Elon Musk: If You Pull Your Advertising From X, "Go Fuck Yourself"

Dude is my hero.

Trump Gag Order Reinstated Because He Is An Idiot

Jeez that guy is an idiot.

All he'd have to do is adopt a minimally civil tone and he could get away with most of the crap he tweets. But he just can't do it. It's pathological. He can't resist setting his mouth to full auto and doing repeated mag dumps into his own foot.

Israel's Action Against Hamas: A Just War?

I don't have a lot to say about this. Just a quick thought:

   It seems clear that Israel meets the conditions required for jus ad bellum: it has just cause to go to war against Hamas. In fact, it is merely responding to Hamas's act of war against it.

   The only interesting question is whether Israel's actions meet the conditions required for jus in bello--i.e. whether it is conducting the war in a just way. My inclination, based on what I think I know, is to think that the answer is in the affirmative. The pro-Palestinian (mostly) left seems to disagree--that seems to be the upshot of their appeals to e.g. the number of children that have been killed. The argument seems, roughly, to be: if so many children are killed, Israel cannot be conducting the war justly. (Though, of course, sometimes they seem to be sidling up to the claim that if any children are killed, Israel cannot be conducting the war justly... But I'll ignore that here.)

   My entire life I have inclined toward a pro-Israel position. I realize that I'm not exactly neutral. But I also realize that I don't know enough about how Israel is conducting the war to know that they are conducting it justly. Furthermore, some technical knowledge about military matters (beyond what little I know) is required in order to answer the question adequately. And this is not to mention that just war theory gets complicated, and it isn't my area of specialization. We hear stories about "roof knocking" to alert the occupants of buildings that it's going to be bombed, and this seems, to me, as if it is almost beyond the call of duty. But at this point I am reduced to guesses about what can be done, what is being done, and what is required.

   My view is that Israel is acting with remarkable restraint. But I also realize that I may have no right to be too sure about that.

Amanda Marcotte: Trump is Polling Well, but He's About to Blow It

That's the RCP title, anyway.

   I went in expecting to agree with Mad Mandy for once. After all, I do think Trump will blow it.

   But Marcotte is a loon, and even when it's within her capacity to be right, she just can't help being wrong. Re: Trump's anti-Obamacare stance, she scrawls:

Erasing the Black president's signature achievement is a manifestation of this racist fixation.

Jeez she's a lunatic. Though, of course, this is the orientation of the entire PC left, and has been for 35 years: just fling the r word at everybody you disagree with. I do think that Trump is kind of obsessed with Obama. But not because of his race. Anyone who's paid any attention should know the real explanation...

   Oh and: stop trying to make "THE BIG LIE" happen...it's not going to happen. 

   Especially when it's easy to name many much bigger lies emanating from the left: men are women, the USA is inherently and irredeemably racist, we're all going to die from Global Searing or whatever they've decided to call it this week...

   But, anyway: yeah, Trump's going to blow it. He's been in the process of blowing it for about four years now. Any even minimally decent Republican candidate would mop the floor with Biden. But, unfortunately, we're probably stuck with Trump. If he manages to hand power to the deranged Dems a second time, whatever good he did will pale in comparison to the harm.

RIP Henry Kissinger

The end of an era...whatever one might think of that era.

Bill Barr and Adam J. White: Kieth Ellison Wants to Run U.S. Energy Policy from Minnesota

Honestly, even aside from all the woke psychopathy, and even the content of climate apocalypticism, it's also this kind of bullshit that has driven me away from the Democrats. The lawfare, the illicit use of the courts to expand their power and implement policy preferences that they can't implement in legit ways...and the ceaseless striving to force their pseudoscientific visions on the rest of us.

   Oh, yeah, the Pubs do it too. And they are moving that way with abortion. But they're a sideshow right now. I'll worry about them again if/when they take center state again someday.

   And: any party that makes Keith Ellison the Attorney General of a state...or that has put him in any other position of power...has gone way off the rails. 

Ukraine: Do The Cheerleaders Know We Lost?

I got kicked off of Reddit for wrongthink a month or so ago, but, at the time, the lefties there still thought Ukraine was winning bigly.

   I asked some time ago what would happen to the Ukraine enthusiasts if/when it became clear that Ukraine was not going to win...as I suppose it finally has.

   Maybe I should peek in and see.

   I'm not actually sure how much it matters that Ukraine is (probably) going to lose. Seems to me that it may have been necessary to inflict pain on Putin/Russia regardless of the outcome. It'd be good for Ukraine to regain its territory. But even supposing they never do, it's also important to make Putin/Russia think twice before pulling such a stunt again.

   None of that's to deny that NATO seems to have been partly to blame for batting its eyelashes at Ukraine, of course.

   Though I'd rather that Ukraine/NATO had won, I suppose the silver lining is that Biden can't use a victory as a talking point if he's the nominee again... Cold comfort, but, I guess, better than nothing.

Transgenderism as Foma

I'm pretty sure I saw this point made somewhere else recently--that's to say: it isn't my idea. But I'm not sure whether this was exactly the point or not.

   At any rate: I'd totally forgotten about Kurt Vonnegut's Bokonon, and specifically foma: "Harmless untruths intended to comfort simple souls." (e.g.: "prosperity is just around the corner," "You'll get back together.") 

   At any rate: many people seem to regard some of the central demands of transgenderism as foma. Sure, John is a man. But if he wants you to say that he's a woman, refer to him with 'she,' etc...why not? It's just foma. As the lefties used to (and maybe still do) ask: Why are you making a big deal out of words? Or my favorite: why do you care so much?

   Well, I've gone on at length for years about why such things aren't mere foma (to use the recovered term). So no need to rant about it again.

Eric Hoffer: Intellectuals Want Your Soul

It's disconcerting to realize that businessmen, generals, soldiers, men of action are less corrupted by power than intellectuals... You take a conventional man of action, and he's satisfied if you obey. But not the intellectual. He doesn't want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there's soul-raping going on.

-- Eric Hoffer

Similar to what one of my conservative friends likes to say:

The right wants you to behave. The left wants your soul.

RIP Rosalynn Carter (1927-2023)

I am deeply sorry to hear the news of Mrs. Carter's death.

Exposing the 2020 fed-ordered, academic-run, corporate-censorship extortion racket

This, at the NYP, is exactly right.

Over the last 10-ish years:

(a) The American left has radicalized.

(b) It has adopted a particularly virulent mix of outlandish, highly-theoretical, quasi-philosophical ideas that infected the humanities and the academic left 40 years ago or so.

(c) It has implemented these ideas as actual policies (or: in-effect policies) from academia to publishing to the news media and social media to government.

(d) It has slipped farther and farther into a kind of soft totalitarianism that (i) brooks no dissent, (ii) actively seeks to crush dissent via non-rational means (eg social punishment, the disinformation-industrial complex), (iii) seeks to use corporations, schools, and universities to indoctrinate people--especially children and young people--into the doctrines of the cult.

   People like me laughed at Trump's phrase "the deep state" when we first encountered it. Well, I, at least, am no longer laughing. There is certainly a deep academy that will resist any attempt to restore institutional neutrality. As with other of Trump's allegedly laughable or terrible phrases--'fake news,' 'build the wall'--'the deep state' turned out to indicate something real and important.

Absolutely, Positively, Watch This Film: The Fall of Minneapolis

On the George Floyd incident.

We were all lied to, and Chauvin et al. were railroaded.

Your January 6 2021 "Insurrection"--Worse Than Pearl Harbor x 9/11 ^ The British Burning the White House

Jan 6 defendants have long argued that the initial entrants were peaceably escorted into the building by Capitol Police, and therefore had no reasonable expectation that their conduct was unlawful

This video, suppressed for almost 3 years, confirms itpic.twitter.com/F24MAf0mXS

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) November 18, 2023

Dumb bin Laden Video; Dumb Responses

There's a dumb TikTok video going around in which some dumb kids ham it up for the camera, pretending that reading OBL's "Letter to America" changed their lives. The kids are all coiffed for the camera. They're actors acting. Bin Laden's letter is pretty much crap. I'm certainly not saying that it's not interesting to know his motives. But I'm saying that you have to be feeble-minded for it to change your life. I am, of course, not saying that he's wrong about everything. I'm saying just what I'm saying and not another thing.

   But apparently the video has been yanked. And the Grauniad (where the letter was initially published?) has taken it down.

   These reactions are even dumber than the original video, which is saying something.

   The video should be available, as should the letter. That should go without saying. 

   Suppressing expression is not the way to win an argument.

   When did we lose our minds about such stuff?

update:

Lunatics: U.S., U.K. Militaries Owe $111,000,000,000 in "Climate Reparations"

Good luck collecting that, dumb shits.

Political Correctness on Parade: Sex Was Invented in the 19th Century to Keep Women Down;

This is literally how crazy they are:

Pretty soon, I’m just going to spontaneously combust from rage pic.twitter.com/qkwvA3VCQG

— Right Side of History™️ (@xxclusionary) November 15, 2023

Taibbi: "Expert" Says Media Insufficiently Hysterical on Subject of Trump

The hysteria will escalate until you acknowledge that we are the reasonable ones.

Trump on "Vermin;" or: REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE / PC Language-Policing Meets Orange Man Hitler

Morons.

HITLER USED THE WORD 'VERMIN'!!!!111

Z0MG Hitler used the word 'Hitler,' too!!!!!11111000000

This is one of the old-school PC techniques: pick a word, make a federal case out of it, pretend the speaker meant something nefarious. Hitler used a lot of words, you stupid jackasses. He used 'green,' 'new,' and 'deal'.* That didn't stop you. 

   The left has actual, substantive resemblances to Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Mussolini. Nothing they can say about incidental words they share with eg Trump will change that. Trump didn't try to jail his political opponents. Trump didn't create a ministry of truth disinformation. Trump's not the one who declared half of America "white supremacists." You want to talk about spooky, messed-up imagery, look back to Biden's red speech.

   Every time someone pulls one of these kinds of cheap linguistic sophistries, you should count it heavily against them. Falsely calling someone a racist, or anti-homosexual ("homophobe") or a "white supremacist is far, far, far worse than calling them vermin. And that's almost all the left does anymore is hurl false charges of bigotry at non-leftists.

   Basically the whole intellectual foundation of the progressive left is bad literary criticism.

* Of course we mean: transliterations thereof.

Update:

I can’t believe this is a real photograph. It depicts the president of our nation, as he took to the airwaves and spoke about his fellow citizens as if they were sewer rats. pic.twitter.com/bWYxHJfqTa

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) September 2, 2022

Anti-Israel Riots in DC "Scarier" Than Capitol Riot?

Thank you @CapitolPolice for keeping Democrats safe from their own terrorist loving supporters. Stay safe out there. https://t.co/Ds2YnTQNFF

— Rep. Mike Collins (@RepMikeCollins) November 16, 2023

Academic Freedom Alliance on Campus Protests Regarding Events in Israel and Gaza

This is exactly right, according to me.

A Conversation With "Insurrectionist" Adam Johnson

Even Newsweek telling the rest of the story now??

That bodes ill for the official tale...

My view of all this has stayed more or less stable for awhile now. Roughly: Trump set the stage for this with his pre-1/6/21 ranting about Venezuelan satellites or whatever he was going on about. He didn't directly incite violence on the day of...but that doesn't matter that much to me. He--and much of the crowd--went way, way over the line. It was an embarrassment of almost unfathomable proportions. And it's not all that surprising, really, when you look at the nonsense Trump was talking ahead of time. Tell people that an election is being stolen, this is a reasonable reaction. Trump wrote himself off any future ballot, in my opinion. 

   Unfortunately, of course, when you look at the other side of the bigger picture... Well, things are much less clear. And part of that picture is provided by Johnson's account of his unjust treatment. But I'm not going to go into all that here.

Bernie Marcus: High Stakes and a Simple Choice; or: Vote for Trump

The choice doesn't seem all that simple to me.

HMD: Truths About Law Enforcement, Race, and Crime

   Public safety has been destroyed in many American cities because of an idea. That idea holds that any law-enforcement activity that has a disparate impact on black criminals is racist. Disparate impact is why many police departments have dismantled gang databases and antigun task forces, why they have given up on public-order enforcement, and why they have all but eliminated car stops. It is why “progressive” district attorneys have stopped prosecuting trespassing, shoplifting, fare evasion, and resisting arrest, why bail is being eliminated, and why judges let repeat offenders back on the street. Disparate impact is the reason that chain stores like Starbucks and Walgreens would rather close high-loss outlets than accost thieves.
   Until the disparate-impact conceit is demolished, permanently restoring law and order will be impossible. Any short-term gains from renewed enforcement will remain vulnerable to the charge that they have come at the expense of racial equity. Conservatives can call for re-policing all they want. Unless they explicitly discredit the idea that incarcerating black criminals is racist, however, Democratic politicians and policymakers will be able to use disparate rates of stops and arrests to roll back constitutional crime control whenever they have the power to do so.

David Sacks: The Truth Has Broken Out That Ukraine Is Not Winning This War

This is the way my thinking has been trending since I saw a map of the territorial gains and losses since the initial Russian invasion--though I still can't find a copy of that map. The amount of territory that Ukraine has recaptured is trivial, and much of that has been lost again.

   I was on the side of aiding Ukraine so long as the war seemed to be going somewhere--so long as there seemed to be a chance to regain significant territory...and hand Russia a significant loss. I only keep one eye on the progressive media noise machine these days, but they have seemed to be holding out false hope for some time now. Left-dominated places like the tattered remnants of Reddit have been gung-ho pro-Ukraine, endlessly posting videos of alleged Russian soldiers, tanks and AFVs being blown up in gruesome fashion. The tone there has been one of Ukrainian triumphalism. If that's where you got your news, you'd think that the heroic Ukes were pushing--endlessly pushing--toward Russia. 

   Which, of course, is what we all hoped for.

   I've been repulsed by the bloodthirstiness, actually. I don't have a lot of sympathy for the devil, but even I have been revolted by all the reveling in the death and destruction inflicted upon hapless Russian conscripts.

   Reddit is going to have to go on suicide watch when--if--the terrible truth finally seeps in through the walls of the echo chamber.

   The right has hardly covered itself in glory, though. It seemed to take up an anti-war--even anti-Ukraine--position early on. And seemingly just because the left went so whole-hog pro-Ukraine. (Which it seemed to do largely because of its pathological Russophobia.) Anti-Ukraine-war conservatives have struggled to explain why they were so unwilling to help out. Cost, of course, is one reason--and a reason they have clearly emphasized. But the rest of their account has been rather a mess. They've flirted with painting the Ukes as a bunch of Nazis (there are some there, of course), characterizing Zelenskyy as a crook, etc. But they never seem to have settled on anything. Thus reinforcing the suspicion that they really don't have a good reason, but are just reacting against the left's pro-Ukrainianism.

   Not that I know what I'm talking about here, because I don't. I'm just going on the third-hand information swirling around these days. 

   But, for the record, my overall orientation for a couple of months now has been: it's long past time to end this, and, if the media were doing its job, that would have been clear long before now.

   Again: there's an enormous element of guesswork in there.

Update: not the map I was looking for, and shows more Ukrainian gains than I thought there had been. But here's an animated map of the war:

Forgot to mention: Ukraine also seems to be running largely on conscripts at this point. So it's not really the heroic Ukrainian patriots against the evil Rooskies. Sounds more and more like unwilling conscripts on both sides being thrown into a meat grinder. 

   Also: Russia has paid a high price for this invasion. That's really all we can hope for in a case like this. But we have other irons in the fire, too, don't forget.

Bravo Blue: Abortion vs. the Stupid Party

link

FIRE: DeSantis Order to Derecognize Students for Justice in Palestine Unconstitutional

link

Expressions of support (loathsome though they are) are not material support.

Abortion Sinks the GOP Again

link

I don't have a firmly-fixed position on abortion. Younkin's proposed 15-week limit with exceptions seems reasonable to me. I suppose our current 26-week limit is also reasonable. I lean libertarian on the issue largely out of general principle and an inability to draw any firm conclusions.

   I do tend to agree with Dobbs, and throwing this back to the states. Both the Dems and the Pubs seem kinda crazy about the issue to me. Funny how the Dems are now occasionally libertarian about just a few issues, mostly having to do with sex Not so funny how the Pubs just can't stop shooting themselves in the ass over this. Now, when, IMO, the very future of the country hangs on minimizing Democrat influence, the GOP just cannot seem to let up on the rather-clearly losing issue of abortion restrictions...

   Usually I expect a party to start showing its ass after securing power. But the Pubs have decided to go on ahead and parade their worst tendencies while still mostly out of power. Props to them for suicidal honesty?

   Conventional wisdom on the left is that the VA results torpedo Youngkin's Presidential ambitions. 

   Local Pubs ran the table, though. Given redistricting, this was not a foregone conclusion. 

Bo Winegard, "Race Differences: A Dialog"

This is really good, sez me...but, then, I think I've made just about all the consequential arguments in it here previously. Though not so Humeanly...

Turley: Jack Smith's Siren Song Prosecution: Can Trump Be Convicted For Being Lured By Lawyers' Bad Advice?

link

Transanity: "Astralgender," "Burstgender," Other Stuff

link

Good/Bad News, Everyone: Trump Edging Out Biden in Swing States

yay

boo

WTF who knows?

The Honest Broker Gets Institutional Neutrality Wrong

I've got a very high opinion of Pielke, but he makes a couple of common errors when discussing institutional neutrality (and universities).

   One error is a version of the perfection argument against objectivity. Neutrality, like objectivity, is (or at least can be construed as) a matter of degree. Institutions don't need to be perfectly neutral--just approximately so. All we're trying to work toward currently is some vague approximation of neutrality, rather than whole-hog, unmitigated institutional progressivism. When we ask whether someone can be neutral or objective in adjudicating a dispute, we don't mean to ask whether they have Godlike objectivity. We're not interested in whether they can adopt (in Nagel's phrase) "the view from nowhere." We're asking whether they can adopt something more like a bird's-eye view--a view sufficiently more objective than the dog's-eye view of those who have dogs in the fight.

   A second error: contrary to THB, robust institutional neutrality is possible--and often actual: the institution can simply not take an official position on the issue in question. Most institutions are neutral about most issues in virtue of not taking official positions on them (mostly because they don't care about them). Few universities take official positions on, say, whether Pluto is a planet, or who fired first at the Battle of Lexington. Of course individual faculty often have some very passionate commitments about such issues! Although most faculty are undoubtedly pro-abortion, few institutions take official positions on abortion. Institutional neutrality does not require neutrality by individual faculty, students, or administrators.

   A third error--another common one--is that THB's proposed alternative to institutional neutrality--"institutional restraint"--is basically just institutional neutrality differently described. If you like, we could call it "approximate institutional neutrality."

   Anway. Again, Pielke is really good. But people who venture into the jungles of philosophy often make some fairly well-understood errors.

Anika Collier Navaroli: Free Speech is Bad

link

   First, we have to admit that some speech is bad. Case in point: the role of RTLM and e.g. Georges Ruggiu in promoting the Rwandan genocide. There are also cases in which the USA has restricted expression and was plausibly justified in doing so. Case in point: restrictions on expression in Germany associated with de-Nazification after WWII.

   I don't deny that there are difficult cases, nor that restrictions on expression can sometimes--apparently--be justified.

   I'll limit myself to just one argument against Navaroli's post: perhaps the most obvious problem with her position is that the progressive left advocates restrictions on expression that are far, far too broad. It's no exaggeration--or not much of one--to say that the progressive left has argued for the suppression of virtually every position, argument and proposition with which it disagrees. Virtually any speech contrary to the sacred cows of progressivism is said to be "hate speech," "dangerous speech," racism, misogyny, homophobia, "transphobia," etc. They assert that such speech causes violence (with no proof of such claims), or, even more outlandishly, constitutes violence. It advocates shouting down opposing speech, and "punching Nazis"...where virtually anyone to the right of Mao is categorized as a Nazi. "Cancel culture" is an informal way of bullying people into silence. Other Western democracies, including even the UK and Canada, unprotected by analogs of the First Amendment, have formalized such restrictions. The progressive orthodoxy is that even stating the traditional, true, justified view that all women are female constitutes violence against those who consider themselves "transgender." It has even been suggested that certain types of research should be illegal--e.g. research into racial differences, and research that questions climate apocalypticism. There have even been suggestions that the latter should be grounds for imprisonment...

   Those who oppose sweeping, leftist restrictions on speech are, as Navaroli describes Elon Musk, free speech "absolutists." As if that were a bad thing...and as if trying to eke out some space for the free exchange of ideas is "absolutism"...

   If we were only talking about genuinely hard cases of genuinely dangerous speech, this might be an interesting discussion. But we're really talking about leftist totalitarianism vs. a fairly ordinary variety of liberalism. The contemporary left is Marcusian, when it comes right down to it. 

   And I'll go ahead and add that much of Navaroli's ire is clearly directed at Musk, and related to losing her job as professional censor at Twitter... Yes, that's an ad hominem. But not an obviously invalid one...

Ramaswamy: DeSantis, Haley, and Cancel Culture from the Right

   Haley apparently threatened to pull schools' tax exempt status if they fail to "combat antisemitism in all its forms," including "denying Israel's right to exist." I'd heard about DeSantis's actions, but, to my shame, allowed myself to not investigate. I just didn't pursue the issue.

   Ramaswamy is right.

   Barring some actual material support of terrorism, there seems to be no justification for silencing pro-Palestinian / anti-Israel student groups. Or pro-Hamas ones for that matter. Expressing support for Hamas is a stupid-ass thing to do. If, indeed, that is what they're doing. Antisemitism, loathsome as it might be, isn't illegal so long as it is limited to ordinary words short of direct incitement. And denying Israel's "right to exist" is obviously protected speech. I'm not even sure that nations--or people, for that matter--have a right to exist. The state can't go after someone for saying "I don't think Israel has a right to exist." And certainly not for saying "I don't think any nation has a right to exist. Oh and: Israel is a nation."

   Free speech, how does it work?

Elon Bought Twitter to Stop the Spread of the Woke Mind Virus and Try to Save Humanity

This guy is my hero.

Well, my co-hero, alongside Thomas Sowell...

A year after Elon Musk bought Twitter, he finally explains WHY:

He says that the niche ideology that turned San Francisco into a "zombie apocolypse" would historically be geographically isolated, and the fallout would therefore be limited. But Twitter gave that philosophy an… pic.twitter.com/JhtrakxVGA

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) October 31, 2023

Rich Lowry: Why Haley Might Become Trump's Biggest Rival

Meh.

I'm still/currently for DeSantis.

Did A Philippine Air Force FA-50 "Kill" a Raptor?

It's all in the news and stuff.

   I don't know the story yet, but it's always the same thing when these stories come out. Basically: the exercise puts the planes at the merge, and they run the simulation a bunch of times, and once or twice somebody manages to get a shot off at an F-22 at just the right time.

   If that doesn't happen, the exercise probably wasn't set up that well.

   Nothing to see here, folks.

   Move along.

   Raptor pilots be like: "Awww, lookit...one of them little whatsis jets got one of us that time! That's a-dor-able,,,"

Update:

Alex Hollings confirms my suspicions, noting, inter alia, that the F-22 still has its drop tanks...:

Triggernometry + Bari Weiss on Israel, Hamas and 10/7

 

Turley: Biden Family Shares Influence-Peddling $$ Via Fake "Loans"

link 

People Who Just Can't Quite Escape the Left: Yglesias, "Misinformation Isn't Just on the Right"

facepalm

   Look, Yglesias tries. He really, really does.

   He's a smart guy. He's a reasonably serious guy. A reasonably reasonable guy.

   But in this respect, he's a type: the good boy who just can't quite shake the deep-seated attitude that left = good and right = bad.

   In fact, sometimes the crazy is more intense or widespread on one side, sometimes on the other. But it's not a contest. Just look and see.

   Currently, I actually suspect that, in the long run--and religion excepted--the right is, overall, less crazy than the left. But I'm not wedded to that--it's a sweeping, highly-qualified guess.

   But my God. Right now, you've got to be blind or nearly so not to recognize that the left is the main locus of crazy. People like Yglesias--and I know several--are heterodox to just about this extent: they will admit that the right is not evil and insane and always wrong. But they can't really get themselves to go any farther than well, both sides... And, yeah, of course both sides. But not always both sides equally. And not always the right is worse than the left. Sometimes...a lot of times, I'm sure...the left is worse than the right. And right now, the left is flat-out, batshit crazy. 

   So "the left has its problems with disinformation, too..." does not really even begin to accurately describe our current predicament.

   You know the litany of current leftist lunacy. I don't have to go through it again.

   As for "disinformation"...not only is the contemporary American left made of "disinformation." But they've so captured our institutions that they have, virtually with the snap of their fingers, created a "disinformation" industry. And 'disinformation,' in their mouths, basically means: Whatever the right thinks. It's meta-disinformation. 

   They did the same thing with 'conspiracy theory.' Just about everything the right thinks is a "conspiracy theory." Oddly, Russiagate was never a conspiracy theory... (And, of course, wide swaths of the left still insist that the fake conspiracy was real...)

   And: let me know when the right says anything even half as crazy as "some women are male." Let me know when a right-wing apocalyptic cult takes over science and public policy, turning them to their nefarious purposes, to the tune of trillions of dollars. Also let me know if a rabidly pro-American right manages to make something like America is inherently perfect something like the official view of universities. 

   Creationists basically wanted their theory mentioned in intro biology classes. Everybody lost their minds--understandably. The left has infused all of education with their panoply of crazy theories, up to and including alethic relativism...anyone who makes so much as a peep in protest is a reactionary MAGA lunatic... Don't want your daughter to be brainwashed into cutting off her breasts? You're a terrorist and the Feds are now watching you...

   It all boggles the mind.

   Look, I don't have any interest in some kind of contest between left and right. But I can say that I didn't start to see these things more clearly until I realized that I had a deep-seated pro-left attitude that basically always saw them as, somehow, no matter how imperfectly, the good guys. And the opposite for the right. In fact, not even "the right"--but conservatives. I would have thought that I had dumped such an attitude decades earlier. But I hadn't. 

   Anyway.

   I dunno.

   Read some Thomas Sowell.

Damnatio Memoriae Watch: Ornithology Goes Woke

The plague of stupid spreads.

At least in this case there is some advantage to be gained by adopting more descriptive names. Though probably not enough to warrant such extensive change. Not to mention: making it all flatter and more boring.

But it's really the reasoning that's stupid.

The main type of inference--used by my own august institution as well--goes like so:

George Floyd

Therefore:

Anything the left wants

Quoting:

One notable exception came in 2000, however, when the society renamed a bird that's now called the Long-tailed Duck because of concerns that its previous name was derogatory to Native Americans.   

   "That was the first that I'd ever really recognized or heard of a name that was offensive," says Handel, who says at that point in time, concerns about injustice wasn't a traditionally accepted reason for changing bird names.
   That really started to change in 2020, when police officers killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. On that same day, a white woman in Central Park called the police on black birder Christian Cooper, claiming he was threatening her.

   The George Floyd incident has nothing to do with this. It cannot be a justification. At best, it's a nonrational explanation for an unjustified change. 

   The Christian Cooper incident is just as irrelevant. It just happens to have something to do with bird-watching. If women were ever at the top (bottom?) of the Totem Pole of Oppression, that interaction would have had exactly the opposite polarity on the left. 

   I don't have a dog in this fight. Just gesturing at another case of unjustified revolutionary change. All part of the project of remaking history, as Orwell warned:

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.

But, then, as many conservatives have noted: the left thinks 1984 is an instruction manual...

[Incidentally: I can't even find a page now that will say what the "long-tailed duck" is normally (or used to be) called. There is only one oblique reference to it in Wikipedia. Apparently it included the word 'squaw'...which, actually, isn't a slur at all. It apparently just means young girl. We are told that some American Indians now find the word "offensive"...]

Matthew Yglesias is Less Full of Shit Than Paul Krugman...On Crime, Anyway

It's a low bar to clear...but I guess it's something.

Paul Krugman wrote a column last week on public perceptions of crime versus crime realities with some analogies to and implications for public perceptions of the economy.

I’m in agreement with probably 80 percent of what he writes. But I think the remaining 20 percent exemplifies why liberals have a hard time securing the public’s trust on this issue, which exacerbates the misperceptions that Krugman is nervous about. The stylized facts about crime he is working with are that murder (and non-fatal shootings, but murder is the best-measured offense) went up a lot in 2020 and up a bit more in 2021. We then had a decent murder drop in 2022 and another one in 2023 that is now on track to leave the 2023 murder rate lower than the 2020 rate. Dark Brandon reversed the Trump crime wave.

So what happened in 2020?

I think most people are aware that George Floyd was arrested and then killed by a police officer in Minneapolis while several of the officer’s colleagues stood around and watched. That touched off a massive and multi-dimensional social upheaval about race and racial equality that had a particular locus of concern around questions of policing and criminal justice. And then crime spiraled out of control.

Or as Krugman puts it:

Unlike the somewhat mysterious decline in crime in previous decades, this crime wave wasn’t too hard to explain. The Covid-19 pandemic led to a lot of isolation and disruption, plus a lot of psychological stress, making it plausible that some Americans became disconnected from the social bonds that usually keep most of us law-abiding.

In other words, he not only thinks the 2020 crime wave had nothing to do with Floyd and the post-Floyd reaction, he thinks this is so obviously the case that he doesn’t even need to argue about it. The causes of the 2022-2023 murder decline, according to Krugman, are obvious — the virus went into remission. The only question is why don’t people realize murder is down.

My view is that there are, actually, a lot of valid and unanswered questions about why murders spiked in 2020, and almost all of those questions center around Floyd and the Floyd fallout. The reason there’s a fair amount of mystery is that it’s challenging to pin down exactly what about the Floyd fallout was responsible for the large increase. There were, in fact, a handful of cities that took steps to defund their police departments, but most places didn’t do this, and the crime increase was very widespread. Similarly, the handful of “progressive prosecutors” scattered around the country are not nearly numerous enough to explain the broad national trend. But I do think there’s evidence that it had something to do with Floyd and the post-Floyd fallout.

Failing to recognize that is bad across multiple dimensions. One is that it’s substantively important to try to understand exactly what went wrong and how we can do better. But the other is that progressive discomfort with acknowledging the facts here speaks to some of the broader epistemic issues in mainstream left of center politics.

Covid was global, the crime surge was not

Figuring out causality is always hard, because our evidence is almost always correlational and (as people on the internet are happy to tell you) correlation is not causation. So one obvious task when a hypothesis is based on a time-series correlation (crime went up during Covid disruptions) is to check for a cross-sectional correlation. After all, Covid was an international phenomenon. So if Covid disruptions caused murder to rise, we’d expect to see murder up everywhere. ...

Flood the Gaza Tunnels?

I don't know anything about this, but it sounds prima facie promising.

"Untested Legal Imagination" and Broad, Sweeping Interpretation of Laws at the Heart of Tump, Capitol Riot Prosecutions

I'm not a lawyer, but this all seems pretty crazy to me.

WSJ: "The Global War on Jews; Anti-Semitism Surges, Even in the West, Which Shows Why Israel Exists"

link

   It's crucial to distinguish between antisemitism and anti-Zionism/anti-Israelism.

   To conflate those things is to fall into one of the left's favorite sophistries according to which criticism of gender ideology is "anti-trans," criticism of BLM etc. is racist, opposition to mass illegal immigration is anti-immigrant, blah blah blah.

   However...even keeping that conceptual point firmly in mind...there seems to be an awful lot of antisemitism in the anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian movements. It's just there. Watch even just the footage of American lefties tearing down posters with pictures of kidnapped Israelis. There's palpable hatred there. And that's perhaps the least of it. We haven't even gotten to the mob trapping Jewish students in The Cooper Union, apparently out for blood... Nor the mob in Australia chanting "gas the Jews..." And on and on...

BLM and the World's Oldest Hatred

BLM is basically just bullshit from wall to wall.

   The organization got its start by lying about the Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman incident, and, most recently, it's defending Hamas's act of mass terrorism, torture and murder against Israelis. It's most notable accomplishment has been "depolicing" and "decarceration," resulting in thousands of American deaths and untold suffering--mostly against/among blacks (in case the race of the victims matters to you).

   And that's not even to mention its communist roots, nor the associated familial abolitionism...