Adam Serwer Is A Lying Idiot, Part The, Oh, Like, Hundreth Or Whatever

My God, Serwer is a lying idiot:

   A lawsuit filed by a coalition of civil-rights groups contends that Florida’s Republican-controlled government has repeatedly attempted to restrict the franchise, including curtailing third-party registration campaigns, cutting early voting, and imposing an onerous poll tax on formerly incarcerated Floridians after the state voted overwhelmingly to restore their rights. The more recent restrictions involve a series of “measures that prohibit or restrict access to the ballot and voting mechanisms that Black and Latino voters used to great effect in the 2020 elections.” The GOP has chosen this path despite Republican gains among both groups in the last election.
   As Florida prepares to defend these new voting restrictions in court, it has prohibited three University of Florida law professors from testifying about the restrictions’ impact. “University officials told the three that because the school was a state institution, participating in a lawsuit against the state ‘is adverse to U.F.’s interests’ and could not be permitted,” The New York Times reported. The university has reiterated its commitment to “free speech” and defended its actions by arguing that the professors were merely barred from undertaking “outside paid work that is adverse to the university’s interests as a state of Florida institution.” Under this definition of free speech, you may speak as long as you say nothing the state has forbidden you to say.
   This decision is of a piece with the censorship campaign that has swept Republican-controlled states that have attempted to outlaw the teaching of the history of racial discrimination in America in public schools. At the core of this panic is a sentiment similar to the falsehood of “negro tyranny” used to justify the violent overthrow of the Reconstruction governments in the 1870s. As the Black vote was seen by reactionaries as oppression of whites then, an accurate accounting of America’s history of racial discrimination is seen by their ideological descendants as bigotry against white people today.
   Florida’s move to censor academics employed by its state university makes clear that, for many, the arguments about free speech that have dominated the political conversation over the past few years have never truly been about the right to speak. They have, instead, been about providing a predicate for conservatives to use the power of the state to settle political arguments. The campaigns of censorship and disenfranchisement must thus be understood as two halves of the same whole. The former erases the historical memory of the effect such restrictions have had in the past, and the latter prevents the public from acting on the knowledge of the discriminatory past that GOP leadership is attempting to erase.

Now, I haven't read a single thing about the FL voting stuff...but we've seen this same sort of thing so many times I don't have to have read anything about it. I already know that what's happening:  some extremely permissive voting policies conducive to fraud are being pared back. They're probably disallowing ballot-harvesting or unattended ballot drop-boxes. Or they're just cutting the early voting period or something--i.e. making a more-permissive-than-necessary policy a little less permissive. Well, now that I re-read the above, they are, in fact, shortening the early-voting period. Anyway, that's what these hysterical, breathless, lefty stories always turn out to be. As for the "poll tax"...well...no. That's a lie. I don't know what the truth is. But I can tell that's a lie.

   I mean, when he describes a ban on the brainwashing of children as "outlawing the teaching of the history of racial discrimination in America"--a bald-faced lie--are you really gonna waste your time investigating whether the other stuff he says is true?

   Not to put too fine a point on it: I'm not.

Let's Go, "Let's Go Brandon!"!

The chant sweeping the nation!

LOL: The Republican [sic] Culture War Is Reaching New Heights In VA

Sidney Blumenthal...so...consider the source.

   The culture war--which I agree we're in--is a war in which the left is the aggressor. They're aiming for radical, antiliberal, antirational reengineering of the culture. In fact, the left has so lost its mind that surrendering to their cultural initiatives would constitute more destruction than reshaping. We have no alternative to fighting.
   It probably goes without saying that the left's favorite new nonexistence claim makes an appearance: CRT doesn't exist in VA schools! It's a total myth! 

   Soon enough, Youngkin waded into the murky waters of racial politics. He offered himself as the defender of schoolchildren from the menace of critical race theory, even though the abstruse legal doctrine is not taught in any Virginia public school. [Note: lie.]
   Yet he suggested that his opponent, former governor Terry McAuliffe, would impose its creed on innocent minds, depriving parents of control. “On day one, I will ban critical race theory in our schools,” Youngkin has pledged.
   But his brandishing of critical race theory, nonexistent in the schools’ curriculum [note: lie]  has been apparently insufficiently frightening to finish the job. Perhaps not enough people know what the theory is at all. He needed one more push, searched for one more issue and produced one more ad.
   So, Youngkin seized upon a novel racial symbol, in fact a novel. The danger, he claimed, comes from Beloved by Toni Morrison – the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by the Nobel prize-winning author, about the psychological toll and loss of slavery, especially its sexual abuse, and considered one of the most important American literary works.

The nonexistence argument is one of their two favorite arguments about CRT--the other being: it is literally impossible to teach kids anything at all without teaching them CRT.

   Followed closely by: none of you Neanderthal bigots understand what CRT even is.

   Which is pretty hilarious because parents and people on the right actually brought themselves up to speed on that nonsense pretty quickly. The left, however, seems to barely understand its own dogma.  Of course neither side understands CRT that well, because it's a giant pile of bullshit that has no place in K-12, and no sensible person spends a bunch of time thinking about such nonsense. It's such a peripheral, BS, fourth-string theory that I'm not sure I ever heard it mentioned in my entire time in philosophy graduate school. 

   Blumenthal's another Clinton toady, so it's not surprising that he's defending McAuliffe.

    [end ad hominem]

   Anyway: as for busting on Beloved--that does, in fact, seem nuts. I've not read the book, and it's not high on my list, so I can't and probably won't be able to speak to the controversial scenes specifically. But we're apparently talking about a good and difficult book--it's not like it's pr0n or anything. The scenes are obviously supposed to be horrible. Hard for me to imagine that Youngkin isn't pulling some bullshit here, and playing with fire. There's really nothing he can do about Beloved. Nobody's going to let him remove it from school libraries. He shouldn't even be suggesting that it ought to be done--but it's simply not going to happen. [All he's apparently saying is that parents should have a say in whether their kids participate in such assignments. I don't think that's an unreasonable view.]

   OTOH, getting CRT out of VA K-12 is fairly important, and might happen--though I doubt that it will. There's basically no chance that it would be taught objectively, and it's not objectively important. Currently, it undoubtedly shows up as it did in "DEI" "training" at my own university: as indoctrination--nutty, highly-politicized opinion taught as if it were knowledge. Of course it's now, in fact, important because the Dems are pushing it in every institution. So it'd be great if people knew about objections to it. But, again, that's never going to happen in a million years. Our real options are: (a) kids continue to get indoctrinated with a pseudoscientific, irrationalist theory way outside the bounds of what ordinarily gets taught in K-12 and (b) we keep it out entirely. Though, in fact, only (a) is really going to happen. A serious effort to achieve (b) would fail at high cost. But it's worth a try.

Biden Considers Gigantic Payments To Families Separated At Border

facepalm

There are imaginable circumstances in which such a thing would be warranted in some peculiar cases.

But let's cut to the chase with respect to common cases in the actual world: this is nuts.

The CDC Wants Your Vaxxed 5-Year-Old Masked Indefinitely

Bend the knee, peasant.

Andrew Stuttaford: "The Omnishambles"

Thanks, Democrats.

   And, though some of this is caused by COVID--e.g. much of the supply-chain disruption...right? That's my understanding. But it's not all COVID. And there's no way the country's going to let you get away with blaming it all on that.

   And, note: the article doesn't even mention all the other catastrophic actions of the left and its front-man. So we'd need to add in at least the Afghanistan debacle. And then the almost unfathomably idiotic and destructive culture war--in which "war" the left is the aggressor, and the doer of the most damage. By far.

   I sincerely hope the the Dems pay for this hard at the ballot box.

   Governing is difficult--at least it looks difficult. I try not to blame officials and parties for reasonable errors. Again: some of this is COVID. Though some of it's really: lockdown... At any rate. I don't understand how much is COVID and how much is Blue Team incompetence and insanity. But a helluva lot of it is pretty clearly the latter, not the former.

   And, of course, the Blues are still digging. On top of the broadside they've already landed against the country, they want to spend [insert most recent estimate of absurd dollar amount here]. And, of course, spend it on a largely unfixable, largely phantom, almost-entirely-un-understood (possible) problem.

   A hell of a lot of this is unforced errors.

WSJ: The Climate Summit To Nowhere

yup

Dorian Abbot: "The Views That Made Me Persona Non Grata At MIT"

In a nutshell: that the dispassionate pursuit of truth is a legitimate endeavor.

It is the denial of that proposition that is the core of contemporary leftism. The academic/intellectual left is now fundamentally opposed to the pursuit of truth. In fact, it commonly goes so far as to deny that there even is such a thing as truth. An adjunct belief is: all pursuits are political, ergo the dispassionate pursuit of truth would be impossible even if there were such a thing to pursue. The left is not merely destroying universities, it is turning them into their opposite: institutions dedicated to denying and rejecting the very idea of academic endeavors.

The Demand For Racism Still Exceeds The Supply: Another Democrat "Hate" Hoax: McAuliffe Staffers Pretend To Be Tiki-Torch-Wielding Pro-Youngkins

link

Hey, don't forget that we're not supposed to notice that there are more fake "hate-crimes" than real ones... That's a really un-PC thing to notice. Look, just generally quit noticing things, bigot. Noticing is white supremacy or something.

Ann Bauer On COVID Madness: "I Have Been Through This Before"

This is good.

Biden's Boondoggle

Grow the beast, feed the beast, grow the beast...repeat as necessary.

   I'm not against government. I'm against this kind of loony, wanton growth of government. What percentage of the population has any idea what's going on? What percentage understands any of these programs? Pre-K is probably a waste of money. Other than that, I have no idea. But once those new cars are added to this runaway gravy train, they're never coming decoupled. 

   I wish everyone could see, from the inside, what a stupid catastrophe public higher education is. If they could, there'd be a lot heavier burden of proof on people who want to expand government.

   And, remember: every new government program is another opportunity to indoctrinate people with CRT and other pomo-prog lunacy. It may not be their central aim...but "cradle-to-grave" opportunities for influence on people's lives is a side-benefit.

[I may have been way too optimistic insufficiently pessimistic.]

Ground Zero: Loudoun County

I mean seriously. If you live in Loudoun County and are still supporting the Dems, I don't know what to say to you. They want to rezone your neighborhood, indoctrinate your kids and admit rapists to the restrooms your daughters use at school. What, exactly, is it gonna take? I'm embarrassed that I basically stuck with the blue loonies until 2017. 

Youngkin Pulls Ahead?

maybe

Education, Inflation, Crime Are Hurting McAuliffe

Also, y'know, McAuliffe.

McAuliffe is really McAuliffe's biggest weakness. He has a long history of being McAuliffe, and general McAuliffing. And that's basically only going to help him with people who are sleepwalking through their political choices.

The way NoVa is metastasizing, Youngkin might be our last chance to get a red Governor...well...possibly ever. I mean, at this rate, the country may only have a coupla decades left...

...so...for the very love of God...get out there and vote for the guy who isn't Terry McAuliffe!

I Hate Being Right All The Time: *Remember How I Told You Not To Vote For Biden?* Edition: Stagflation Edition

Yes, yes, Orange Man bad. Everybody knows that Orange Man Bad.

I've never denied that Orange Man bad.

Though, importantly: Orange Man nowhere near as bad as Blue Team made him out to be.

And Orange man way, way, way less bad than Biden...

...who has been--as, let me stress, I told you he would be--absolutely ****ing awful.

For future reference: Orange Man bad is not an adequate basis for a political worldview.

We Live In Some Bizarre Hell World Where Tucker Carlson Is The Voice Of Reason

And I'm swiping title templates from Instapundit...

Whelp...aside from some econ background I don't actually understand...I agree with everything about this:

Homeschooling Now Seems Like A Good Idea To Me

We don't have kids, so this is a purely theoretical question for me. But I used to think: it's a good idea for kids to go to school, where they'll have exposure to other adults, and to ideas different than those of their parents. That's kind of a sloppy point, but that's the main idea. Now I think: it's more important to protect them from the rampant indoctrination they're likely to get at school; better to do the homeschooling thing and do your best to make sure your own ideas don't dominate that education. But I don't know enough about this to really deserve an opinion.

Ed School CRT: The Master Argument

If you don't allow us to indoctrinate your kindergarteners into believing that the craziest theory of race known to man is undeniable truth, then you're saying that children should never be allowed to learn anything about race at all.

8 At Princeton Assail False Portrayal Of Professor As Racist

Behold, social "justice."

Social "justice" isn't about justice, and truth is a reactionary concept standing in the way of achieving the actual ends of the postmodern-progressive left. 

Note that the whole case against Katz seems to turn on a psychotically uncharitable interpretation of one sentence in one statement he made. Even if they hadn't lied about what he wrote, this would be abject madness.

Your blue future.

The comPost Soft On Younkin?

huh

I Don't Think That's Really Gonna Be An Issue

🤣🤡 pic.twitter.com/1IlcGMxjkl

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) October 19, 2021

SMOD Deliver Us

I think we’re ready for the asteroid pic.twitter.com/p2ECx6n8Qb

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) October 18, 2021

The Postmodern Progressive Left In A Slate Advice Nutshell

tl;dr:

Dear Slate: I am an insane, psychopathic child-torturer who is psychologically destroying my daughter--with the approval of "her other parent." But I can't get over my anger at her for making me be so cruel to her.

Slate: You are fine and you should get over it so that you can focus all your energies on future cruelty.

Though obviously there's no way that letter is real. Even Slate-readers aren't that insane.

[Addendum: Aside from all the other stuff, here's the tell:  two 11-year-olds...put the chips in a bowl? LOL NFW.]

This Makes Dukakis In The Tank Look Like "Morning In America"

This will turn Virginia red pic.twitter.com/54uliCjc2I

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) October 19, 2021

The Postmodern Progressive Left In A Politifactual Nutshell

Does the pomo-prog left dislike you? Then ✌ means TEH WITE P0WR!!!11111  oneoneonewhitepower!!!1

Does the pomo-prog left like you? Then it's just...well..whatever it actually is.

This is what happens when you combine the pomo doctrine that every interpretation of every "text" is exactly as ir/rational as every other possible interpretation, and combine it with relentless, dumbass leftist politics--you pick whichever interpretation is most convenient. 

That's not a straw man of the view--that's the view.

Hahaaahaha Reuters fact checked my joke 🤣🤣 I’m dying 🤣🤣 (first link on second paragraph) https://t.co/9KRhV733WV

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) October 24, 2021

Horrific Experiments Conducted On Puppies

I don't think animal experimentation is an easy issue. But you should, at the very least, draw the line at torturing dogs you sick ****s.

Twitter Locked PJ Media Account, Says It Will Unlock Only If They Lie About Rachel Levin's Sex

So here's now this worked: initially, progressives claimed that 'man' and 'woman' were gender-terms not sex-terms. They badgered and bamboozled people into speaking differently and saying that e.g. Jenner and Levin were male...but women. Because women could be male. Because the term 'woman' has nothing to do with sex...and 'gender' means...whatever the progressive left wants it to mean... Once they got people to go along with that bit of linguistic revisionism, then they started claiming that e.g. Jenner and Levin were female after all! ...because I guess 'woman' is a sex term again? God knows. Now, of course, the left is entirely wrong about the terms 'man' and 'woman'--e.g. Jenner and Levin are both men. Feminine men...men who misrepresent themselves as women. But let that slide. There should be no controversy whatsoever that both are male. Because they are. Male that is. I neither know nor care about what plastic surgery they've had--but no amount of surgery can turn a man into a woman. A male human being who's had surgery in order to appear more female is...well...a male--i.e. a man--whose had plastic surgery. It isn't possible to turn a penis into an actual vagina with cosmetic surgery.

   As I've said many times, it's certainly conceivable that future medical technology might make sex changes possible. But it's certain that it isn't possible now.  And: if genuine sex changes do become possible, people will look back on our time, and the declaration by leftists that all sex changes require is fiat and a dress...and shake their heads in disbelief.

   tl;dr: Levin's a man--an adult, male human.

   But political correctness--i.e. the subordination of truth to political dogma--is the central characteristic of the postmodern progressive left. And Twitter now apparently busts anyone who speaks truly about this sacred pomo-prog dogma. Hence PJ Media is being told that, unless they mouth the politically correct falsehood, thus repudiating the politically incorrect--hence verboten--truth...their account ist kaput.

Progressivism Continues Its Downward Spiral: Harassment Edition

I suppose it's just a natural consequence of the fanaticism that's gripped the left, but its penchant for public harassment is nuts. This is just an adjunct of "cancel culture," really. If you don't do what they command you to do, they will try to make you miserable. Sometimes that's online, sometimes it's in person--whatever it takes to bully people into compliance. I've never seen anything like this in my life. The left is just losing its mind right in front of us. It's not the normal kind of political crackpottery in which there are one or two things about which a group is kind of kooky. Rather, they just seem to be going completely nuts about everything they have any opinion about at all. Of course there are people out there--lapsed liberals or whoever it is backing these people up--who remain on the side of progressivism without participating in the madness... But at some point support for madness itself becomes madness. 

"White Ways Of Knowing"

...are different than Jewish physics...how?

Zack Goldberg

This guy is great. But Twitter now doesn't let you click down more than one level into conversations without an account.

Judith Butler Is Full Of Shit

Gender ideology is such a load of horseshit that one hardly knows where to start with something like this. Butler's own thought--I use the term loosely--is a morass of inconsistency, invalid argument, and nearly meaningless claims. Gender--a somewhat interesting, but relatively minor aspect of human life--has been inflated into the most important concept in the universe--with the possible exception of "power"--by the "gender studies" crowd. 'Gender' briefly--in the 70's or so--had a useful and determinate meaning in feminism. Now it just means whatever the left wants it to mean. Like so many other postmodern progressive concepts, it's basically an equivocation generator--a term that can mean so many different things that it serves as a locus of equivocation that lets them basically draw any conclusion from any premises just by swapping out one meaning of 'gender' for another. 

   Gender ideology is, of course, a central component of the worldview of the totalitarian left. Its ideas are used to stifle free inquiry and free speech, compel speech (e.g. via pronoun laws and rules), and, of course, deny reality. Butler pretends that the opponents of the totalitarian left are fascists--I'm sure some are. But that's a typical pomo-prog ad hominem dodge. What's important is that gender ideology is a huge, steaming pile of nonsense that willingly and actively constitutes a component of pomo-prog totalitarianism. What matters is that, to affirm reality, freedom, and the pursuit of truth, you have to oppose such insanity. Gender ideology is on the side of madness and totalitarianism. Its arguments are easily shredded--it survives not via clarity and careful argument, but by spewing out huge gouts of vaporous bullshit and--see Butler--by pretending that its enemies are all Fascists, misogynists, blah, blah, blah. It's a major contributor to the anti-rationalism and anti-liberalism that now plagues the USA. Which pernicious view originated in academia, of course--mainly in highly-politicized areas of the university that have low intellectual standards--e.g. women's and gender studies.

   Consider just this from her interminable Guardian piece--which, honestly, I didn't finish. There are too many good things to read to waste my time on such utter bullshit:

   We generally think of sex assignment as happening once, but what if it is a complex and revisable process, reversible in time for those who have been wrongly assigned? To argue this way is not to take a position against science, but only to ask how science and law enter into the social regulation of identity. “But there are two sexes!” Generally, yes, but even the ideals of dimorphism that govern our everyday conceptions of sex are in many ways disputed by science as well as the intersex movement, which has shown how vexed and consequential sex assignment can be.
   To ask questions about gender, that is, how society is organized according to gender, and with what consequences for understanding bodies, lived experience, intimate association, and pleasure, is to engage in a form of open inquiry and investigation, opposing the dogmatic social positions that seek to stop and reverse emancipatory change. And yet, “gender studies” is opposed as “dogma” by those who understand themselves on the side of “critique”.

First, of course: sex is not "assigned," it is discovered. Discerned. Observed. Postmodern progressivism (including gender mythology/ideology, including Butler) has its roots in postmodern and Marxist pseudoscience. It is associated with arguments that science itself is nothing more than another "kind of writing." Such views commonly argue that literary criticism and related endeavors are epistemically prior and superior to science, because the practitioners of such fields are armed with the tools of textual analysis (and "critique"...so...I'm not sure what she's talking about at the end.)  "What if," she writes, "sex assignment" "is a complex and revisable process, reversible in time for those who have been wrongly assigned?" Oh..."what if"! Well...gosh! A mighty argument, that... I reply to this "what if?" with: it isn't. As a matter of actual fact, rather than speculative possibility, human beings are extremely sexually dimorphic. Discerning the sex, even of infants, is not generally a difficult process. Few mistakes are made, because mistakes are seldom possible. Of course there are borderline, unclassifiable cases--that's the way natural kinds are. Conclusions about borderline cases can't automatically be applied to paradigm cases. Hard cases make bad law--specifically because of that error. The big idea of gender ideology in this vicinity has nothing to do with borderline cases. It is, rather, that a paradigmatically male person can magically make himself paradigmatically female by fiat. 

   Much of the confusion here concerns gender. I've talked about this about a hundred times ever since this nonsense hit the big time around 2014 or so. 'Gender' is sometimes a synonym for sex--in which case an appeal to "gender" changes nothing: your sex is a biological fact. In a few cases it is objectively indeterminate. In no case can it be changed by fiat. The helpful meaning of 'gender' has always been as a term for the masculine/feminine distinction. These are modes of behavior. Male humans--men and boys--tend toward masculine modes of behavior. Female humans--women and girls--tend to be more feminine. And everybody's androgynous to some extent. But this has nothing to do with sex. And, contra the most significant gender studies confusion, none of the following are gender categories: man, woman, boy, girl. Those are all species/sex/age categories. Men are adult, male humans. and so on. 

   Of course there's stuff to say about sex--and even, less importantly, gender. The problem is that the left radically blows "gender" out of proportion, treating a relatively minor concept as if it were as important as mass or causation. Sex is a much more interesting and important concept...but sex is biological, and the academic left doesn't do science. Sex isn't really susceptible to deconstruction, interpretation, textual criticism. So sex gets turned into something that is: "gender." Or--per Butler above--the subject is changed to: how does sex-or-gender manifest itself in ways we can bloviate about? Ergo: "To ask questions about gender, that is, how society is organized according to gender and with what consequences..."....blah, blah, blah...

   Gender studies and gender ideology are representatives of what's wrong with the humanities and related fields. Such stuff, as Searle points out, gives bullshit a bad name. I could pretty easily go through Butler's piece and shred it in detail...but there'd be little in that that I hadn't said before. It does concern me that some people have such broken bullshit-detectors that they might need such a thing done. Some things are such shit that you really do need to be able to smell it from a mile away. 

Actual Justice Warrior: The Cult Of Social Justice

 

Progressives Are OK With Rape So Long As The Rapist Is Pretending To Be A Woman

Progressivism has become a massive web of lies and delusions.

Merrick Garland Debunks Democrat "Insurrection" Claims

(1) If it were an insurrection, someone would have been charged with insurrection.

(2) No one has been charged with insurrection

...

The drawing of the conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader.

It was a lot of things.

But insurrection is not one of them.

Lawrence Krauss: "How 'Diversity' Turned Tyrannical"

Absolutely, exactly, 100% correct.

Astronomical Gas Prices Are What Progressives Want

Basically yes.

Loudoun County's Vicious Mediocrities

How much farther can this sort of thing go?

It's very hard to believe things have gone as far as they have.

Even ignoring all the other insanity in this case: yet again we see that women and girls come much lower in the left's victim hierarchy than men and boys pretending to be women and girls. This is part of the left's new multi-tiered system of justice in which "transgendered" rapists are treated with kid gloves while a white father seeking justice for his daughter is pounced-on, roughed-up, arrested and declared a "domestic terrorist."

None of this makes any sense at all.

But welcome to your blue future.

Russiagategate: The Red Team Is Right Again (And Me Too...)

Two years or so ago I said that, if the red team ended up being right about the Russiagategate hoax, it'd be game, set, match, tournament...etc. They should, in that case, be declared the final and permanent winner of the red-blue political feud. 

   Well--they were right.

   Sure...we don't have the final conclusion of the investigation. But it's clear where this is going. 

   At first I thought it was too crazy to be true--which is part of why it would count as such a huge red-team win... But pretty soon I came to believe it was pretty clearly true. IMO there hasn't been significant doubt about Russiagategate since before the pandemic. 

   Of course the left has such a death grip on the MSM that the exact opposite of the truth has been ensconced in the American mind: many progressives still claim Trump was a Russian asset, and even well-informed progressives have been able--with the help of the MSM--to turn their gaze away from what actually happened. I've basically stopped talking politics with progressive friends. But last I checked, at least some of them knew nothing at all about Russiagategate. 

RIP Colin Powell

Damn.

The Incredible, Disappearing, Incompetent Team Biden

I'm just baffled. How can they be so bad at so much???

Markowicz doesn't even mention the most egregious example--Harris going AWOL on the border crisis. And with the laughable excuse that she was trying to fathom the "root causes." Which in Newnewspeak means: not the actual causes, but the PC "causes": i.e.: some bullshit story that fits with the progressive "narrative": climate change, racism, or some other pre-packaged nonsense. 

   Honestly, it's just baffling how terrible these people are at their jobs. The root cause--the actual root cause--of that is: they're ideologues locked into far-left groupthink. There's virtually no way to do anything right once you've fallen into such a state. And this ideology is built on the subordination of reason and truth to dogma. All political views fall into that to some extent--but this view is built on it--it's a feature, not a bug.

Biden's Energy Crisis, Or: Biden Loves Fracking Now

Anybody paying attention--which doesn't include me--would have predicted this: an increased demand for oil as the lockdowns were lifted. That's a 1-2 punch by the Dems against the economy: first, lockdowns, second, failure to prepare for lifting them. Anyway: 

...Mr. Biden and his party have sent signals that are loud and clear, in accord with the larger cultural message that fossil fuels are the new tobacco and the world doesn’t need them.
***
That isn’t true, as Mr. Biden is finding out the hard way. Despite all the subsidies for renewables, fossil fuels provide about 80% of America’s energy, and high prices weigh on consumers and the economy. The White House says rising energy costs are a global problem, and that’s true in part. As the economy began to revive from the pandemic, it was only natural, and in fact a good sign, that demand for energy would rebound.
But the U.S. has been the world’s leading oil producer and thus a major player in global supply and demand. American crude-oil production in March 2020 was 12.8 million barrels a day, per the Energy Information Administration. That fell sharply when Covid hit, and now it’s barely inching back up. July’s output was only 11.3 million barrels a day, more than 10% below the pre-pandemic trend.
In other words, this is Mr. Biden’s energy crisis. Given the pressure from his wealthy climate donors and the left, he is never going to yell “drill, baby, drill.” But if Mr. Biden is serious about wanting U.S. producers to help reduce prices at the pump and at home, he will change his punitive policies. Progressives will be upset, but his poll numbers might go up.

   On the non-bright side: this is like the border chaos: Trump had things under control, Biden wrecked them for reasons grounded in hard-left ideology, then, eventually, be moves back toward the bad policies of bad Orange Man. On the bright side: there is only so much harm to the nation that Biden will allow before going back to Trump's policies...so...that's something I guess... 

   Part of the problem here is the bizarre power that progressive-left ideology has over people who are in a position to know better. We're not talking about "climate denialism" here--we're talking about choosing reasonable solutions to a non-apocalyptic problem. Climate apocalypticism is false, and climate hysteria is not helping. 

   So long as the progressive left subordinates reason and truth to political dogma, it will be dangerous and unfit to govern. And subordination of reason and truth to dogma is the defining characteristic of the progressive left. Ergo...

Biden Reinstates Trump's Remain In Mexico Policy

So Biden and his administration: 

(i) took a clearly, wildly successful policy;

(ii) falsely, irresponsibly called it "unAmerican"--part of the left's practice of deeming everything with which they disagree to be prejudiced;

(iii) threw it away because it didn't accord with their radical open-borders ideology;

(iv) created the worst immigration crisis...possibly in the history of the nation

and now:

(v) are forced to reinstate it in order to stop the crisis of their own creation...a crisis that would have never happened without their idiotic rejection of the policy in the first place.

   So...what do we say? 

   I guess: at least after causing untold harm to the nation and untold pain and suffering among the waves of illegals that poured through Mexico at the administrations behest...they eventually had the wit to reinstate a policy that Trump implemented and would never have suspended in the first place?

   So...is it still racist, xenophobic and unAmerican? One wonders?

   This is basically the tale of the two administration's in a nutshell.

   Honestly, there's just no excuse for this. This isn't some abstruse, complex policy question that only a few experts understand. This is about fixing a real problem that does real harm...as opposed to whining and puling and lying and using ad hominem character assassination against your political opponents...all in order to take yet another leap toward your dystopian vision of a stateless future. 

   But, y'know, Orange Man bad, so...

Bari Weiss: We Got Here Because Of Cowardice; We Get Out With Courage

I've been saying roughly that for several years now...so of course I agree.

Follow The Pseudoscience: Joe Manchin Destroys The Earth Edition

Progressives are the most anti-scientific major political faction of my life thus far...and my life includes the rise and fall of the religious right and "creation science."

The Deep State Is Real

Taibbi:  Yes, Virginia, There Is A Deep State.

My own observations: there is absolutely an academic deep state. Academia is run by the intellectual left, and, hence, it is always moving leftward, toward whichever flavor of the left the intellectual left favors at the time. This is almost impossible to stop. If leftward movement is endorsed by the administration, academia rockets leftward. If rightward movement is endorsed by the administration, academia drags its feet, objects, dissembles, redefines...and moves leftward anyway. Just more slowly. If you could get them to move rightward, it wouldn't be far. And they'd just move left again as soon as they could.

Biden Gets Port Of LA To Move To 24/7 Operations

This seems really good to me.

I read somewhere that it won't make any difference--but that's hard to believe.

McAuliffe Is Lying: CRT Is Taught In VA Schools

link 

McAuliffe's lying...progressives, Dems, and teachers' unions are all lying. CRT is absolutely being taught in VA schools--and probably in every state. 

   Though, again: the problem really isn't CRT. CRT is just the currently-most-glamorous manifestation of the bigger view--a view that doesn't have a name: it's the big, radioactive stew of bad philosophy and bad politics that has been metastasizing on the intellectual and political left for 35 years at least. Marxism, some existentialism, postmodernism, critical theory, post-colonialism, Foucault, Derrida...they all get kind of smooshed together, and smooshed together with the radical politics of the left. What you get is an incoherent mess of Marxism, pseudoscience, skepticism, relativism, nihilism, radical feminism, gender mythology/ideology, identity politics...basically an incoherent combination of views held together only by anti-Western, anti-liberal (in the broad sense), and anti-rationalist orientations. It's the whole, nutty package of leftist philosophy and politics, in which different aspects come to the foreground, depending on fads on the left. Postmodernism, feminism, and "multiculturalism" used to predominate. Now it's "diversity" and CRT. 

   If you think that stuff isn't being taught in VA--and every other state--you're completely in the dark. That whole mass of radical ideas dominates much of academia--and it's strongest where intellectual standards are weakest. And no discipline has lower intellectual standards than Ed schools.

Trump Telling Pubs Not To Vote Is GOPs Worst Nightmare

Not worst, maybe...but very, very bad. 

He already handed the Senate to the unhinged Dems. Aleem doesn't mention any of the good reasons to think that the Dems cheated in '20--e.g. judges illegally rewriting state election laws. What to think about all that is beyond me. Even given my obsession with this stuff I can't sort it out. What's clear is that there was a massive, largely successful, push by Dems to cheat with plausible deniability--roughly, I'd say, on the order of the things the Pubs did in FL in 2000...roughly. But, honestly, it really is beyond my understanding. As soon as I get a little break from grading and whatnot, I'm going to get Molly Hemmingway's book...

   Anyway. Trump's such a mixed bag that it's almost impossible to make just one judgment about him. He's a train wreck...but his policies were often great...mostly in virtue of simply opposing the overt insanity that has gripped the left.

Blah, blah, blah.

Behold, The Latest From Great Kendi!

link

He's got a sort of a point--not an original one: it may sometimes be permissible to take race into account. Color-blindness is an ideal, but there may be cases in which it's permissible to suspend it--e.g. if affirmative action based on race is ever permissible.

But then there's this:

   And yet, the second assassination is about King and hardly about King at all. If Mandel is an avatar of the snipers, then King is an avatar of history. The second assassination of King is the latest assassination of history. The war on science, on expertise, on facts, on journalism, on democracy necessitates a concomitant war on history. And the war on history is the war on education—as history is essentially educational. If an anti-racist King can be turned into a color-blind conservator of racism, then anyone and anything from history can be assassinated. Pro-slavery Founding Fathers can be recast as having been “against slavery.” Racist Confederate rebels can be recast as “not racist” heroes deserving of monuments in town squares.
  Assassinating the reality of the past assassinates the reality of the present (and creates a new simulated reality). In this simulated reality, critical race theory can be warped into being like Jim Crow. Anti-American insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6 can be presented as pro-American patriots. Education can be turned into indoctrination, and indoctrination can be turned into education. Teaching children that there’s nothing special about their skin color can be turned into teaching children to hate their skin color. People organizing and writing against racism can be portrayed as “race politics profiteers,” as Mandel sadistically framed Bernice King.

Political correctness means never having to say that you're completely f*cking full of shit. 

   I mean...of course there is a war on science...on facts, on journalism, on education... What's astonishing is that anyone can be so delusional as to think that it's the right that's conducting that/those war/s... Which is what I take Kendi to be suggesting, absurd though it is. There's no war on expertise--there's a war on pseudoexpertise. And as for trying to make CRT out to be anti-racist...that takes almost superhuman powers of reality-denial...

   And, as for denying that there are "race politics profiteers"...and as for Kendi denying that...  Well...the mind reels...  Of course he only directly mentions Bernice King. But that itself is dishonest. The real race grifters are in BLM and the like...though one might also mention Robin DiAngelo. Kendi himself may well go into that category--though I'm not sure there's anything wrong with making money off of your ideas if people are willing to pay you to repeat them. I don't have much of a position on that.

   Anyway. Pretty typical Kendi. There's a point of sorts in there, though no much of one. So it's not worth rummaging through the bullshit to get to it.

Internal Pub Polling Puts Youngkin Up

So saith a reliable source, anyway.

"Transgender" Rapes 9th-Grade Girl In Loudoun Co. School Restroom

link

I believe the Newnewspeak term for this boy--who was wearing a skirt and invading the girls' restroom, is "transgirl" or "transwoman." But the crime is not being reported in that way. In fact, it's not being reported at all. This male student was transferred to a different Loudoun county school...where he raped a second girl. Thus far, however, the only person arrested has been the father of the first girl--for complaining about the crime at a school board meeting...which, of course, is domestic terrorism...

   Progressivism has lost its collective mind.

Gary Saul Morson: Partisan Science in America

I say this is exactly right.

   One can often tell that an appeal to science is unwarranted without knowing anything about the science in question. If science is treated as a solid block, each part of which is as indubitable as all the others, then science has been misunderstood. Science always contains some propositions less firmly grounded than others: on the frontier, newly discovered, based on experiments not readily replicated.
...
   It is now regarded as an open question whether the Covid virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. But when the virus first appeared, dozens of scientists published a statement in the Lancet expressing “solidarity” with Chinese colleagues. “The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumors and misinformation around its origins,” the statement declared. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” How could epidemiology discern that ideas were not only ill-founded but conspiratorial?
   Now that new evidence has come to light, have these conspiracy-denouncing scientists acknowledged they overstepped? No. In another statement to the Lancet in July, they assert: “We reaffirm our expression of solidarity with those in China who confronted the outbreak then.” Solidarity is a social, not scientific, category, and a judgment as to whether scientists in an authoritarian regime have been pressured is also not a scientific one. Anyone who has studied Marxist-Leninist regimes knows that it is possible that the “solidarity” is not with the scientists but with the authorities supervising them.
   To explain their earlier statement, the scientists remind us that “we have observed escalations of conflicts that pit many parties against one another, including central government versus local government, young versus old, rich versus poor, people of colour versus white people, and health priorities versus the economy.” To justify a scientific claim with such socially charged considerations is, again, partisan science. To the extent that scientific claims are informed by political considerations, they are no more well-founded than purely political ones.
   If scientists expect their statements to be trusted, they must themselves be trustworthy in making them. One had better be scrupulously honest before asking people to surrender their own judgment and simply believe what they are told. Scientists should be especially careful not to misrepresent political or policy judgments as being scientific. And they must protest vigorously and loudly when other influential people claim to speak in the name of science while misrepresenting it.

   "Lysenkoism" (or: prope-Lysenkoism) is the term we really want here, of course. One problem is that scientists are irresponsibly speaking on political (social, cultural, philosophical, etc.) issues about which they have no special epistemic authority--but they are, in effect, claiming to speak with the authority of their expertise--expertise that is either irrelevant to the political issue, or only marginally relevant. Since their expertise is not relevant, you don't have to share it to see that bullshit is afoot. 

Columbus Day!

For years I believed a bunch of the worst stuff flying around about Columbus, and it turned out to be untrue. Apparently he his actions were, nevertheless, notably suboptimal. I've never gotten the time/energy/curiosity worked up to get the straight dope on him, though. I'm back to acknowledging Columbus Day, though, because the lefties hate him so much, and I am, as you may have noticed, way past fed up with their nutty antics. But their complaints actually seem to have a factual basis in this case. Stopped clock and all that...

Foreign Policy: 10 Ways Trump Is Becoming A Dictator! Number 6 Will Surprise You!

facepalm

Holy God.

Seriously: do these people ever listen to themselves? 

But when you think about it, I guess Trump did turn Capitol Hill into an armed, fenced-off fortress...declared angry parents to be domestic terrorists...wanted to monitor even inconsequential transfers in and out of our bank accounts...

No, wait...

Let's Go Brandon!

Truer words were never chanted.

Jonathan Chait: Anybody Fighting Joe Biden Is Helping Trump's Next Coup

facepalm

Remember when Chait was good?

I do.

He's never been the same since he got quasi-"cancelled" (suspended?) for disagreeing with Saint Ta-Nahisi of Coates. 

I mean...it's not that I don't think there's some truth in what Chait writes. But "Trump's coup" wasn't, y'know, a coup. And whatever it was was completely ineffective. Biden and the cult of Woketarianism, however--who may well have stolen the election and who certainly cheated at it--have absolutely wrecked the country. They'd already nearly wrecked it before they got in office. Biden has facilitated even wilder flights of insanity and greater feats of destruction. Despite the 1/6 grotesquerie, Trump did a good job as President and Biden has been an abject catastrophe. 

Anyway: yes, it's hardly rocket science to notice that helping the Dems is harming the Pubs and vice-versa. That's how this works, you see. And, yeah, there's a lot to detest about Trump after 1/6. But there's more to detest about Biden and the Woketarian crazies. Trump shouldn't ever even be in a discussion about the office of POTUS....and yet, anybody who wouldn't take him over Biden is...well...I'll just say: deeply in error.

Terry McAuliffe Doesn't Know What CRT Is

But (a) it's not taught in the OD! And (b) it's racist to be concerned about it!

   Politicians often have no idea what they're talking about, and no real idea what the thing is that they're passionately for or against. But McAuliffe is really caught out here. He's super full of shit. Does Younkin know more about it? Almost certainly. Conservatives have to know--it's a hostile ideology with which their kids are being brainwashed. Progressives don't really have to know: they're winning everywhere. In fact, it's better for them not to know...the view is crazy, and knowing would just make it more difficult for them to support it. Which, of course, they do. Except that they don't! Because...like everything else the left gets busted for (PC, cancel culture, Pantyfa...) it doesn't exist. And isn't taught. It's nowhere at all in the OD! 

   Actually, three days ago I was told that some of my (university) colleagues are concerned because they teach CRT...and, needless to say, they're "afraid"... Have you ever heard of a group of people so easily frightened before? And they're allegedly now no longer teaching it...which is obvious bullshit. It's just the standard pomo-prog ploy of feigning fear as a political tool. I mean...I must regretfully defend their right to do so...even though I'm sure that many of them aren't teaching about it, but are, rather, indoctrinating their students with it... 

   Anyway: CRT is absolutely taught in VA.

   But I'm pretty sure TM meant: not taught in K-12. 

   Though it's also taught there--we've been told that it is impossible to teach K-12 without teaching CRT! (Yet we know K-12 is taught here...) K-12 literally cannot be taught without it!!! And school boards are fighting to defend it...and all the parents who are concerned are terrorists...and teachers are going to fight to keep teaching it...and it's unfair to students to withhold from them the immense font of wisdom contained in...one of the dumbest theories of the late 20th century...and that's saying something...

   ...But, you see, it's not being taught anywhere in the entire Commonwealth!

   Liar.

Bad Jobs Report

ugh

Did Garland Just "Tip Over The Dominoes"?

Maybe

   People opposed to postmodern progressivism keep saying that its collapse is inevitable. But I'm skeptical. I do think that facts are stubborn things, and the truth has a power to out itself. And paleo-PC finally went too far in the '90s, and centrist liberals stopped defending it. My view about that story is that the "Antioch rules" (Antioch students had to ask permission at every point of...what?...escalation?...during sex) were a bridge too far. And Clinton's "Sister Soulja" "moment" was also pivotal. But Sister Soulja would be an unremarkable lefty by today's standards--and the Anitoch rules now have something like the force of law at schools everywhere. Neo-PC is about twice as crazy as paleo-PC was. And it's taken over all our institutions, not merely universities. And it's being enforced by our "moderate" president. And needless to say, Biden will have no Clintonesque "moment." I don't think anyone should be confident that we're going to win this battle for the mind of the nation any time soon. Or, y'know, at all. Even if we do win, the history of PC suggests that the victory will be partial, and the PC mythologists and thought-police will likely just retire to universities, where their power is virtually unchallenged. There they'll plan their next assault on reality and humanity. They'll lose some ground, but not all that they've won, and next time they'll win more. 

   I want to think we're destined to win. But I don't. Eventually they or some other reality-denying lot will win enough to at least bring down the country. A new dark age is a real possibility. Even if reason wins at some further-future date, humanity might have to endure a hundred or a thousand years of antirational madness first. I'd count that as a loss. Rebuilding the liberal (broadly construed) order from scratch...the mind shudders...

   I'd also like to think that Garland's totalitarian use of the coercive power of the state to squelch the speech of perfectly reasonable, ordinary parents who don't want their children indoctrinated with the left's new religion is itself a bridge too far. But it's really not that much worse than any number of other actions taken by the left. But it's another straw putting weight on the camel's back--I think that's undeniable. 

"Trans" Mythologists Harass Kathleen Stock, Demand Her Firing

For the great and terrible sin of speaking an obvious truth--all women are female--Stock is under attack. 

"Independents Turn On Biden"

TBF he started it.

McAuliffe Lead Down To +3.5

link

Higher Ed's Free Speech Death Spiral

Universities are already not really universities anymore. The postmodern-progressive left aims to make sure they keep moving leftward and never look back.

NYT: Redesign The American Flag

Jackasses.*

Here's mine tho:

US - CA = 49 stars.

I keed...I keed... 

* I mean, maybe it's just an idle amusement--an innocent little exercise. But that's hard to believe given what the Times is like now.

Fusion Breakeven Is Not Ten Years Away

This made my jaw drop open:

If You Object To Your Kid Being Indoctrinated With CRT, You're A Domestic Terrorist

The USA has never been crazier than this in my conscious lifetime. No administration has been crazier than the Biden administration in my conscious lifetime. Bush '43 lying us  into Iraq may well have been worse. But it wasn't this insane. We are now ruled by people who are possessed by an insane ideology. 

   And to make matters weirder...now Tucker Carlson is a voice of reason. 

   That's how topsy-turvy things have gone:

AHA: CRT's New Disguise

link

Weird how long it took people to start recognizing this: i.e. that "diversity" and "DEI" are now little more than linguistic camouflage for the institutionalization of pomo-prog, IdP, leftist ideas and ideals. The "diversity" stuff comes up through institutional channels--so it's now basically doctrine. You can't even get a job in my college now without a statement of faith expressing fealty to "diversity." You can't "merely" be a scholar anymore; you must be a leftist scholar-activist who actively pursues "diversity" goals. But, basically, all the "diversity" goals and programs and initiatives and requirements are leftist. It's as if the state had decreed that "religious understanding" were a new official goal that we must all pursue, suggesting that it's just some kind of scholarly understanding of world religions with a tolerance spin...(which would be bad enough...)...but then it turned out that every single policy and action undertaken to implement "religious understanding" was Christian, and aimed at getting students and employees to accept (or at least pay lip service to) Christianity. There's a set of official goals...which it's futile to oppose because they're ensconced in state policies...but the actual implementation and pursuit of those goals is always thinly-disguised advocacy of one highly-controversial view.

Mdou Moctar

 

MIT "Cancels" A Geophysicist

The postmodern-progressive left is destroying academia.

   It's destroying academia because it is an antirationalist movement, opposed to the very idea of dispassionate, rational inquiry, including science. Destroying academia is, to some extent, an end in itself. But it is also a means to the greater end of destroying Western civilization. Of course that sounds mad--it's an instance of a paradigmatically mad belief. If you were writing a novel and wanted to instantly establish that a character was a kook, one way to do it would be to put some instance of x is trying to destroy Western civilization! in his mouth. Rhetorically, one might be better off to not say such things, true though they might be. It's been suggested to me many times that I shouldn't say such things even though I believe them. It's probably good advice. But I can't help but say the things I think are true. For much of my life, I thought everybody was like that.

   Incidentally, here's a measure of how far they've gone toward destroying academia: feeling compelled to say what you think unfits you for life in a contemporary university. Survival in contemporary academia is easiest for people who (a) share the fantastically insane postmodern-progressive worldview and/or (b) are very good at not saying what they take to be true.

Despite Being A Racist, Xenophobic Conspiracy Theory Believed By Trump, The Lab-Leak Hypothesis Is Probably True

This truth might even make it through the left's epistemic forcefield...eventually.

NAS Statement On Gender Ideology In Higher Education

link

Merrick Garland Ordered The FBI To Organize Against Parents Opposing CRT In Schools

This may not be the beginning of the end of the Biden administration...but it should be.

Alumni and Donors Unite

Godspeed.

I Am Very Stupid: One Of The Stupidest Things I Ever Did Edition

As I've noted, I was deeply enmeshed in the paleo-PC wars in grad school. Then I became convinced that we'd basically won. And I just sat on my ass in this respect from about 1995 until about 2013 or so when I started recognizing the emergence of the SJW. Then--somehow--I failed to recognize neo-PC as PC. In retrospect...in a life filled with doing stupid shit...this was one of the stupidest. I should have recognized that we hadn't won, should have realized that we'd just entered a cold war phase. Should have seen that Sauron had merely retreated into Mordor to marshal his power. I should have been preparing all that time. 

   But noooo...

   I was caught even more flat-footed than a bunch of people who didn't have the background I had, and who were in no particular position to see what was coming.

   I mean this really does beat all. 

   Sometimes it's hard to see how I've managed to stumble along through life as well as I have. I just do the damndest things sometimes. 

   Anyway. I had all the information I needed to see what was coming far ahead of time. But I only recognized it after it was basically un-unnoticeable.

   Just unbelievably stupid.

UVA Librarian Resigns To Escape Pervasive CRT Propaganda/Indoctrination

Your blue future.

T-34

Speaking of Bolsheviks...

If you like the T-34...and who doesn't?...this movie kicks of the ass:

Build Back Bolshevik!

"Infrastructure"

You keep using that word...

Haight: Monomania Is Illiberal And Stupefying

worth a read.

However, as I've said many times, I find the obligatory shot at the far right tedious. Sure, there there be wackos...just like there are in the far n for all values of n. But I'm sick of this rule:

When you criticize the right, just criticize the right.

When you criticize the left, criticize the right, too.

Haight throws elbows at the (far!) right in his first and last paragraphs. It's not that I disagree. it's, well, just that I'm sick of the rule.

   In fact, basically anybody left-of-center follows another, related set of rules:

No enemies to the left.

But, if you have to criticize the left, don't criticize their ends; only criticize their means. You may say that you think that they're ineffective. Or you may say that you think that they might end up helping the right--i.e. that they are counterproductive.

But don't criticize the left.

   Those rules and the mindsets surrounding them are among our biggest problems. Almost everyone welcome in allegedly polite society assumes that, deep down, the left is good and, deep down, the right is bad. And there's not much hope for you until you get rid of that--utterly, entirely, fantastically--false belief.

   In fact, if anything, it's likely the opposite... But most probably not anything. That is: probably neither side is much different from the other...y'know...deep down... But the far right isn't an issue. Everybody hates the far right. Even the right hates the far right. The far right has no power at all--until a couple of them snap and start shooting people. And all that does is strengthen the left, really. 

   OTOH, the far left controls the left...and the left controls all our institutions. The right spends a fair bit of time letting everyone know that it hates the far right. There's no Nazi "squad" in the GOP. The far left is ensconced in academia, and in the activist class (but I repeat myself), and it sets the tone and the ends and creates the conceptual frameworks and the vocabulary of the progressive left. The far left is the vanguard of the left. The far right is hated and vilified by everyone. 

   And yet, few people even acknowledge the existence of a far left in America. In fact, the far left really just is our left now. But few people even seem to recognize that. Much less take analogous obligatory shots at it whenever they criticize the right. 

   Oh yeah...Haight has some good points, too. 

   But you know me...

Climate Hysteria: Rolling Stone / "JOE MANCHIN JUST COOKED THE PLANET" Edition

link

"International Journal Of Advanced Computer Technology" Accepts Paper Composed Entirely Of "Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List"

link    Not exactly the Sokal hoax or the Boghossian-Pluckrose-Lindsay hoax...but still hilarious and awesome.

Mass Hysteria and Transgender Mythology: You're Not Allowed To Say That This Is Insane

This ends up being about abortion, about which I don't really have much of a position. But I've written about the other points in the video several times--i.e. the "trans" delusion as mass hysteria. (There's probably a general difference between men (who tend to be autogynephiliacs) and tweenage girls (who are apparently in the grip of mass hysteria / mass psychogenic /sociogenic illness.) Anyway.

   As I've also written many times: if you want to understand the PC/pomo progressive left, it's best encapsulated in trans mythology. Watch people like those below who can sit there and say that black is white and night is day with not only straight faces, but a kind of passionate, dogmatic matter-of-factness in their voices. Men can be women and get pregnant. It's just a fact, bigot. It's just a fact...

   It's doublethink. How much is make-believe (a great and very accurate term)--i.e. something they actually made themselves actually believe--and how much is a politically correct put-on--i.e. something they say because it's PC, but don't really believe? Who knows? Both are creepy as shit. And the combination is doubly creepy. That's the left, man. 

Michael Goodwin on Biden's Capitulation To The Left; or: Philosoraptor: Right Again

I sure do hate bein' right all the time...
   I did think there was some chance Biden would govern as a moderate, but, as you'll recall, I said it wasn't going to happen--in part because there's not enough of him left to do much of anything. 

Not that there was a whole lot there in the first place...

But anyhoo...

To repeat my oft-repeated metaphor: Trump, for all his many flaws, was substantially good--that is, good on policy. Well, mostly. But really, amazingly good. And incomparably better than Biden. He was (to get to the metaphor) a big, fat monkey wrench in the governmental apparatus that has, by all appearances, largely gone woke. Which means: insane. Biden, on the other hand, would be (I said) like replacing that monkey wrench with a big, central gear that did nothing but facilitate the smooth working of a machine that functions mostly to take us leftward toward a cliff. So the metaphor was really wrong. Biden isn't even a gear. The machine already has everything it needs to function. The wrench was a wrench, a brake, an impediment. It was removed. We lurched left. And that's where we'll keep going. Barring some Reaganesque revolt that temporary moves us centerward. (Though, still, it's just a matter of time before we go over that cliff...but I'm willing to ignore that long-term problem for now...)

tldr: right again. Dammit.

(Of course I completely failed to heed the signs that Trump was flipping his shit after the election. (Which he may actually have been cheated out of. But still. I was waaaay wrong about that.))

   Oh, yeah...but I was supposed to write about Goodwin's post. He writes:

   Frustrated, he [LBJ] launched an attack on the left-wing of his party, declaring, “A liberal is intolerant of other views. He wants to control your thoughts and actions.”
   As Califano writes, Johnson then moved closer to his guests to deliver the final punch: “You know the difference between cannibals and liberals? Cannibals eat only their enemies.”
   Joe Biden knows the feeling. More than five decades later, he, too, is being eaten alive by the Dems’ left, which is now called progressive instead of liberal.
...
   So far, he hasn’t delivered much of anything except trouble and failure and his poll numbers continue to slide downhill. The Afghanistan debacle, the border mess, the still-raging coronavirus and rising inflation are taking their toll on his presidency, and getting passage of the infrastructure deal, which garnered nearly a score of GOP votes in the Senate, would give him bragging rights on a popular issue.
That should make it a no-brainer for all Dems. After all, a failing, unpopular president is likely to cost the party control of Congress next year given the party’s narrow margins.
   But rejection of common sense is a key trait of the irredeemable nature of the left. Johnson, by the time he made his cannibal comparison, already had delivered the Great Society agenda, from voting rights to civil rights to Medicare and Medicaid, but it wasn’t enough for the left.
   For his part, Biden has backed nearly every far-left piece of nonsense in the wind, including a voting rights bill that would put Washington in full charge of federal elections. He talked about making Puerto Rico a state, packing the Supreme Court and ending the Senate filibuster.
   He’s also showed himself to be an open-borders president and adopted the language of the worst race-baiters by insisting the nation is guilty of “systemic racism” even while he calls Americans “good people.”
   None of these positions reflect the Joe Biden people knew from his long tenure in Washington, where he personified the word moderate. Indeed, when he talked repeatedly in his campaign and at the inaugural about “unity” and working as hard for those who didn’t vote for him as those who did, there was reason to hope he was serious about trying to heal the nation’s breach.
Yet here we are, with the president remaking himself as a leftist, the left calling it insufficient, and he shrugs his shoulders and says OK.
...
   Still, because all roads in Washington lead to the White House, the question of why Biden has ceded so much of his power to the insatiable far left demands an ­answer.
   Unfortunately, the answer is obvious. He’s a weak, befuddled president who is the emptiest of empty suits. All talk and no conviction, he couldn’t stand up to the Taliban and can’t even stand up to the wing nuts in his own party.

   There only seem to be two types of Dems today: (i) the crazies and (ii) the ones who vote like the crazies, but may possibly tut-tut about them a bit here and there...y'know...in the privacy of their own homes... Which doesn't surprise me anymore, and never should have. Party allegiance is tribal. And--at least I've always recognized this much--tribalism is nuts. The left has swung so far to the left that only the "right" is anywhere near the center anymore. 

Anyway.

The point is: I toldja so.

Do Universities Still Care About Truth?: The "Cancelling" Of Steven Pinker

The term 'cancel' in the use above is dumb as shit...but I've given in to it for lack of a good current alternative.

But to answer the question in the title: No, of course not. 

Though one might also answer it like so: Not really.

Those are pretty much the reasonable options...

Nobody who's been around universities in the last five years would answer Of course they do!

If It Weren't For Double Standards, They'd Have No Standards At All: TUSK-uh-GEE Experiment / White People Suck Edition

So how many black Americans are refusing the vaccine because of the Tuskegee experiment (etc.)? 

Not enough to account for the racial difference in vaccination rates--that's a safe bet.

But it's ridiculous to even engage with such arguments. They aren't made in good faith. They're just part of the racist left's knee-jerk practice of always spinning everything in their preferred direction--which means, inter alia, always stretching to find some manufactured, fictional reason to condemn everything about whites and excuse even identical actions by nonwhites (except for Jews...of course...). The pomo-prog left is like your crazy roommate who makes up nutty nonsense to excuse every stupid-ass thing she does, and equally nutty nonsense to blame everything on you. It's a mental disorder. No sense arguing with her/them:

She really said "the TUSK-uh-GEE" experiment 🤣🤣🤣 https://t.co/Wdae9RGr0j

— Clifton Duncan: Drapetomaniac. (@cliftonaduncan) October 1, 2021

Oz Reverting To Prison Colony

Meanwhile, in Victoria... https://t.co/ulJmAePpkc

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) October 1, 2021

Big Biden Is Watching You: $600 Transaction Edition

But see this is totally fine and what really matters is that the Republicans are so much worse and policies are only bad if they help the right so if you did want to criticize this--which you shouldn't because whaddaya have to hide? Bigot.--you know the drill: I'm just afraid this will something something something help the right...

   Because even while the left is destroying the nation and hoping to turn it into a massive gulag from sea to shining sea...it's the right that's the real problem...

I’m not sure people understand how bad an invasion of privacy this is.

But it’s huge. pic.twitter.com/zF9l612J4S

— J.P. Freire (@JPFreire) October 1, 2021