WaPo Reporter Admits Media Afraid to Tell Truths That Anger the Left

Specifically re: the Tom Cotton editorial debacle at the NYT.

But this is no surprise. 

The kind of insanity that's taken over the American left can't survive without some kind of nonrational enforcement mechanism. Lefties are already (a) locked into groupthink and (b) loath to break ranks with their tribe. Add (c) fear of the shrieking hordes of reavers that is cancel culture...and, well, you get the conceptual shitshow with which we've all become so familiar.

The Left Doesn't Want Us To Have Cheap, Abundant Energy

The Left's historical beef with nuclear power was it worked and would enable wasteful capitalist consumption.

"In fact, giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun." — Paul R. Ehrlich, 1975

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) October 28, 2022

Musk/Twitter: The Memewar 3

pic.twitter.com/33AYRS638G

— drefanzor memes (@drefanzor) October 28, 2022

Paul Pelosi's Attacker: Illegal Alien Nudist Hemp-Jewlery Artiste...

But the left is insisting that he must be a conservative. And at least one MSM talking head claims this incident was like January 6th...because...the attacker allegedly said "Where's Nancy"...and the 1/6ers apparently chanted "Nancy, Nancy"...so...they said the same word. link

   Honestly, the blue team was just not always this dumb. 

   They just weren't.

Musk/Twitter: The Memewar 2

pic.twitter.com/kOrqjWNcfd

— 📰 Media Accountability Project 🇺🇸 (@media_tmap) October 28, 2022

Musk/Twitter: The Memewar

Restoring free speech on Twitter pic.twitter.com/1Y9YNeT3mz

— NautPoso 🇮🇪☘️ (@NautPoso) October 28, 2022

Antioch Insanity

You may think this is laughable...but what was the craziest crazy at Antioch in the 90s is mainstream leftism today...

Newsweek's "Fact" Check of Cruz on the Mostly Peaceful Social Justice Riots for Peace and Justice

LOOOOOOOOOL

When somebody has to stoop so stupid as to deploy the Antifa isn't real ploy, you know the "fact" check is gonna be good. The left has no problem attributing every vice and error to "the alt-right," "white supremacy," "structural" whatever, "ultra-maga"...but Antifa, you see, doesn't exist because it doesn't have a charter and bylaws or something...

The left is seriously stupid.

Oh, also: the George Floyd riots didn't last a whole year! So FACT CHECK: FALSE, BIGOTS!!!!111

REEE REEE WHITE WOMEN WON'T SAVE DEMOCRACY REEEE REEEE ORANGE MAN BAD REEE REEEE WHITE SUPREMACY REEE REEE....

tl;dr: voting Republican is destroying democracy.

Does Kari Lake Lead Katie Hobbs By 11 Points???

Holy crap.

11/8 is gonna be a massacre.

A very, very well-deserved massacre.

Test Scores Show There's Not Much Distance Learning

link

Here's my conclusion about my own experiences: basically no one learned anything in any of my online classes so far as I can tell. 

Ok, that's an exaggeration: highly-motivated students always learn at least something. They'd have probably learned something anyway--though maybe not about American philosophy...

Anyway: online classes were a disaster IMO. I could have gone back in person a semester before I did, but I said I wouldn't lecture in a mask. But by the Spring of '21, they were still permitting us to teach online, but requiring masks in person. The online classes were so painfully awful that I went back anyway. I bought some fact gauze masks from Amazon, and just took the thing off about 3/4 of the time anyway. Eventually I just quit wearing it and several students in the class--mostly guys--eventually caught on and followed suit.

But I digress: online classes were shit is my point.

Fetterman Debate Disaster

link     I hope he magically snaps back to 100% the day after the election.

Democrats: One-Party Rule Required to Save Democracy

They really have lost it.

It's OK When Democrats Do It: Election Skepticism Edition

I kinda thought this unhinged HRC screed was a deepfake at first...but...I guess not?

Pox: "How Many Van Goghs Is One Earth Worth?"

All of them...and then some...at the very least...

   If the Earth were really headed for destruction, and if we were really the perpetrators, and if destroying paintings really had any chance of stopping it...then you really do need to get to destroying them for good.

   But their apocalypse fantasy is just that. The end is not nigh. We didn't cause it--though there's no it. It's part of their juvenile, overly-dramatic religion. Even the hysteriac IPCC doesn't think the Earth is going to be destroyed. Nor that humanity will be devastated--let alone made extinct. 

   Of course it's Vox...so this BS is just about par for the course.

Who Blew Up Nordstream? RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA???

Ehhh...we've heard this one before...

B-21 Rollout: 12/2/22

!!!!!

Could a Midterm Thrashing Help Move Dems Back Toward the Center?

No link; just pretty obvious speculation.

Of course they'll blame "messaging" if they do get thrashed. Both parties always do that. It's never bad ideas or bad policies. It's always a failure to "get their message out." Their policies and ideas are almost always good...they just can't get the voters to see that... 

But there've already been warnings and grumblings from old-school Dems like James Carville about the Woketarians wrecking the party. So, even if they don't admit it publicly, a red wave will almost certainly strengthen the case of the remaining Dem centrists. 

Of course to really bring that about, Pubs will probably have to win big--taking the Senate and taking more than a midterm-average number of seats in the House. Otherwise the Woketarians will have a strong case: nothing out of the ordinary happened, so that's reason to stay the course. Or at least it's not reason not to. If Dems do lose big, the radicals will blame Biden's unpopularity. And they can claim that it's his alleged centrism that's to blame. 

Ultimately, we need two sane parties. Currently I'd say we have about 0.5. The Pubs, subtracting Trump and the fringe, are what we have to hang our hopes on. A suboptimal state of affairs, to say the least.

Lysenkoism Watch: NIH Blocks Access To Genetics Database If Research Is Deemed "Stigmatizing"

The politically correct destruction of inquiry proceeds apace.

Rufo: Yes, Critical Race Theory is Being Taught in Schools

No it isn't! It's impossible to teach CRT in K-12! It can only be taught in graduate school! Teaching it anywhere else is a conceptual impossibility! You don't understand what CRT is if you think it's being taught in K-12! It is being taught in schools, but that's a good thing! In fact it is impossible to teach about race at all without teaching kids CRT! If you oppose teaching CRT to kindergarteners you don't want kids to learn about race in America at all! Well it's actually not so much being taught as being presupposed as a "lens" through which all of human history is seen...without any discussion of the distorting nature of the "lens" itself...so...see? It's not actually being taught at all! Like we said! It's more being what you might call indoctrinated into them...

Lies, lies lies.

It's all gaslighting all the time from the contemporary progressive left.

In case you fell for any of their bullshit, here's Zach Goldberg and Eric Kaufmann to fill you in.

Obama Gently Chides the Woketarian Cult That's Destroying the Nation

Weak sauce.

Praising with faint damnation. 

Obama's refusal to call bullshit on political correctness has forever diminished him in my eyes.

The Woking Dead

Gotta love all the shout-outs in here, esp. to my fave rave game of all time, L4D.

Taibbi: On the Loony van Gogh Protest

First: I don't blame the children doing these things all that much. [a] If you believe progressive climate apocalypticism, what they're doing is plausibly warranted. In fact, they're probably not going far enough. Why aren't they blowing up transformer stations? Coal plants? Aircraft? Well...one answer: these are gender studies majors, not chemical engineers... But anyway. [b] They've been brainwashed by progressives--by progressive adults, media, universities, government...and one of our major political parties. The fault lies mainly--or so I guess I'd say--with the scientists and scientific institutions who are going along with progressive climate hysteria. And of course, as usual....I blame...the progressive left!!! dun-dun-DUUUUUNNNNNN.... 

   As I've said, I just don't believe in climate apocalypticism. I don't believe climate change is an "existential threat" to humanity...but, then, so far as I can tell, neither does the IPCC... And this all fits a standard progressive pattern: fabricate or exaggerate a crisis, then leverage it to accomplish pre-existing political goals. 

   But: given the theory relentlessly flogged by the left...can you really blame people for thinking that radical action is justified? In fact, demanded?

   Anyway.

   Different point: the group in question said something obviously stupid and false...unless they're even stupider than they seem:

I happened to be rereading Fahrenheit 451 when news arrived that a pair of protesters from a climate action group called “Just Stop Oil” hurled tomato soup at Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” at the National Gallery in London. A spokesperson for the group, Mel Carrington, was quoted in the New York Times saying the choice of art was irrelevant, since the only thing important about “Sunflowers” was that it was famous, “an iconic painting, by an iconic painter.” On the other hand, the choice of Heinz Cream of Tomato was more “symbolic,” because some can’t afford to heat up a tin of soup.

Look...no one is that stupid...right? RIGHT???

   Anyway, this good point from Taibbi:

I don’t buy the idea that thought was put into what to throw at a Van Gogh, and not where to throw it. It’s just too much of a coincidence that campaigns of kids dumping on Botticelli and Van Gogh are taking place in the middle of a years-long war on art, literature, music, humor, and even math and science, when there are movements to obliterate entire fields like classics, and professors are fired for everything from reading passages from great books to teaching subjects students deem too difficult. Young people seem more and more to come out of college convinced ancient thinkers have nothing important to teach them, and may even actively symbolize the politics of exclusion, à la Beethoven. Whoever is teaching these kids is robbing them of all the joy of learning, and using them as political pawns. Another theme of dystopian literature that’s proved depressingly on-target is that the youthful urge for idealism would be appropriated for society’s ugliest work, especially destruction. “I’m afraid of children my own age,” says young Clarisse in Fahrenheit 451. “They kill each other. Did it always used to be that way?”

"Root Causes Aren't Behind the Migrant Surge--It's Open Borders"

The appeal to "root causes" is a way to obfuscate and divert attention and resources away from policies you don't like to ones you do. This seems to me to be more common on the left, but you know me. 

They don't like arresting and imprisoning violent criminals, so they wave their hands and assert that we shouldn't be doing it--it's superficial. We need to go after the "root causes"...poverty, not enough Head Start...whatever. They don't really want to stop people at the border...but they do want to waste more money on "climate change." You know what to do! And, of course, to focus on climate change with any hope of affecting immigration is the utterest nonsense.

   There may be "root causes" of crime that government can effectively address...or there may not be. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't lock your door. If your house is on fire, you need to call the fire department, not the electrician. 

   And, of course, it's easier to bullshit about "root causes"--easier to simply give the answer entailed by your ideology or perspective or worldview. 

Tulsi's Excellent Summary of the Contemporary Dems

With one major and a few niggling disagreements, I otherwise agree with this picture of the smoking wreckage of the Democratic party. 

   The major disagreement is that I tend to think that Biden's strategy in Ukraine is about the best we can do. I have not taken the alleged threat of a nuclear war seriously. But, then, as I've proven, I don't understand the situation. Gabbard is a lot more likely to understand what's up than I am. Other than that, my disagreements are minimal. E.g. I don't like the hyperbolic and inaccurate charge of "erasing existence." The Dems aren't "erasing the existence" of women any more than the Pubs are "erasing the existence" of "transgendered" people. In neither case does anyone think that the group in question doesn't exist; rather, the disagreement is over the properties/characteristics of the relevant groups. That's not to say that the Dems' position isn't completely nuts...because it certainly is. And, as I've said many times, I'd think that women would eventually wake up to the fact that they're always shoved to the lowest position on the victim totem pole. (That analogy would not be popular among the Woketarians...) That's especially weird given that women are the main drivers of Woketarianism...

   Anyway: Gabbard is right on target.

McCarthy: "Utter Proof" That the FBI Framed Trump and Shielded Hunter Biden

McCarthy doesn't make such claims lightly.

F-35 vs. Su-57 in One Picture

Shades of F-15 vs. Mig-25.

Crazy Woke Medical Oath at The University of Minnesota

Absolute gibbering lunacy.
Starts at 1:41:10
Ends at 1:45:35
It's four interminable minutes...but they do manage to cram just about every known kind of woke lunacy into it. The most common modern version of the Hippocratic Oath, by contrast, is about ten lines long.

Among other things, they pledge to resist the "violence of the gender binary" (or roughly that...no way I'm listening to that shit again...) and to "honor all indigenous medical knowledge." Not just some of it, mind you. But all of it--witch doctors, chicken guts, magic spells, the whole nine yards...

Pour One Out For Pebbles, (Formerly) World's Oldest Living Dog

Not to be confused with the world's oldest formerly-living dog...

   As goes without saying, you can tell Pebbles was a very good girl just by looking at her picture. 

David Atkins: "Losing the Culture War, Republicans Are Deparate"

I agree with the predicate: we're losing the culture war. Although I'd say there are reasons for optimism. For one thing, we're right about almost every issue in this fight. And the truth matters...even now...even to more moderate lefties. 

   I also agree that there's a certain amount of desperation on the red team. There's also an enormous amount of hysteria and other insanity on the blue team. Even, maybe, some desperation--in case that's some special indicator of loserdom...

   But there's nothing for it but to keep working. We have to win this one. Losing may well mean the end of the USA, hence of the West, and the liberal world order. 

   Trump saddled us with some very, very bad senate candidates. He may well lose us the senate twice. After the election, some hard thinking about Trump needs to happen on the red team. But now's not the time. Nows the time to volunteer and donate money. Yeah, also to vote...but more importantly: those other things.

   The Herschel Walker argument seems pretty weak to me. Politics makes hypocrites of us all in that sense. I'm not anti-abortion, so that argument doesn't affect me. But I do care about the accusations made by his son. However, at this point I'm voting almost exclusively to weaken the Democrats--because I consider them an actual danger to the nation, the society and the culture. Well, their theory is a danger--their Woketarian religion. Most Dems are just being ignorantly or mindlessly tribal...just like most Pubs. It's not that they're bad people. It's that they're in a bad tribe, and haven't been roused to see that yet--or can't be bothered to bust out...

HMD: Marijuana Conviction and Incarceration Not Biased Against Blacks

Thing is, our public political discourse is no longer fact-oriented. The progressive left cares not a bit what the facts are. The cluster of literary theory and pseudo-philosophy that grounds the progressive world view does--as they sometimes admit in discussions of CRT--constitute a "lens" through which they see the world. And that "lens" sees only a few kinds of things--and distorts them. Are whites and blacks convicted of drug crimes at differential rates? Yes. And are blacks convicted more often? Yes. This shows up in the progressive conceptual "lens" as discrimination--or, rather: oppression. Do blacks actually, as a matter of fact, commit more / more serious marijuana crimes than whites? The "lens" does not detect such facts. Or, if it must, they merely show up as further, deeper oppression: must be a result of hidden (another word for "structural") racism. 

   Even non-progressives  have given in to this mode of leftist discourse: you're not permitted to point out that the progressive presuppositions are false; you're only permitted to argue that the policy in question (e.g. pardoning all inmates convicted on weed charges) will harm black communities more. (HMD isn't subject to this error...though she does make both kinds of arguments.)

   Does the left just like violence and chaos? Sort of, yes. There's a strong youthful strain of leftism that finds urban shittiness exciting and sexy. But to some extent, this is a calculated strategy by the hard-left vanguard to destroy the nation. It is, after all, their main goal. They're not exactly cagey about it. Of course to make it palatable to the non-bleeding-edge of leftism, they have to pretend it's the "social justice" thing... Also, of course, this is motivated by the actual arguments: many progressives believe that all such differences must indicate racism. And, having been convinced that the USA is made of racism, they'll basically support any policy represented to them as "anti-racist." 

   And basically, to get your true believers on board, you only need one argument that isn't so overtly stupid that even a true believer can't swallow it. They won't listen to counter-argument. So, as they like to say in DCS, sometimes you can win the dogfight if you win the first turn...

   And, of course, it does seem unlikely that white progressives live in the neighborhoods that are going to be most afflicted by this move. As HMD points out, black neighborhoods are likely to suffer more. 

Tulsi Dumps the Dems: Woke Ideologues Weaponizing the Police State and Racializing Everything

I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue & stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms, are… pic.twitter.com/oAuTnxZldf

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) October 11, 2022

The Left Uses "DEI" To Pack Institutions With Leftists

Just like the title says.

Universities, for example, are frantically packing themselves with leftist administrators under cover of DEI These people will never be fired; their positions will never be eliminated. Barring something extraordinary, this is a permanent, widespread moving of universities to the left. 

And it's happening even in the DoD.

Nord Stream Stuff

Whodunnit?

   I have no idea...but the teams seem to be lining up as usual... Those over on the left seems to be saying it was Russia, those on the right saying it was the U.S. Pretty hard for me to believe it was us...but, then, I don't really understand anything about the issues. The fact that a U.S. Navy aircraft flew near the site of the rupture a couple of hours after it happened doesn't seem like good evidence of U.S. involvement...at all. For one thing, we'd have to know how often Navy planes routinely fly in that vicinity. Nearby...around the time of...that's just too much wiggle room--unless there's colateral info to the effect that, say, flights in that vicinity are rare.

   It seems to have emitted a helluva lot of methane...which is very bad. I've heard near 500k tons this says 100k-400k. Methane, of course, is very bad qua greenhouse gas, trapping a lot more heat than CO2 and, if I'm not mistaken, decaying into CO2 as well...

   Also, doesn't it seem like the blowback would be extremely damaging if it were the U.S.? OTOH, the tangible damage to Russia...assuming it's significant...would seem to be evidence against them doing it...

   But, really, I don't see how non-experts can even guess about this intelligently.

Newnewspeak Dictionary: "Gender-Affirming"

LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLL

My God these people are loony. Or, rather, they're running a looniness emulator in their political software.

AJW: Pedro Hernandez, The Face of NY Bail Reform

Coming Soon: Polygamy

Ugh.

I can't believe Rick Santorum was right.

"Does Trump Realize He's Now Just the Democrats' Stooge?"

He shot us in the ass by setting the stage for the Capitol riot, by losing us the Senate once already, by continuing to be a lunatic...and by having set the stage for us to lose the Senate again. 

   For all his copious faults, he took big steps in right directions. And had he been even just a little bit less Trumpy, he could have won another term and, perhaps, been a transformative President. Instead he couldn't STFU--not even just a little bit--and played into the hands of the crazies. He lost. He freaked out. He put the cult and its front man in power. He may be the only thing--other than those white boots--the can derail the DeSantis train...

   What a tragicomedic wreck he's been.

Bill Clinton: There's A Limit To How Many Migrants the U.S. Can Take In Without Causing Disruption

Amazing the things that have to be said.

Shellenberger on Biden's Woke Green Energy Fantasy

This is almost certainly right:

If renewables are doomed for fundamental physical reasons, why do so many educated people believe we will transition to them? Most are just ignorant. They have been surrounded by professional ideologues who have deceived them for decades. They insist that the US will somehow be able to quickly build the massive solar factories, rare earth mines and mineral refiners that took China 20 years to build.

Most educated people aren't educated at all about climate nor energy. "Educated" now--with respect to such issues--really means: indoctrinated into the fantasies of the left. (In this case: liberals as well as progressives, unfortunately.) They do not understand how dicey "the science" on climate is...must less on warming...much less on anthropogenic warming. They do not understand what a boon to humanity fossil fuels are--even taking their climate costs into account. And they don't understand the costs and problems associated with alleged "green" energy sources. They are subject to pervasive propaganda to the effect that we're on the brink of an apocalypse, science-fiction energy sources can save us, and only the stupidity of conservatives and the greed of oil companies stands in the way. When you are allowed to hear--and allow yourself to consider--only one side of the issues...and when all the strength of the considerations are all wildly exaggerated...you end up with a fantastically counterfactual view. In fact, the reasonable view here is that of people like Shellenberger and Musk: there are a lot of reasons to work toward a future in which fossil fuels play a much smaller role. But we are not teetering on the edge of apocalypse. And the pretense that we are has become at least as dangerous as climate change itself. It's making us do very, very stupid and harmful things.

Important New Paper Challenges IPCC on Climate Sensitivity

link

As always, I acknowledge that I'm in no position to make the kinds of judgments that experts make on AGW. But, from the perspective of a well-informed layperson, it's pretty clear that "the science" is not "settled." 

My own view is, of course, that the view being represented as the consensus is shifted pretty far to the hysterical end of the spectrum. When you--or at least when I--dig into the arguments that I can somewhat understand, it all seems pretty messy and guessy. Overall, the discussion about AGW looks an awful lot like other discussions of leftist articles of faith that have been infected by political correctness / Lysenkoism. The left is quasi-religiously committed to climate apocalypticism, and, if that were subtracted from the discussion, we'd be having a much more rational and temperate discussion. 

Psaki: "The Gloves are Off"

Where, pray tell, were these alleged gloves previously?

   Like when you-all were manufacturing a conspiracy among the FBI, the media and the Democrat party to falsely portray Trump as a Russian "asset"? Or you were encouraging leftist mobs to attack American cities? Or mobilizing law enforcement against your political opposition? Or when the President of the United States was calling us "semi-Fascist"? Or when the state was classifying parents as terrorists for opposing the sexual mutilation of their children?

   The left doesn't believe in using "gloves." It's a totalitarian ideology. Gloves are for liberals. To the Woketarian cult, it's all life or death.