldn't be indoctrinated into a radical, anti-liberal, anti-American set of philosophical opinions. 

One reasonable response to this is: for decades upon decades, kids have been indoctrinated with a conservative, liberal, panglossian, pro-American set of philosophical opinions, and so... There's a Marcuse/Kendian-style argument in there about fighting indoctrination with subsequent counter-indoctrination. Liberals and liberal conservatives tend to reject such arguments, and I'm no exception.

   Samuelson's suggestion may be too far on the anti-progressive side to satisfy progressives. I'm not sure he's right, but I don't think he's too far wrong.

  Another question: should kids be taught a purely objective view of American history? Or should schools be erring on the side of some practical goal--instilling civic pride and some commitment to the American project? I think that's a tough question. But I'm inclined to think that they should not aim to instill anti-Americanism in kids--however the previous question gets answered.

   I admit this is complicated. I just don't think that the radical, anti-liberal, anti-rationalist, leftist fad of the last fifteen minutes should be taught in K-12--and indoctrination of any kind is right out.

Rian Milan: "How 'Equity' Ideology Plunged South Africa Into Inequality And Chaos"

link

Things were already bad, bad, bad in SA even before this latest spasm. 

VDH: The American Descent Into Madness

On target, as usual.

NPR Hatchett Job On TDW

So, um...does NPR admit that it is a far-left "news" source? The NYT has admitted that it's lefty...has any other organization in the PMSM? 

Treacher: "Anti-"Fa Blackshirts Fight Against Women's Rights (And Get Their Asses Gratifyingly Kicked)

Of course I abhor violence and would do everything! in my power to avoid it no matter what! Needless to say! Buuut....there's no denying that these papered little Blackshirts of ambiguous "gender" deserve to get pummeled... And the cops oblige in at least some cases. 

   The little scamps are attacking women who are protesting the "Wi" spa in which a man pretending to be a woman exposed his junk to women and little girls. Treacher explains:

Men are evil, unless they identify as women, in which case their rights supersede those of genetic females, who are bigots for wanting to go to the spa without seeing naked men, who are evil, unless they identify as women, in which case...

Aside from everything else crazy here: when are women going to understand that they always come in last in the Oppression Olympics? The left always puts women after every other faux victim group. Always. They even come in last behind men pretending to be women. I mean come on... Short of being a reviled straighwhitemale, women really can't come in any laster, OO-wise.

Democrats In 2018 Saying Everything Mike Lindell Says About Voting Machines

Here are Democrats in 2018 saying everything Mike Lindell says about voting machines pic.twitter.com/IFZ2sEhmZ9

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) July 19, 2021

DACA Illegal

link

Like most Americans, I tend to favor something like DACA, for the obvious reasons. 

However:

(a) It does sound as if it was implemented illegally. I averted my eyes from that...well, because Obama.

and

(b) Given the Dems' basically all-out war against any restrictions on immigration, I guess you've got to fight back where you can. Maybe DACA can be used as a bargaining chip.

VDH: Dems Won't Admit They've Become The Party Of Wealth

I'm somewhat skeptical--but not terribly so.

Some conservatives start sounding a bit like Marxists when they try to outflank the Woketarians like this. 

Not that VDH does--but one worries.

   I do think conservatives have hit on an important point: rich progressives now hold a large number of "luxury beliefs"--beliefs that they can afford to hold on account of their wealth and safety and insulation from their effects on society. Rich people can afford to indulge in recreational drugs and recreational sex--neither will ruin them. Poor people can ruin their lives like that. The rich can advocate for loose or open borders--that won't import competition for their jobs, and it won't crapify their neighborhoods. 

   Another reason I shy away from such arguments is that I still hope liberalism might be saved. But for that to happen, liberals will have to come to understand that conservatives are often right. As it stands, one reason for the crazification of liberalism is that they don't understand that. They only accept a narrow range of criticisms--x isn't liberal enough; x is liberal, but the means to x you advocate won't work; x is liberal, but something about it or your suggested means will be counterproductive (i.e.: help conservatives); x is at odds with some other liberal commitment. These class-based arguments seem kind of like the latter to me. Which isn't to say that they're wrong. I just don't like making them. I'd rather that lefties see why open borders is a bad idea than use their own weird anti-wealth arguments against them.  But that's a fairly weird preference.

   Sorry; too fast and sloppy. But I gotta work.

"How To Be An Anti-capitalist,: or: Find Somebody Who Looks At You The Way Chuck Schumer Looks At...

...his last, best chance to wreck the country.

   Really all I ask is for people to make no more than a roughly average number of vaguely reasonable mistakes. Just get in the damn ballpark. Stop with the cavalcade of massively idiotic unforced errors, for the lova.

   Sadly, when you start off from climate apocalypticism, you've already committed yourself to something that's going to lead to more than an average number of mistakes--and some really bad ones. 

   I'll admit that having a doddering President in physical and mental decline is less embarrassing and psychologically taxing than having Trump up there taking verbal dumps in the spotlight 24/7. But, to repeat myself repeating myself, I'll take embarrassing words and solid deeds over good manners and bad policy just about any day.

"Virginia Is A Rising Leader In Passenger Rail"

WTF is a "rising leader"? Sounds like not a leader to me. Is a Corporal a "rising leader"? Is he a rising General? 

Sounds to me like the WaPo just getting a bit overwhelmed by its lust for mass transit.

I used to be gung-ho for mass transit. That was back before the government and corporations went totalitarian and started going after people who said things they don't like. Now? Fuck you. I'll take cars. Trucks, actually. The more control those assholes have over something, the less you can rely on it. Also fuck the climate hoax. (I mean: yes, there's been some warming; but I'm sick of uncertainty being represented as certainty.) In all honesty, I'm all about big-ass trucks and SUVs now. I'm sick of being lied to. And God knows what another 3.5 years of hard-left Democrat rule will wreak on the country. I'm going to buy something that can crawl over many things.

Dreher Is Finally Getting It: "ABA: We're Book-Banners, But For The Left"

I mentioned this in April. There are no right-of-center books mentioned on the Banned Books Week page. 

This is the way the left operates. "Politically correct' means correct from the leftist perspective. "Social justice" means just from the leftist perspective. "Change" means change leftward. Suppression of expression is awful if the expression is leftist. Censorship is awful if it's censorship of the left. These things are all so well-established among progressives that I doubt they ever even notice--the organization that runs banned books week doesn't even bat an eye at labeling a right-of-leftist book as "violence."  And, of course, hyperbolically apologizing for inflicting book-sales violence on unknown snowflakes. 

Dreher:

   Let me remind you that this is the trade association of independent booksellers, yet they believe that simply mentioning a popular book that offends against woke dogma is “a violent incident.” They are abasing themselves FOR MENTIONING A BOOK THAT IS FOR SALE!
   These are the same people who squawk on self-righteously about Banned Books Week. They are advocating banning books (“banning” by their standard). You can’t make this up.
   See, this kind of thing is why I’ve become more radicalized this summer. I don’t believe that the leading voices of the Left have any confidence in traditional liberal principles anymore. They — or at least their organizations, like ABA — are illiberal leftists. I would like to be wrong, but this is a perfect example of what Wesley Yang says of wokeness: that it’s the “successor ideology” to liberalism. A liberal American Booksellers Association would never have put out that kind of cringe, disgraceful tweet. Woke ABA would, and did.

Go read it, I say, and follow the links to several disgraceful, groveling, shitty, stupid, anti-liberal statements by the ABA. They deserve endless ridicule for this stuff. 

Biden Admin Urges OPEC To Increase Output

link

So...they shut down the Keystone XL, but then ask OPEC to increase output. Ergo: this isn't really about climate hysteria after all...but about, what? Satisfying the blue activist base? Virtue signaling? Climate Apocalypse Theater?

What a train wreck this administration is.

They sacrifice energy independence, radically raise gas prices, and pump more money into regimes that do nothing but cause trouble for us.

"Death To Our Extremist Opponents!"

Stupidity + ignorance + totalitarian pseudo-philosophy --> bad.

“Let’s deny this off-key band of people that are anti-education, anti-teacher, anti-equity, anti-history, anti-racial reckoning, anti-opportunities, anti-help people, anti-diversity, anti-platform, anti-science, anti-change agent, anti-social justice, anti-health care, anti-worker, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-children, anti-health care, anti-worker, anti-environment, anti-admissions policy change, anti-inclusion, anti-live-and-let live people. Let them die,” she shouted, to cheers and applause. “Don’t let these uncomfortable people, don’t let these uncomfortable people deter us from our bold march forward.”

 Maybe the problem is really meta-stupidity / meta-ignorance: the teachers pushing this stuff have no idea how ignorant and, well, not-all-that-smart they are. They fancy themselves intellectuals, but really have no earthly clue WTF they're talking about. Insert Dunning-Kruger hoo-ha here. You'd think they'd understand enough to know that they have insufficient grounds for teaching this shit to children...but I guess not. OTOH, they're basically acting in accordance with illiberal principles: they aim to indoctrinate and convert, not understand. According to their own dogma, the epistemic status of the dogma doesn't matter. What matters is winning a political war. And what they want is child soldiers.

Michael Goodwin: Biden Admin Aims To Collude With Big Tech To Undermine First Amendment

To quote Insty: you may not care about the Gleichschaltung, but the Gliechschaltung cares about you...:

Joe Biden is, at this point in his presidency, by far the worst President of my lifetime. And that's a lifetime that includes Nixon (though I was too young to understand what was going on at the time), Carter, Bush '43, and Trump. None of them, at this point, comes anywhere close to the disaster that is Biden:

   Any assessment of Joe Biden’s performance last week runs into an obstacle. While it was awful from start to finish, the hard part is ­deciding which was the absolute worst moment.
   Was it the president’s latest attack on state voting law reforms, which he bizarrely called “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War”?
   Was it the administration’s outrageous invitation for the pampered popinjays at the United Nations to sit in judgment of America’s racial strife?
   Or perhaps it was Biden’s decision to push a one-party spending spree of trillions of dollars even as inflation levels reached their highest mark in 13 years?
   Under almost any president, each of those events would qualify as a low point. But Biden is proving to be spectacularly awful at his job, and he did something else that captures the award for the week’s Worst of the Worst.
   Friday, the president accused Facebook of “killing people” and demanded it silence those opposed to or questioning the coronavirus vaccines.
   Coming from the president, this is a breathtaking accusation and demand.
   It far exceeds anything Donald Trump ever said or did. Trump wrongly called some media “the enemy of the people,” but never accused them of actually “killing people.”
   But Biden has — recklessly — and no doubt assumes the lapdog news media will echo his charge.

The Dems have capitulated to the pomo-prog cult, hence have become unmoored from reason and reality. I realize there are a lot of Dems out there who haven't drunk the Kool-Aid...but they're going with the flow or, at best, silently disagreeing. I thought HRC would knock the crazies to the side as the Big Dog had done. Then I thought Pelosi would hold up and be a bulwark against "the Squad," the vanguard of loony in the House. When she capitulated on the crazy, outrageous impeachment scam, it was over for the Dems. I thought there was some chance that Biden would be as good as his word and govern from the center...but I thought it unlikely, and--you can look it up--before the election I argued like so: 

Trump is the monkey wrench at the center of the giant, apocalyptic mechanism of the progressive left. He's  grinding their gears and jamming up a machine the function of which is to destroy the country--which is not to say that's what it was designed to do...but...certainly some some in the vanguard of the left would see that as a happy consequence at least. Electing Biden will, at best, mean replacing that monkey wrench with a big central gear that will allow the smooth functioning of the rest of the mechanism. And that will mean disaster.

Boy I hate bein' right all the time...

   I'll add:  

   The progressive left just keeps being wrong about everything--often undeniably so. Yet it never seems to diminish their certitude that they are crusaders for and on the right side of history, and, as such, are permitted--required!--to brush liberal principles and institutions aside in order to bring about the leftist paradise.

   So get ready to get utopia'd good and hard...

Shelby Steele, White Guilt

Just started this yesterday. Of course I've read stuff by and about Steele--but this is the first book of his I've read. 

Thus far I've been most impressed by two things:

(a) His poignant-but-in-no-way-maudlin accounts of what it was like to live during segregation

(b) His strikingly insightful account of "white guilt."

I put that phrase in quotes because the ideas he's onto are rich and interesting enough that this is almost a theoretical term--though it tracks so close to the plain phenomena that it's also just like a really clear and good analysis of the concept. He's certainly not just complaining about the plain facts of what's gone wrong on the left; he's (thus far, anyway) offering real insights into the nature and functioning of (what he calls) white guilt.

   Anyway, thus far I've been notably impressed.

Contemporary Leftist "Anti-Racism" Isn't Anti-Racism--It's (a) A Specific Variety Of *Seeming* Anti-Racism that Yields (b) A Kind Of Anti-Racist Fanaticism, Which Yields (c) Anti-White Racism

I could go on, but I don't feel like it.

But why do you think it's so important for the fanatical, progressive left to insist at every opportunity that anti-white racism is impossible "by definition"? It's an obviously absurd proposition. Why expend so much time and energy on such a risky rhetorical project? 

Rand Study: Lockdowns ‘Single Biggest Public Health Mistake, Possibly Of All History’

link

I don't know anything about the history of public health mistakes...so wouldn't be in a position to compare this one to other doozies. And, well, I'm not even in a position to conclude that this one was an error. But that's where I'd put my money if I had to. IMO we should have recommended that vulnerable people (old, overweight, diabetic and other comorbidities) stayed home, and the rest of us should have gone about our business with increased caution.

1619 Project founder believes Cuba has 'the least inequality' and has brought about the 'end of codified racism'

Z0MG ICE!!!11...er...well...wait a sec...is she right? Is it true? And does she judge Cuba to have the kind of system we should have? Does she think greater racial equality is worth everybody being worse off in every other way? Or what?

   She also admits to not being an expert on international racism.

   Anyway. What really matters is whether what she said is true. Next on the list: is she covertly recommending communism for the USA? 

Interesting Star Wars / Movie Reasoning

I'm ignorant about movies and suchlike--I really know nothing about that stuff. I mean, of course I watch movies...but I'm not religious about it. Honestly, watching this video, I was unsure whether I'd even seen the final (?) Star Wars. I revere the original trilogy, like any red-blooded American boy from the '70s... But, well, you know. I got old, the movies got worse, blah blah blah.

   Anyway, I never really realized, I guess, that critiquing movies involves reasoning. Knowledge, sure--but there's a lot of thinking in the video below. I found it interesting:

Why Did The Left Go Insane?

Here's a puzzling fact: the left went insane all at once.

   Of course that isn't true. But it happened fast--so quickly and on so many fronts that it was hard to keep up with. That seems to be a surprising / unpredicted fact--ergo in need of explanation.

If progressives had, say accepted transgender mythology, or moved toward open borders, or accepted social constructivism, or the intersectionality conjecture, or rejected free speech...some one of those things would be strange, of course, but more-or-less in line with the nutty enthusiasms that sweep both sides of the aisle. 

   But what happened was: all these crazy views and more swept through the vocal left all at once. 

   Progressives often try to argue that it was Trump--because, of course, everything is Trump. (Trump is everything. Everything and Trump are one...) But that's false. The crazification was already well-underway by the time His Obnoxiousness arrived on the scene. Trump was a reaction to the crazification of the left. He seems to have intensified it. But it's not clear by how much. It was already a runaway train before he had even emerged as the GOP frontrunner. 

   So what explains it? The crazy radicalization on so many different issues, that is?

   I've got hypotheses, various of which I've floated over the years...but, bottom line: I don't know. All I'm doing now is saying: it seems to require an explanation.

The Pomo-Prog Left Aims To Stifle *All* Disagreement

The contemporary postmodern progressive left wants to stifle--and, ultimately, outlaw--all "hate speech." That's bad, of course. But what people tend to leave out is crucial and well-known: it has an utterly daft, extremely expansive conception of "hate" and "hate speech." Consider racism alone--this left thinks that basically everything it doesn't like, anywhere in the vicinity of race, is racist. Basically everything is racist according to them. So, granting them the power to stifle "racist" speech is granting them the right to stifle just about any speech. 

   This is partially because they're just crazy, but partially it's the properly postmodern part of the view--every interpretation is just as good (or, better: just as bad) as every other interpretation. 'There's a dog' doesn't mean There's a dog to any greater degree than it means 2+2=7, or It was the best of times, it was the dinosaur of times, or There's a cat...or nothing at all. But it's mostly because progressivism is just crazy. Though one of the reasons it's crazy is: it actually wants to implement wacko philosophical speculation that ought to be isolated to the classroom.

   Of course they don't even want to stop with "hate speech"--and not even when fortified by their absurdly expansive conception of "hate." They've also suggested, for example, that climate-change "denial" be made illegal. Ditto inquiry into racial differences. Of course they (via Big Tech) have already stifled whatever facts about Wuhan virus disease they found distasteful--e.g. that the virus is properly called 'Wuhan virus,' that it probably escaped from a Chinese lab, that it's not very dangerous to most people...etc. 

   Wanting to stifle speech--the illiberal extremist's perpetual fever dream--is bad enough when you want to stifle some narrow range of speech. It's even worse when what you really want to do is stifle all disagreement--as contemporary progressives want to do. 

Davidson Offers "#AbolishThePolice" Course

The hashtag makes gives it that little extra stupid something.

Biden To Afghan Translators, Contractors, Etc.: "You Have A Home In The United States"

For once I think Biden is doing the right things. 

Leaving seems to me like a terrible decision, but staying seems futile. We certainly should take in Afghans who helped us, especially since they're apparently in grave danger if we don't.

Why is Biden doing this? Well, maybe because he's willing to let in as many immigrants as possible--except from Cuba. But more probably because it's the right thing to do.

Of course my opinion on whether we should leave doesn't count for much. But there it is.

Nigerian Traveler in TX Has Monkeypox / CDC Website Violates Made-Up, Bullshit, Anti-Trump "Rule" About Place-Naming Diseases/Viruses

The case in TX.

The CDC webpage stuff:

"There are two distinct genetic groups (clades) of monkeypox virus—Central African and West African. Human infections with the Central African monkeypox virus clade are typically more severe compared to those with the West African virus clade and have a higher mortality. Person-to-person spread is well-documented for Central African monkeypox virus and limited with West African monkeypox."

The CDC and WHO have always been bullshitting about place-naming viruses. If you look on their webpages, there's this bullshit about it causing "stigma"...which the CDC and WHO are not experts in. It's pure Woketarian, PC bullshit that they don't even stick to...except where Trump is concerned. The media was happy using "UK variant" and "Brazil variant" until conservatives busted them for failing to stick to their own nonsense rules...whereupon they slowly and sporadically replaced those names with the completely uninformative "Delta variant" etc...  Where does that come from? Who the fuck knows? It's way more important to take swipes at Trump than it is to give viruses informative names...  

   Anyway, it's all always been patent bullshit. The paragraph above is just another piece of evidence for that. If 'Wuhan virus' and 'China virus' are "stigma"-causing, then so are 'Central African monkeypox' and 'West African monkeypox.' 

   God these people are so full of shit.

USAF To Deploy 25 Raptors To Pacific Amid Tensions With China

Shit man hell, that's like a quarter of the operational Raptors.

How fast are those F-15EXs gonna come off the line?

Happy World Snake Day!

linky

Migrants Biden Admin Has Released With Orders To Return For Hearings Not Actually Showing Up For Hearings

link

Which is fine, because the orders to show up for hearings are for domestic consumption / plausible political deniability...not to actually get them to show up. The point is to achieve stealth open borders. Until, that is, they don't need the stealth part anymore.

Get Ready For Anti-Air-Travel And Anti-Red-Meat Coercion

Your blue future.

(via Ace)

Hugo Gurden: Gaslighting For Critical Race Theory

There are only so many ways to say things like this.

The problem isn't that we haven't made our point. 

The problems is that we're trying to reason with unreasonable people--people who are, perhaps, not inherently unreasonable, but more probably made unreasonable by the massive tangle of lunacy that is postmodern progressivism (or "the successor view" or whatever you want to call it.)

On the other hand, I've begun to wonder whether what we're seeing is some kind of innate quasi-insanity being revealed in those who are so readily falling under the spell of the cult...

We've provided cogent argument after cogent argument for the conclusion that they are dragging us toward totalitarian, dystopian insanity...and they merely respond with some combination of "No--we're not doing what you can plainly see us doing" and "Yes--totalitarian, dystopian insanity constitutes social justice / the right side of history." 

Wesley Yang: Welcome To Year Zero

The first half of this is just great, according to me. Right on target. Later it just becomes a plan for Wang's future inquiries--which is fine, of course. But the first half is the real gem.

Biden Admin Colluding With Big Tech To Advance The Totalitarian Project

The masters of disinformation tighten their alliance.

UNC Black Students Claim It's "Not Safe" For Them On Campus

Gosh, it's really a shame that this isn't an empirical question that could be answered by referencing crime data to discover how many racially-motivated murders and assaults there are against black students on campus...

   Nope. The only information we have on this is the testimony of brainwashed students about their subjective sense of terror... I wonder why black students continue to attend such a terrifying and dangerous place? I mean, you'd expect this sort of thing to show up somehow in people's choices and not-scripted-for-the-media actions...

   People don't vacation in Somalia. When people genuinely think that someplace is dangerous--whether because of their race or any other reason--they tend to avoid it. I've known several people who were afraid of bears and snakes and whatnot, and who assiduously avoided the woods. Nobody'd choose to spend an afternoon among the denizens of a maximum security prison. I'm sure the students in question wouldn't go to a Klan meeting. And yet they willingly attend a university in which they are allegedly terrified on account of believing themselves to be threatened with violence at every moment. Puzzling.

   And the university pretends to believe them...but...it doesn't warn incoming students about the danger. Also puzzling. Everything else aside, universities are terrified of being sued for failure to assiduously protect their helpless and fragile little charges. Why aren't they afraid of being sued for maintaining such a dangerous institution? For that matter, why aren't the victims suing them? I mean...there would have to be thousands of such victims at UNC alone, in the last decade-or-so alone...

   And the whole time, the entire left, including university faculty, purportedly those most charged with discovering truth, continue to believe/"believe" all this... 

Behold, Carolina Students

Spoiled, brainwashed, narcissistic, embarrassments to a great university:

Protesters were shoved out of the room at UNC’s BOT meeting ahead of a closed session to discuss Nikole Hannah-Jones’ tenure. Video from @laurenemeier pic.twitter.com/K0HRxAWzlH

— Tyler Fleming (@tyler_fleming96) June 30, 2021

Air Force Releases Drawings Of NGAD

Can't believe I missed this when it happened:

BLM Defends Its Fellow Communists, The Repressive Cuban Government

Though 'repressive communist' is redundant.

BLM would never survive in a country with journalists and news media.

Tucker On Apparent Fraud In Fulton County, GA

Whelp, this sure looks nefarious as hell:

Massive Election Fraud In Fulton County, GA?

Seems unlikely...but it wouldn't be the most surprising thing of even the last year.

'Moderate' Texas Democrat James Talarico Flat-Out Opposes Voter ID. Period.

These people are daft.

Biden/Progressives Aim To "Dismantle" American Sovereignty, Invite UN To Enter To Enter Country And Make Judgments About Race Policies

In case you are still in denial about the progressive left's desire to undermine / cede U.S. sovereignty--well, here ya go.

   One reason they're doing this, of course, is that they know that the U.N. is leftist--possibly even to the left of the contemporary Dems.

   My God...imagine the mutual boners the Dems and the U.N. will get if this bullshit goes through and the U.N. gets an engraved invitation to issue a a report and directives about racism in the U.S... That's gonna be some hardcore blue-on-blue action...

   Even just a few years ago, I'd have been at least neutral on such a plan, on grounds similar to those offered by the administration: that we should welcome external perspectives, and should, like any other nation, be subject to rational scrutiny by--especially expert--third parties. 

  Now I think that's hopelessly naive. There are basically no experts on racism. What there are are pomo-leftists race hustlers like Robin D'Angelo and Great Kendi, who hawk nonsense cooked up by leftist academicians last Tuesday as if it were knowledge. This is like a spouse offering to bring in her (or his) extremely sympathetic therapist--or cousin--in to moderate a marital dispute. Except presumably the therapist/cousin would be waiting in the wings hoping to assume control over the marriage...

   I can understand how this might seem like a reasonable idea from certain perspectives. And my categorical rejection of it is not a judgment in which I have the highest confidence. However, I'm inclined to think that this is (see above) a bad idea--and a bad idea that's indicative of the sorry state of the contemporary Democrat worldview. They already believe a bunch of false and nutty things about race and racism. And they already have anti-American, anti-national, globalist leanings. Putting these two things together so ostentatiously is, as they say, not a good look.

55% Of Americans Believe The Defund The Police Movement Led To Increase In Crime

45% of Americans not paying attention.

Psaki Avoids Blaming Communism For Cuban Unrest

link

   It's not some huge, definitive thing...but her response was consistent with the intentional avoidance of condemning communism. As I've argued about Trump, though: there's interpersonal stuff operant, too. Sometimes if someone's trying to get you to say something, and you think it's stupid or insulting to try to get you to say it, or you just don't want to be their dancing monkey, or whatever, you just drag your feet about saying it. Trump, for example, was way fed up with being falsely accused of racism, and he'd already condemned it many times. And sometimes his condemnations would be twisted into non-condemnations or endorsements by our evil MSM. Also, he's cantankerous. So he just started refusing to play that game.

   Biden's not a communist...but elements of the party are outright socialists...and it seems to me that they're at least sympathetic with communism. So it's possible that Psaki and the admin just don't want to get something started with AOC et al.

   Anyway...serious question: why pass up a good chance to condemn communism?

   Obama used to avoid condemning Islamism...but that was apparently because he didn't want to cause any more friction with Muslims, Islam, and Islamic states. So I gave him a pass on that one. It's possible that there's something similar at work here--but that doesn't really make a lot of sense so far as I can tell.

Lindsay's Outline of CRT

James Linday's doing God's work on this stuff. Here's his two-page overview of CRT. 

Coupla points:

[a] He left out social constructionism about race.

This is apparently a major component of the view (Delgado and Stefancic list it as one of the six-ish components of CRT on p. 9 of their third edition.)

Why leave out one of the most important and well-known components of the view? It's uncharacteristic. I wonder whether it has something to do with him agreeing with it--he and Pluckrose accept it in Cynical Theories. Dunno. 

The thesis of the social construction of race is very probably false--but it's complicated and worth keeping an open mind about. Sesardic, for one, scores what seem to be killing blows against the thesis. "Social constructionism" generally is such a confused and radically underspecified/overused concept that I rarely take any application of it too seriously. (Except when it specifically concerns the creation of social institutions.) 

[b] CRT proponents are deploying a couple of (often dishonest) defenses of the view, and one of them is, basically You're getting CRT wrong. Thing is, there's no single definition/characterization of CRT. Thus some concepts and theses are sometimes included in it and sometimes not. So by switching around among conceptions, it's easy to accuse critics of not understanding the view their attacking.

Even more important, IMO, is the fact (that I tend to go on about) that CRT isn't the real problem. The real problem is a massive complex of weird, outlandish philosophical and political views that's been at the core of the American far left for around 40 years now (at least). Postmodernism used to be the flagship component of that view, and critical theory (generally) was a less-prominent component. Now CRT is the flagship component. But it's a big, seething mass of crazy...and it has no name. This is a problem that many people have noted. For five or six years I've called it, variously, "postpostmodernism" (which is really already taken for a different view), "the postpostmodern mishmash," "postmodern progressivism"...and several others I can't remember...bad form, really... Sullivan calls it something like "the successor ideology." There are a bunch of others. Anyway, under these conditions, using 'critical race theory' (the phrase) to name them all is permissible, I think. Suboptimal...but close enough for government work. That's about as precise as our public debates get, really...

Oops--gotta split. IRL crap to do.

Biden Admin--Which Is Still Pretending That The Protests Are About Batflu Vaccines--Says Cubans Aren't Welcome Here

link

I've offered up this thought-experiment many times: what if we were being flooded with illegals who voted Republican?

We already knew the answer, of course.

The American Left Wants The End Of America

link

The vanguard of the progressive left hates America with a fiery passion--unsurprising, given that they're mostly some kind of Marxist or other. Rank-and-file progressives disdain America, but many don't overtly hate it, nor want it to become a subsidiary of China, nor be subsumed under a world government. When I was younger, conservatives commonly accused liberals of hating America, and I thought that was unfair. But today's left is not yesterday's left. Hatred of America, like hatred of whites and men--straight men, anyway--now seems disappointingly common on the other side of the aisle.

   Here are some depressing numbers:

   Most importantly, it is evident that mainstream professional liberals have made a political decision to assert that American institutions themselves are “systemically” or “structurally racist.” This attitude has consequences, because it devalues both our culture and our people. It cannot help but undermine patriotic attachments among liberal elites, activists, and rank-and-file citizens.
   The political scientist Eric Kaufmann conducted a revealing quantitative survey of liberal attitudes toward America in May 2020, just before the George Floyd incident. People who described themselves as either “liberal” or “very liberal” on a five-point scale (from “very liberal” to “very conservative”) were asked questions about American national identity. Seventy-nine percent of “very liberals” (which comprised 40% of all liberals) and 70% of the just plain liberals favored replacing our Constitution.
   Fifty-eight percent of “very liberal” respondents, and 44% of plain liberals, supported removing the “four white male presidents at Mount Rushmore, as they presided over the conquest of Native people and the repression of women and minorities.” Significantly, 41% of very liberals and 33% of plain liberals would “move, after an open public process, to a new name for our country that better reflects…our diversity as a people.”
   As discussed above, both components of the American nation-state—the sovereignty of the state in its relations with other nations and with global entities, and the normative attributes of the nation, our culture, people, history and mores—are unappealing to progressive liberals. Political thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Montesquieu and the American Founders have long explained that an emotional attachment to one’s political community is necessary for its survival.
   This fundamental truth is explicitly stated by James Madison in Federalist #49 and George Washington in his Farewell Address. Republican self-government, American constitutional democracy cannot survive in the long run if large sections among both its elites and general citizenry denigrate the core principles, symbols, and cultural mores of the nation itself.
   The argument is made that progressive liberals are the true patriots because they call upon Americans to live up to our founding principles of liberty and equality. This is a lie—it requires reinterpreting our “founding principles” to mean equality of outcomes for racial and gender groups. “Our ideals” are re-engineered to fit radical utopian theories about “systemic racism” and “institutional sexism.” These are the ideals not of American culture and history—of the founders and Lincoln—but of a vaguely formulated race-and-gender-focused neo-Marxism.
   American liberalism has lost its bearings. Unless there is a major course correction it will, for the foreseeable future, constitute a major regime challenge to our republican self-government and our American way of life.

Here's a solution that's infinitely better than trying to replace the Constitution: go somewhere else. Seriously. People like me aren't going to let you get away with replacing the Constitution. That's tantamount to destroying the nation. So just figure out where it is that you think is so much better than the U.S. and go there. You'll be happier, we'll be happier--it's win-win. Believe me--an attempt to replace the Constitution will not go well for you.