Judge Tosses Ray Epps's Lawsuit Against Fox News

link

Steven Malanga: No, You're Not Imagining the Illegal Alien Crime Wave

link

   Of course it is politically incorrect to acknowledge that illegal aliens are more likely to be criminals.

   There's a massive academic/research apparatus devoted to propping up the absurd progressive dogma that illegals are actually more law-abiding that [spit] so-called "legal" [spit] so-called Americans...

   For the last decade or so, I've used the following system:

   If a "study" comports with progressive orthodoxy: discount it.

   Wait for the meta-study.

   If its conclusion is politically incorrect (conservative, liberal, libertarian)...take it seriously. It must be methodologically better than average or it would have been shit-canned.

   Political correctness is the baseline.

   It's basically like a null result at this point.

   

   Of course I tend to discount almost all single studies in the social sciences anyway...because so many of them are shit.

   When the history of the replication crisis is written, I have no doubt that we'll find that vastly more unreplicable studies friendly to the left have been published than those friendly to the right.

Race Madness in Anthropology: "Back on the Frontier of Racism"

WHY DO FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGISTS CONTINUE TO DISCERN THE RACE OF SKELETONS WHEN WE'VE TOLD THEM OVER AND OVER AND OVER THAT THE IDEA OF BIOLOGICAL RACE WAS DECONSTRUCTED DECADES AGO BECAUSE IT IS SO TOTALLY RAZIZT!!!!11111??????!!!!!

link

To repeat myself repeating myself:

This is Lysenkoism.

You can't disprove a scientific theory by shrieking RACISM! at it.

Races are almost certainly natural, biological kinds.

If it had turned out that races aren't natural kinds, then they would be nothing.

"Social race" is not a thing.

Hope this helps.

[p.s.:

The great Neven Sesardic: "Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept"]

"Loving the Brine Shrimp: Exploring Queer Feminist Blue Posthumanities to Reimagine the ‘America’s Dead Sea’" II: The Video

I'd say that this is obviously a joke, but you can never tell with these people. One of the distinctions they often want to "deconstruct" is that between joking and being serious.

   Needless to say, there's nothing wrong with deadpan humor.

   IRL, I'm often accused of this myself.

   Thing is, this bullshit is rampant, the papers are published with apparent seriousness in serious places, and it has genuine impact on teaching and research. Generations of grad students have been raised to take such nonsense seriously...

   And it's genuinely funny...if you can get over your sense of revulsion...

   Also, I think they say that one of the people involved in the "wedding" is "Annie Sprinkle"...who I'm pretty sure is a pr0n star...though, believe it or not, I am unfamiliar with her oeuvre...

Anyway:

I'm not sure you're ready for this.

Last night I posted an insane academic paper titled "Loving the Brine Shrimp: Exploring Queer Feminist Blue Posthumanities to Reimagine the ‘America’s Dead Sea’."

That paper included a section near the end where the author claimed, via… pic.twitter.com/DMexzjGnc3

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) November 26, 2024

Postmodernism or: How French Intellectuals Ruined the West

Rufo: DOGE Theory

link

NRO: "Trust the Science: DEI is Dangerous"

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"Loving the Brine Shrimp: Exploring Queer Feminist Blue Posthumanities to Reimagine the 'America's Dead Sea'"

This in Springer Nature

It's the kind of abject bullshit that has metastasized through academia for at least the last 40 years.

First the humanities, then the social sciences, now the sciences.

Get ready for insanity.

This new peer-reviewed paper in the a @SpringerNature journal, uses "feminist blue posthumanities to reimagine...how brine shrimp are perceived in science, culture, and art."

The paper "introduced the concept of hydrosexuality" to enrich "feminist blue… pic.twitter.com/iqnEe6t78w

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) November 26, 2024

Bhattacharya on Lockdowns

In just six minutes, Trump's NIH pick @DrJBhattacharya breaks down the jaw-dropping harm of COVID lockdowns: "1/4 of young adults seriously considered su*cide." pic.twitter.com/QQlHq1Z4TF

— TRIGGERnometry (@triggerpod) November 27, 2024

"Samantha" Sapp: "Soon I'll Occupy the Men's Room Stall Next to You; Thank the OH Legislature"

Mr. Sapp is one of those men who misrepresents himself as--and insists that he is--a woman.

   He's got nothing new to add to this absurd parody of a debate.

   There's the ubiquitous red herring why-don't-they-address-a-real-problem. Well Sapp old bean, you're the one who fabricated a problem out of nothing. Don't blame Ohio.

   He's going to be peeing next to you soon! Well, that's creepy alright. But people gotta pee, and Mr. Sapp is a dude. So I guess we'll have to deal with it. Better than him sneaking into the women's.

   Thing is, I've never been sure that segregation by sex for the familiar purposes is defensible. What I really care about in this case is that we refuse to give in to the Orwellian left trying to coerce us into accepting the patent falsehood that men in dresses are women. (And, for that matter, that castrated or otherwise mutilated men are women.) Sapp's a man. We do not have sci-fi sex-change technology. End of story.

There are arguments against sex-segregated public restrooms, locker rooms, sports, etc. I'm no longer convinced by them as I sort of was at one time. But here is perhaps the main argument in the contemporary debate:

(1) "Trans" "women" are women.

(2) Women use the women's room (etc.)

Therefore:

etc.

Of course 'trans woman' is a Progressive Newspeak term for man (mis)representing himself as a woman. "Trans" "women" are simply not women. So premise (1) is false. No attempt to prove otherwise rises above the level of patent sophistry. So whatever arguments the left wants to use to finagle women into the men's room, it can't be that one.

   Now, on the side of the debate I don't care that much about are all the grubby details about men using women's facilities. Others are more interested in those arguments than I am, and better-prepared to address them.

But:

Here's a major consideration: 

Transgenderism in men is mostly a fetish--autogynephilia. So, among the men we least want in women's facilities are these men.

Now, Sapp expresses concerns about getting beat up if he goes into the men's room. That seems to be a legitimate concern. We do have to make sure that everyone who might be so inclined realizes that it's straight to jail for anyone who does such a thing. And, of course, the rest of us also have an obligation not to allow it to happen.

   Anyway, the real point here is: any debate we might want to have about all this has to begin with the premise that Sapp is a man.

Internal Dem Polling Never Showed Harris Leading

link
Basically, Mark Mitchell at Rasmussen was right all along.

And yet another conservative article of faith has been verified:

Polling outfits are a lot like the MSM

Perhaps their main goal is the help the Democrats.

Mitchell said repeatedly that he just wasn't finding what the blue-sympathetic pollsters were "finding."

My previous position:

Pollsters can't be as biased as the media, because they will have the kind of succeed-or-fail reckoning that the media...can at least finesse.

How would a polling outfit survive if it routinely cheated in its polling, and was repeatedly and demonstrably wrong?

I mean, at least the NYT et al. can obfuscate more easily...

Dunno. Jeez, you'd think their outright lying with respect to Gulf War Episode II: The Phantom Menace and RussiaRussiaRussiagate would cost them something..

But mostly it seems to have cost them: being awarded with Pulitzers...

Ok, anyway:

Conservatives have again been proven right.
Polls are like media reports: the majority of them are, at least to a significant extent, Democrat propaganda.

Is Rasmussen like Fox News?

Dunno.

Rasmussen was right--and that matters.

Trump's Secretary of the Navy Pick Has No Military Experience

Apparently this is not unprecedented...and, well, I don't really even know what the Secretary of the Navy does, now that I think about it...but it doesn't sound great...

Though TBF this is basically how the MSM operates with respect to Republican appointments: HERE'S A JOB YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT AND A GUY YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT BUT HE DOESN'T SOUND LIKE HE'D BE GOOD FOR IT DOES HE?????

And yet...

it does not, in fact, sound great...

I see they shoehorn in Hegseth and the obviously bogus rape charge against him.

A Very Knowles Thanksgiving

 

Trump Cabinet Nominees SWATted + Bomb Threats

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Jacob Sullum: The Dismissed Federal Cases Against Trump Involved Substantial Evidence of Serious Misconduct

Agreed, of course.

Though also of course, not the 18 USC 1512(c).(2) stuff. I am obviously NAL, but I thought that nonsense was shit-canned in Fischer.

Not that I deserve much of an opinion here.

Crazy that the E. Jean Carroll bullshit, the hush money bullshit, the loan bullshit...all the rest of the lawfare bullshit could survive.

But the one non-insane case is a goner.

Jay Bhattacharya to Lead NIH

I had hardly dared even hope for this.

I'm not sure I've ever been this happy before about a Presidential appointment.

This is a winner.

Carolina 72-Auburn 85

Shakes fist

Damn you, War Eagle!

"Queer Temporality"

eyeroll

Trump Runs Out the Clock on Federal Cases

link

The incitement case re: the Capitol riot is the one case I thought had merit, and ought to be played out in court...if--big 'IF'--we could have some confidence it would be conducted fairly.

All the others were lawfare, IMO.

As I've said, I thought Trump's actions after his loss in '20 were inexcusable and disqualifying.

Only the fact that the Dems currently pose a very serious threat to the nation made me support him.

I'd be relieved if Trump were to resign and leave things to Vance.

Does "Antiracism" "Training" Produce/Increase Racism?

First: almost certainly, says me.

Second: 'indoctrination' is the more accurate term.

Third: it's not actually anti-racist.

Anyway, one recent, seemingly-well-done study agrees:

Huge new result:

Anti-racism trainings probably lead people to accuse others of racism even when they're not racist.

That's exactly the result of a new study on DEI trainings, with a special focus on the impacts of the works of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo.

Let's dig in🧵 pic.twitter.com/htpQRDqosN

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) November 25, 2024

The Drunk Kamala Video

Or perhaps I should use the indefinite article...:

Just finished watching the grassroots thank you call 🥹

My seven year old: “I am going to take Kamala’s advice to not give up. She’s a good influence. That’s why she should have been president.” pic.twitter.com/tQQsWfIkxe

— Qondi (@QondiNtini) November 26, 2024

Can Conservatives Keep it Between the Ditches Long Enough to Push the Culture War Front Line Back to the Status Quo Ante?

The predictable next phase of this nonsense is: conservatives go too far.

Then we'll have to deal with them.

One question is: can they keep it together long enough to eliminate the (hopefully vast) majority of cultural and political ground taken by the left over the past decade+? That is e.g.: stop the brainwashing and sexual mutilation of children, get CRT, DEI, ESG and the rest out of government (and businesses too) entirely, stamp out censorship (including the version masquerading as "anti-disinformation"), do something about universities...well, you know the list.

Obviously my concern is that the right will go crusading against the leftist jihad in bad ways before we've pushed them back in the ways that matter. See e.g. pushing Christianity in schools (my brother, a centrist Dem, was probably reachable until that shit happened), anti-abortion extremism, etc.

Answer: probably not.

It won't surprise me all that much if, ten years from now, the Pubs have lost their shit and some new version of the Moral Majority is rampaging through American politics...and the Dems have gone back to being some kind of roughly Clintonian centrists... Or the nightmare scenario: it's a neo-Moral-Majority vs. a still-thriving Woketarian cult...

But I don't think that's very likely. I just don't believe the American center will have faded into such irrelevance.

Also: some family is here for Thanksgiving, and I'm not going to think about that horrific timeline right now.

Louie Villalobos: "We Can't Share Thanksgiving; You Voted to Deport People Who Look Like Me"

link

[1] So, why should "people who look like you" be immune to immigration laws? I voted to kick out anyone here illegally. Can you explain why resembling you should confer immunity?

[2] Cool name, bro. I ain't lyin'.

[3] As for conservative "information bubbles:" you seem to be upset that there are islands of dissent in your massive, monolithic left-wing "information bubble." This seems indefensible.

[4] Anybody who puts 'free speech' in scare quotes provokes my skepticism. (Note that my use of single quotes is to mind the use-mention distinction.  That's not how you are using double quotes.)

[5] So the rest of us have been deluged by a torrent of leftist propaganda, censorship, and hectoring for a decade...but now that X-Twitter is permitting politically incorrect opinions to be expressed, you can't take it. Well, have fun over there at Bluesky. Word is that you-all are so busy tattling on each other for wrongthink that they can't keep up with it. I couldn't be less surprised.

[6] No border, no country. No border enforcement, no border. We have very generous immigration and asylum policies. It is permissible--and perhaps obligatory--to justly enforce just immigration laws.

Carole Cadwalladr: How to Survive the Broligarchy

Progressivism is a mental disorder, episode MCLXIII
   It is almost impossible to believe how un-self-aware these people are.

   From quoting the totalitarian "anti-totalitarian" Timothy Snyder, to...and I'm not making this up...finally asserting that truth is real...contrary to the last 40 years of leftist dogma...this jawdropping testament to obliviousness will make your jaw fall open.

   These people now think that anything that stands in the way of their totalitarian quest for world domination is...a totalitarian quest for world domination...

Mack Brown Out at UNC

I'm not a big football fan, though I do watch a bit of college football (mostly the Heels, unsurprisingly) here and there.

I like Mack, but don't have any standing to speak on him as a coach.

Anyway, he's out.

James Carville Spittin' Truthz on: Kamala's 23-y-o Progressive Staffers

I've been hot and cold on Carville--basically because, while I kind of like him, I can't like his type--the political mercenary. OTOH, I guess that's better than being a true believer...a nutty true believer anyway...

But whatever. It doesn't matter what I think. Here he is at his Carvillian best: "You're 23 years old--I don't give a shit what you think."

"The Math on Deportation Doesn't Add Up"

facepalm

This is not in any way the point.

First, I don't believe libertarians on this issue, because they're ideologically against immigration restrictions.

Second, it isn't the point anyway. No one is against mass illegal immigration because they think it's economically bad, and no one's against it for economic reasons.

The point is: no borders, no country. No enforcement, no borders.

Immigration is at least fine and to some extent good when it's measured and controlled. An uncontrolled border means the end of the USA.

The leftist strategy--aided and abetted by libertarians--is, basically: we can let people in faster than you can kick them out. A slight variation: we can let people in faster than you can afford to kick them out.

If having a nation costs us money--as we already know it does--then so be it.

This "Reason" argument is rather like: defending the USA requires a massive military budget...so we should just give up on that.

Trump and Tariffs

My guess is that they're mainly just threats.

William Deresiewicz: Academe's Divorce From Reality

I could almost not agree with this more.

I've said almost all of it here many times over the last decade.

(I know that's generally an eyerollerific kind of thing to say...but it's true...)

I'd only add or delete a few things:

Add:

   Don't forget that 'theory' (or 'Theory') basically means: literary theory broadly construed.

It's basically bad literary theory + insane leftist "identity" politics.

Think of a paradigm of shitty literary theory: the method is so loose/sloppy that absolutely anything, no matter how idiotic, can be made to seem to comport with the thesis via eyerollingly ridiculous verbal legerdemain. Hamlet's all about kinky sex...but there's no kinky sex in it? Are not Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern a kind of threesome? Does not Hamlet penetrate Polonius? Is not his adoration for Yorick a kind of necrophilia? And as for his relationship with Gertrude...need we even say more...?

Delete:

   I think it's crazy to say that Trump is evil. I mean, really, really crazy. He may be a little bit of a criminal (see: Trump "University"). And he's pretty appalling...

   But no, he is not "evil."

   But anyway, I generally agree with the author's point
   The worse you try to make Trump out to be, the worse the "Theory"-addled left is: the nation resoundingly chose Trump over you.

Also:

Stop pulling the punch. The "Theory"-addled left isn't "totalistic"...

You know what the relevant word is.

You should say it.

Robert F. Graboyes's New and Improved Super-Definitive Presidential Rankings

I'm less ignorant about American history than most, but I'm in no way qualified to evaluate this.

He's moved Trump to ?? from somewhat negative. (Because: second term.) I'm somewhat skeptical of the latter rating. I agree that his rhetoric was stupid and divisive, and his post-electoral-loss freakout was inexcusable...but, especially when you list his accomplishments, as Graboyes does, it's rather hard to conclude that he's at least neutral...or so says me. I'm also skeptical about the somewhat negative rating for Clinton...but I was pretty benighted about politics back then...or should I say more benighted?...so I don't know.

Dunno, dunno, dunno.

Armin Rosen: "The New Yorker's Cavalcade of Ignorance"

You had me (heading for the door) at Timothy Snyder...

That alone is just about enough to convince me that I don't need to read this.

I used to read this stuff assiduously, thinking I had an obligation to carefully consider the roughly-other side in this culture war...but even this second-hand account reminds me why I've done so less and less.

Both/all sides have their wackos and wackiness...

...but that smug, vaporous, condescending, pseudointellectual bullshit you get on the left...I'm just done with it.

The kind of bullshit you find on the right just irritates me a lot less at the moment.

Why'd Harris Lose?

I don't know.

Up until now, I've been doing what everybody else seems to be doing: pick the thing you dislike most about the Dems and attribute the loss to that.

So my explanation has been: their Orwellian totalitarianism / political correctness / Woketarianism.

As is known, after a presidential election the winning party is smug and the losing party is insane. So we can't really look to the Dems for help. They're probably the group least likely to come up with a true hypothesis right now.

   Losers' favorite explanation, regardless of the party: "we didn't get our message out."

   I don't distinctly remember seeing that this time...but, then...they didn't really have a message... Unless you count. "Brat."

Or was it "Joy"?

Hm.

Oh, there was The Republicans are weird...which...true though it is...well...glass houses and all... Everybody everywhere knew that was just an effort to defuse the insult so it was less effective against the ostentatiously weird Harris and Walz (& co.).

Was I am a, how you say, cen-ter-ist ever an official slogan/shtick?

There was I'm really fucking running out of patience with you men...

...black guys, too [glare]

No, wait--it was: Donald Trump is a Nazifascist Hitler...

So, y'know, I guess it may actually have been the "messaging" this time.

"Brat" and "Joy" were the two stupidest and cringiest political slogans of my lifetime. Both of them absolutely off the scale. I can barely stand to type them. She deserved to lose for those slogans alone. I'm not kidding.

The other ones probably reminded people too much of who the Democrats actually are now.

Which is the weirdos.

To put it mildly.

But anyhoo, we don't know whether there's any single most salient cause for the defeat.

Or I don't anyway.

Eventually the academic / Democrat / media complex will cough up some conjecture. It'll aim largely at denigrating the Pubs and helping out one or more favored Dem factions.

Absolutely, positively, astonishingly terrible candidate(s) will have to figure into most explanations, I'd think.

But anyway: though I've been saying that it was their Woketarianism that did it...and though that has to have played some role...all I really know is that Woketarianism is insane, and they are its champions, and people are finally realizing that and saying it out loud. And they lost. But obviously the causal hypothesis goes beyond those facts.

Nate the Lawyer Says that Reversing the Jussie Smollett Decision Was Right

He's always reasonable, and sounds like he's likely to be right here:

John Lott: Illegal Aliens Are Not Less Likely to Commit Crimes

This has never been plausible.

I did let them convince me of it for awhile--and I have never though that crime was the main reason to stop illegal immigration anyway.

But it's never been plausible.

The left starts with what it wants to be true or what it thinks ought to be true, concludes that it therefore must be true, and then brands anyone who disagrees with it ignorant and a racist.

The radical vanguard, of course, doesn't believe in borders and wants to destroy nations in general and the U.S. in particular...and knows that unregulated immigration is a good way to do it. But your average progressive in the street just thinks it's mean not to let illegals in...and give them whatever they want. It's mean, and the only reason you might disagree is that you are mean.

They don't have a firm grasp of the is/ought distinction, nor of the fact that there are unpleasant truths.

Should Elon buy MSNPC?

Absolutely.

He should buy it and keep it just like it is.

I can't think of anything that would help us more.

Tristan Justice: "DoD Intentionally Delayed National Guard Deployment to the Capitol on January 6th" (?)

I don't really understand what's going on about all this.

The strongest version of the blue-team story seems to go like this: we didn't want the Guard deployed because we were afraid Trump would try to use it to seize power.

The red-team story goes like this: Trump wanted the Guard deployed to make sure there was no trouble. The blues prevented it so...uh...that there would be trouble?

It's true that the Capitol riot wouldn't have happened--or at lest the Capitol building wouldn't have been breeched--if the National Guard had been there. So, making some assumptions, Trump was right about the need to deploy.

But I find the theory that the Dems were basically laying the groundwork for the riot to be pretty damn implausible.

I suppose the above part of the Trumpista version of the story is supposed to mesh with the theory that Feds and Fed "assets" in the crowd egged the rioters on.

(There's a quasi-inconsistency at the heart of the Trumpista theory of this: The riot was justified because they stole the election...but we'd never have done it if the Feds hadn't set us up...)

Now, there's all sorts of reasons to be suspicious about all sorts of things here. 

And I still accept the following guiding principle:

After Russiagate, we can't put anything past the Dems.

I might eventually add:

After the shameless, lunatic lawfare against Trump we also can't put anything past them.

But anyway: I don't buy the red team's story.

Pelosi's story--we don't want the Guard there because of "bad optics"--doesn't strike me as all that plausible. Especially since the "optics" would mostly be bad for Trump... This is a guy they're willing to impeach and prosecute and throw in jail on (mostly) preposterous charges. Why would they hesitate to make him look bad?

They certainly didn't care about bad optics when they deployed the Guard soon after all this and put up fencing and concertina wire on Capitol Hill during their efforts to paint all Trump supporters as "white supremacist" insurrectionists--around the time of Biden's Stalinesque red speech...

But things like this...they're almost too complicated for me to make any kind of judgment on. People think they're not all that complicated and we're all entitled to an opinion...but I'd have to sit down with a gaggle of research assistants and pore over all this evidence for months to really deserve much of a position this.

Probably so would you.

And don't forget the lunatic smokescreen of lies that the blues generate around everything Trump does. Patent absurdities like HE TRIED TO GRAB THE STEERING WHEEL OF THE BEAST!!!!111 It's all lies all the time with those people. Trump's own penumbra of bullshit doesn't help...though it's less bad than the other thing, IMO.

Well, anyway.

The die has now been cast.

We're out of the fire and back in the frying pan...

David Cole: Dear MAGA: What If You Were Wrong (About the '20 Election Being Stolen)?

Agreed.

There were all sorts of shenanigans in 2020 (indiscriminate mailings of absentee ballots, Zuckerbucks, etc.), but still no evidence of the outright fraud that much of the right accepts as an article of faith.

UnScientific UnAmerican Watch: The Editor Most Reponsible for Lysenkoizing SciAm is Out

Lysenkoizing the publication is ok. But mean tweets are out.

COP 29: COP is (Still) a Fraud

Inter alia: The U.S. send over 400 representatives and staff to Azerbaijan for this thing.

Structural Racism!!11: "Black Women of African Descent Most Likely to Die From Black Death"

faceplam

Sidebar: amazing they could even do this when neither race nor sex are biological...how'd they figure out which skeletons were black (and of African descent...as opposed to those blacks not of African descent...)

Lysenkoism Watch: W&M Anthropology

Should academic departments be issuing statements on antiracism?

Not sure--but it's not crazy. That racism is bad isn't controversial. So I think issuing such statements is consistent with institutional neutrality.

However:

(1) "Eurocentrism" has nothing in particular to do with racism.

(2) Departments probably shouldn't be making official statements against "Eurocentrism."

(3) Rejecting "Eurocentrism" sidles right up to rejecting our whole worldview, including science.

(4) LOL "inequities"

(5) Departments shouldn't be taking a position on "equity."

(6) Among other things, that's tantamount to proclaiming that the department is leftist.

(7) LOL "white supremacy"

(8) "Decolonizing": see "Eurocentrism."  This gets even closer to rejecting science.

(9) Departments should lose their funding for officially supporting BLM.

(10) This is "activist scholarship," i.e. Lysenkoism.

Trump's Appointments

In general: facepalm

PA Supreme Court Blocks Attempt to Steal Votes

Which, as you know, never happens.

Anthropological Lysenkoism: Anthropologists Can Identify Skeletons by Race--But They Shouldn't

Political correctness is Lysenkoism.

And this is pure political correctness.

Among the many bad arguments in there, one basically goes like this:

Forensic anthropologist's shouldn't identify skeletons by race, because they sometimes get it wrong. Instead, they should identify them as belonging to more specific (totally not racial!) sub-racial populations.

Which, of course, will dramatically increase the likelihood of erroneous identification...

You don't have to know anything about anthropology to know that it's harder to identify some x as a member of a sub-group than to identify it as a member of a super-group...

The discussion of race in academia is at least half political. There's a moral premise in play: the view that races are natural kinds is racist.

And, of course: racism is the Worst Thing There Is...

It's not like lying or cheating. It's not like cruelty or infidelity. It's not something that's a matter of degree, something that lots of people have done sometimes without being thoroughly bad. It's nearly an all-or-nothing matter of being good or evil.

In fact, of course, to be a little racist is like being a little dishonest--it's a little bad.

(Protip: don't do it.)

And, of course, these views are of the left--and the left rules academia.

So: there is nothing more important than "proving" that races are not biological kinds.

So: academic leftists will say just about anything to "prove" that races aren't natural kinds.

It's like an article of religious faith.

The "social construction" view of race is--like most "social construction" views of anything--bullshit. It's barely coherent. It's just nonsense.

The eliminativist view--that races aren't real at all--is, at least, possibly true.

Though probably not.

In all probability, so far as I can tell, races are relatively unimportant natural kinds.

John Masko: Shy Conservatives Keep the Left in Its Bubble

I agree--and that's one of many reasons I've been so outspoken about this stuff IRL (and here) since everything over on the blue team went over the edge.

   I can't help noting, however, that this sounds a lot like what the left likes to call "blaming the victim"... It's our fault that they're doing what they're doing, because we didn't speak up enough against it it...

   Look, it's not like these were subtle points that they just weren't seeing...

   These are big, obvious errors that anybody can see.

   It's not that we didn't point things ot to them.

   It's that there's no reasoning with (many of) them anymore.

   Nevertheless, I do agree with Masko's point in large part.

   The left kinda deserves its misery. They did it to themselves. I speak up about it IRL (a) because truth matters, (b) because I hate that Orwellian psychopathy with a fiery passion, (c) because they're dragging the country (and the West) down with them. But also, just a little bit, because I feel sorry for them.

   One excuse I will make for them: they've got it a bit harder than other we do because they listen to their own massive, well-oiled, mega-well-funded propaganda apparatus. The NYT, e.g., is, inter alia, a truly amazing propaganda organ. Sure, it's also an impressive news-reporting organization...so long as that news doesn't impinge too uncomfortably on progressive-left dogma...

   Righty propaganda is a pathetic thing. You can basically only find it on overtly RW sites...which almost all look bush league at best. You always know you're reading something from the right. Almost all of it looks kinda amateurish. The Times, though...and the rest of that ilk...the Atlantic, the NYRB, even Scientific American... That's some slick shit, man. Times New Roman itself has probably suckered a fair number of people. It just all looks so good. Well-written, well-credentialed, just about impeccable in all the overt ways. Even the ads! Ever look at the ads on conservative sites? With only one or two exceptions, they're horrifying. I sometimes have to navigate away because they're so repulsive. It's actually one of the reasons I have a kind of low opinion of the right--whoever's clicking on those ads has problems, man...

Joe Klein: Not a Democrat: The Party Left Me

Another in a long line of such essays.

I mean, that's my story, too, in the main.

Democrats still do not seem to have--not widely, anyway--even acknowledged that the party has rocketed leftward.

Klein makes two points of a kind that I think are important, but tend not to loom large in my thinking: that the most prominent forces in the party are public sector unions and lawyers.

And there is a very clear case to be made that these two groups are not exactly forces for good.

Though, again, these are not issues I understand very well.

The Kids are Alright...Except for the Girls...

I'd kinda like to know how representative this is.

It's about a (seemingly rather well-to-do) girl walking around her school the day after the election. The girls are weeping--which is the correct thing! The boys are not weeping--which is the incorrect thing! BOYS.

Look, I didn't start understanding conservatism until...well...let's just say embarrassingly late in life... People can go decades locked up in the blue echo chamber. I thought I was well-informed...because I voraciously read...a bunch of stuff all from the approved center-left elite.

Kids seem to naturally fall for the weepy+faux-revolutionary patter of the left anyway. Basically locking them into that shit is a terrible idea. And social media is another level of stupid.

I think males just have better bullshit-detectors--when it comes to these kinds of sanctimonious appeals to compassion, anyway. Other kinds of bullshit, not so much, I think...

That post's a mess. Mine I mean. The kid's too.

Schumer to Pubs: Please Don't Do to Us What We Were Going to Do to You

That is, gain a small majority and implement de facto one-party rule.

I was expecting: use a politicized DoJ and courts against political opponents...

Daniel McCarthy: The Case for Matt Gates

I don't have an opinion on Gaetz.

He's on the periphery of my awareness.

Even after all these years, I still jump for the left/MSM's character assassination trial balloons, as much as I hate to admit it.

Thus far, it sounds to me like a lot of hearsay. And the left long ago honed their game in this respect.

And they seem to have an endless supply of cultists willing to be the vessels for sexual-assault accusations.

At any rate: I'm not resistant to evidence about Gaetz--not at all. I've got no commitment to him. But we know what the left has become, and we know we can't accept mere rumors of hearsay.

So I'm suspending judgment.

Don't know what else we could reasonably do.

This part of McCarthy's essay really struck a chord with me, inclined as I am to want Washingtons:

There are two ways to look at the corruption that is rife in 21st-century American life. One view is that reform demands a saint to reproach the wicked. While we await a political hero with the character of a second George Washington, we must make do with morality-reinforcing illusions, according to which our most powerful institutions—the federal government, the media, the medical establishment—are also good institutions, while wickedness is a characteristic of lone individuals, especially of those who challenge the norms of our institutions.

The second view is that if we must await an immaculate reformer, reform will never come. So we ought to support even obviously flawed individuals when they take on the necessary work of confronting systemic evils. Those systemic evils aren’t impersonal, of course—they are the product of people who insist that they are upholding what is good even while they do what is bad. The merely human, rather than angelic, reformer has a doubly difficult task: In addition to being assailed for his mortal failings, he is charged with attacking the very decency of our institutions. Hence, the campaign against Trump branded him as a threat to democracy itself, as well as a convicted felon. 

Vinay Prasad: How Many of RFKj's Ideas are Already Implemented in the Anglosphere/Europe?

lots.

And I didn't realize how right he was about COVID.

"Trump's Push For Ukraine Peace Finds Growing Acceptance In Europe"

BUT HE'S A RUSSIAN ASSET!!!!!111

Leana Wen: RFKj's Views on Fluoride Aren't as Crazy as You Might Think

Toldja!

Tulsi Gabbard, ROOSKIE "ASSET"!!!!!!111

Twixxer is absolutely jam-packed with lefties shrieking about Gabbard being a "Russian asset"...a term leftists apparently first learned back during Russiagate, and now it's lodged in their tiny little blue oxygen-and-information-starved brains. I mean, it's downright creepy how everywhere this is, Twixxer-wise. They're screaming it from the big accounts, they're shrieking it from the little accounts. You might think it'd be amusing, but it isn't. It's, well, as I said: creepy.

If you've been hoping that the electoral spanking might have beat some of the crazy off them...well...not so far, it seems.

Here's Greenwald, and I say it's worth a watch:

Ronald Bailey: Can RFK Fix Our Disfunctional Public Health Services?

Conclusion: probably not.

Bhattacharya/Bardosh: RFK Will Disrupt the U.S. Medical Establishment (In a Good Way)

link

I have a very high opinion of Jay Bhattacharya--though I have no expertise in the areas you'd have to have expertise in to make a genuinely informed judgment about his arguments. But his arguments are generally reasonable, and he clearly has an open mind. And he was clearly right about a lot during the pandemic. I tried to get my department to take the Great Barrington Declaration seriously back in '20. I was shut down quickly by a colleague who responded that it was out of step with mainstream opinion in public health. I'd said my piece, and that was true, so I just agreed with that particular point and let it drop. I still think we should have pushed back on the university's overreactions...but it wouldn't have done any good anyway.

   I don't really have standing to have much of an opinion on RFKj as HHS secretary...but it doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Pushing back against what seem like the excesses of the public health establishment sounds sensible...but bad pushback is, well, bad. As I've said, it does sound to me like the fluoride question should be on the table...but, again, I have no doubt that the calculations have already been done to death. We're not talking about amateurs here. The COVID response still seems to me to have been pretty suboptimal...but I'm not sure we can generalize much from that. And we basically don't pay any attention under normal conditions.

   At any rate, Bhattacharya seems to think that RFK is a plausible candidate. and he knows about 10,000 times more about it than I do.

John Burn-Murdoch: Dems Have Moved Radically Left, Leaving American Voters Behind

Nothing here should surprise anyone who's been paying attention...or who isn't living in the fantasy world of the blue echo chamber. It's very common for progressives to say that Republicans have moved far to the right...basically they always say that, no matter what. But it's absurd. Actually, the Republican party has moved leftward (at least on "social issues"). They're mostly cool homosexuality and even same-sex marriage now. It's the left that has rocketed leftward. Despite Burn-Murdoch's somewhat dismissive discussion of Colin Wright's famous cartoon, Wright is exactly right, and many of us knew what was going on long before that cartoon made its appearance. (It's some measure of how blind the left is to the facts that they like to post an inverted version of the cartoon claiming that they were actually left in the center by the right's rapid move rightward...)

   Look, in the past decade, Democrats have basically absorbed the whole cartload of bullshit that has afflicted the academic left for 40 years--obsession with race, sex (and now "gender"), sexual preference, etc. Imagine, 15 years ago, the Dems announcing that men can be women...women can have penises, men can get pregnant...that everyone has a secret mental quasi-sex, that it's ok to brainwash children with this hogwash and then medically/sexually mutilate them...that everyone gets to choose "their pronouns" and everyone else must not only use them, but must participate in the delusion represented by such nonstandard English usage...

   DEI, CRT, LGBTQIAP2S+#%, UBI and on and on...not to mention climate apocalypticism, a rather independent variety of crazy... The Dems certainly left me behind--and this helped prompt me to become more conservative on other issues, especially economics. But I've hated political correctness since I first encountered it in graduate school. Even before I had begun shifting rightward/centerward, that shit did not fly with me. It was GamerGate, really, that first introduced me to the "SJW"... Even centrist liberal that I then was, I sided 100% with the Sad Puppies and other sane folk. Then came men can be women...use my pronouns, bigot...all whites are racist and the rest of the torrent of crazy.

  Well anyway.

Time to Switch from Fretting About the Dems to Fretting about Trump

I knew it would happen of course. Electing Trump is kind of like jumping off a cliff into a raging river in order to escape a horde of...I dunno...wolves or zombies or DEI apparatchiks or something... 

Best-case scenario, you've jumped out of the fire into the frying pan.

   I hoped we'd have a little more time to lounge around being relieved and watching progressive women melting down into their phones.

   But noooo...

   Trump had to start announcing planned appointments to his cabinet and suchlike.

   Look, I don't know anything about Gaetz. He sounds like a walking train wreck--but, then, there are apparently no limits to how far the MSM will go to smear someone. Some of the stuff I've heard about him...it sounds like the sort of stuff people wouldn't make up... But, as I've said before, post-Russiagate, I don't put anything past the blue team. OTOH, some Pubs have also said some stuff. My hope is that Senate Republicans won't just roll over, but will actually give advice and only prudent consent. Maybe that's hoping for too much.

   Anyway: hearsay has never been very strong evidence, and it seems weaker than ever now. There's a House report on him. I'll wait for that.

   RFKj...well...he concerns me. 

   OTOH, basically as soon as I peeked into stuff about fluoride in the water, I was astonished at how non-obvious the issue seemed. I thought this was an open-and-shut, no controversy, Dr. Strangelove-level, lead-pipe cinch.

   But...that does not actually seem to be the case.

   (He says, knowing nothing about it, and having spent like a half-hour on Bing...)

   We now know we can have only rather limited trust in the pronouncements of the "public health" "community." We're aware, in a way we--or at least I--didn't used to be that they have important biases and blind spots. Profound progressive-left bias being among them. RFKj doesn't seem to be optimal as the tip of the spear on this. But we left optimality behind long ago. You go to war with the generals you've got, not with the ones you wish you had.

   My experience with the fluoride thing reminds me of my experience with the issue of pet neutering. I always just assumed it was an open-and-shut case. But when I got the Bear about five years ago, I started looking into it just to figure out the optimal age at which to do it--not intending to question the wisdom of it. But I was really surprised at how strong the evidence on the other side is. I changed my mind only reluctantly, but ultimately--and provisionally--did so. I decided not to do it. This complicates your life somewhat--e.g. no doggie daycare. And some vets won't see your pooch unless you sign a contract to get him "fixed" (as if he were broken) afterward. I know this b/c the Bear seemed to have cut his foot not all that long ago, and my vet was booked. I contacted another vet, and that's what they told me. I just said "Nope" and that was that. (Turns out that the "blood" he was leaving everywhere was really walnut stains. He was running around in the yard on the walnut husks and tracking that into the bed etc. The brownish stains looked like dried blood. LOL.)

   ...Anyhoo...as with the issue of spaying/neutering, I just assumed that the fluoride case was open-and-shut. And look--I'm sure that FDA has spent tens of thousands of nerd-hours crunching the numbers on this stuff. All I'm saying is what I said: I was surprised that there seemed to be as much room for doubt as there prima facie seems to be.

   As for vaccines: well, we were blatantly lied to about the Deadly Batflu vaccine. Turns out--as I understand it--there was never much reason to believe their flagship claim, that it stopped transmission. And I went to red alert when the irrational pro-vax propaganda was cranked up to eleven...

And I know some very smart and normal people who came to have concerns about vaccines when they had to actually face questions about their own kids and grandkids. One very smart and reasonable friend of mine, when he actually looked into it when it was vaccine time for his own daughter, said to me "it's not as clear as one would like it to be." At the time, I was appalled. Other also smart and reasonable friends had a grandson who had seizures after getting a round of vaccines, and they have tentatively concluded--understanding full well that correlation is only weak evidence of causation--that there's a problem with giving kids so many vaccines at once. Another set of friends--also very smart, though rather peculiar/unorthodox--looked into it hard and ended up changing their minds a couple of times, resulting in some but not all of their kids being vaxxed.

   Me, I don't know.

   My default is still: FDA's conclusions get presumption.

   But I'm not as condescendingly certain about that as I used to be.

   What about Tulsi? I don't know as much about her as I thought. She has said some questionable things--though who hasn't? Twixxer is full of lefties screaming that she's TEH RUZZIANZ AZZETZ!!1111 Now, I try not to let such lunacy push me in the other direction. I do find e.g. her recent comments urging skepticism about the remilitarization of Japan to be...kinda out there...

That's it.

No firm conclusions in any case, really.

1/6/21 Pipe Bomb Investigation Still Fruitless

Corrupted cell phone data??

If they're trying to spin off conspiracy theories, then...good work.

Hegseth et al.

Does not sound great.

Worse than Austin?

I do not know.

We don't want to generate sympathy for DEI, CRT and transanity by just flipping everything around. They often seem to have been elevated above warfighting in the woke Pentagon. We can't make stamping them out a higher priority than defense...though high priority it must be.

Anyway.

"Fox News personality" does not inspire confidence.

Not sure this is the right role for Tulsi...but, again, do not know.

The left has gone into RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA!!! and RUSSIAN ASSET!!! mode against her. So that's always amusing.

She did say something weird about Japan the other day.

Anyway.

Disruption good but...let's keep it between the ditches...

Matt Gaetz: Bad Choice

The Editors

Ann Bauer: Why I Voted Against the Democrats

Agreed.

Except, of course, I could actually not care less about the Puerto Rico / garbage joke.

Jim Geraghty: The Best-Case Scenario for Trump's Second Term

Largely wishful thinking, of course (though I guess admittedly so), but much more sober and reasonable than the hysterical NYT columnists' worst-case scenario disaster pr0n, IMO.

"If Jonestown Had Recorded a Final Video:" NYT Columnists on the Worst Version of a Trump Administration

I mean...this is the kind of general thing I've now shifted to worrying about...but, of course, these people are crazy:

If Jonestown had recorded a final video pic.twitter.com/fVmd1ub13C

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 7, 2024

Needless to say they'd never have done this sort of thing about a Harris administration.

   It'd be hard to find a collection of people I trust less to analyze such things.

Piers Morgan: Trump's Stunning Comeback Victory Has Cured America of the Woke Mind Virus

Slightly misleading and obviously false headline.

   He actually argues for the obviously more reasonable claim that the outcome of the election shows that the WMV is dead.

   I don't think that's true either, though.

   It does show what we already knew: many people alredy reject Woketarian madness.

   As I've said many times: I foolishly thought this insanity--political correctness as it was then known--had more-or-less died out by the turn of the century. In fact, after it's forays out into the broader culture died out, PC just retreated back to universities, where it got stronger and crazier, and more assiduously indoctrinated another generation of students. Since the members of our elite class all pass through that bottleneck, this was a sound Leninist strategy: take over the schools and you take over the culture. By about 2012 it burst out again, this time successfully infecting all our major institutions. Since I had moved from a major research university in grad school to a job at a regional teaching college, I barely encountered it anymore. I was caught almost as by surprise as everyone else. Damn stupid of me. Damn stupid.

   At any rate: I now suspect that this will be an ongoing battle, and we should not expect total and final victory. One of the central ideas driving political correctness / Woketarianism is Marxism. And Marxism has proven to be a lasting thorn in the side of the West. Of course I hope it's dead--but it isn't. We've won some victories, and we need to win more. We need keep fighting it and not quit. We need to push it back and wipe it out to as great a degree as possible, hitting it hard now and trying to at the very least wipe out the gains it has made over the last decade. We also need to break its grip on universities, reducing it to the status of just another wacky philosophical/political view inhabiting the vast universe of wacky philosophical/political views. Currently, it exerts hegemonic control over academia.

   A leader of an organization to which I've belonged once said that he'd consider us to have lost if we were still fighting this fight in five years. I responded that I thought this was the wrong attitude. As we'll likely never completely wipe out crazy right-wing religious views, we'll probably never completely wipe out these crazy left-wing philosophical views... It'll likely be a never-ending battle.

   In fact, I expect Trump's victory to have at least two kinds of consequences: (i) it will directly challenge and undermine political correctness; (ii) it will strengthen the commitment to PC on the hard-core, activist and academic left. Among other things, we need to work to insure that the effects of (i) outweigh the effects of (ii).

   And, again: we need to think of this as an ongoing fight. The election of '24 is a major victory, but not a final one. Think Saratoga, not Yorktown.

Rich Lowry: "Trans" Moralism is Killing the Democrats

George Orwell, call your office.

National Review: It's the Leftism, Stupid

It's why she lost.

Trump's Back To His Old Tricks...Already

Two tweets...easy to find, but I can't be bothered. One aiming to humiliate Nikki Haley by specifically saying that she would have no role in his administration (after she was good enough to write the WSJ piece endorsing him), the other mocking the Harris campaign for its spendthrift ways by faux sincerely offering to build unity by helping her pay off the balance. Really, the Harris campaign does deserve to be mocked for its spending. That alone--e.g. the $1 million to Oprah--shows that Harris isn't qualified to run the country. (And that the Democrat party has basically become a money-laundering op.)

   But, really, this is one of the things Trump is just pathological about. He fans the flames of partisan animosity by just flat-out being an asshole. This is the kind of thing you have to give up if you are going to be President. Or a Congressman. Or Mayor. Or dogcatcher. Just STFU, jackass.

   I really hate this kind of shit.

   It's pure loss for the country.

   Some short-term lulz for a few of his supporters, at the cost of even more simmering anger on the blue team.

   Of course, being called a racist Nazi rapist dictator for almost a decade straight probably does get under one's skin...

   Counterpoint: they've called half the country those things for even longer... (Well, that radfem line "all men are rapists" seems to have fizzled out a bit...)

John Harris Almost Faces Facts: "From Trump's Victory, A Simple, Inescapable Message: People Despise The Left"

Maybe a wee bit better than typical Grauniad fare.

He's got most of the pieces of the puzzle in place...but, of course, thinks it's mostly a big misunderstanding. I mean, first of all there is, of course, a lot of straight racism and sexism underwriting the Republican win. That goes without saying! But on top of that, conservatives have managed to convince people--and not just white people, but people who actually matter, like blacks and Hispanics--that mass illegal immigration is bad. Then there's the "hateful" "anti-" "trans" ad (Kamala's for they/them, Trump is for us.). So hateful, amirite? And, despite the fact that he even won the popular voate, and that blacks and Hispanics--who, again, actually matter--voted for him in record number, he had the audacity to cast himself as some kind of unifier! The. gall.

   In conclusion:

None of this is meant to imply that most progressive causes are mistaken, or to make any argument for leaning into Trumpism. What the state of politics across the west highlights is more about tone, strategy, empathy, and how to take people with you while trying to change society – as well as the platforms that poison democratic debate, and the harm they do to progressive politics. The next time you see someone on the left combusting with self-righteous fury on the hellscape now known as X, it’s worth remembering that its current owner is Elon Musk, who may be about to assist Trump in massively cutting US public spending, while cackling at the weakness of the president’s enemies, and their habit of walking into glaring traps.

[1] Well of course this is not to suggest that, wall, any progressive causes are mistaken! This is The Grauniad, sir!

[2] This is really all about tone and strategy--not substance. That the left is right cannot be in doubt, bigot. We just have to figure out a way to call people Nazis in a nicer way.

[3] We also have to figure out a way to "take more people with us" as we destroy...er...I mean...change...society...

[4] Remember those social media platforms we used to propagate our crazy and to shout down and vilify all opposition? Well, now one of them is allowing people to speak freely...and even contradict us. This is what we call "poisoning democratic debate."

[5] ...and "harming progressive politics"... See, presenting arguments on the other side is...well...you get it...

[6] That final sentence WTF? I have no idea. He started to maybe say "try to stop shrieking at people and calling them Nazis..." but he maybe just couldn't bring himself to do it. So blah blah Musk blah blah Trump...blah blah...cutting government spending...the very idea!!!!!????!!!!!

   It's all so tedious...

   But at least a few of them are seeing the relevant facts, even if they continue to spin them in an ideological direction. 

   If social psychology were worth a damn it would be collecting evidence like crazy. Sadly, it's been captured by the cult, so will probably just give us more erudite-sounding versions of this sort of thing.

   But, anyway, I do think Harris is being a bit smarter and more honest here than the average lefty scribbler.

JFK Jr., Health Czar?

It's time to turn my fretful nature toward this whole thing.

Sometimes that guy seems very reasonable, sometimes he seems like a kook.

But it's clear that he has no formal education in this area. And that must be taken into account, obviously.

I'm actually hoping Trump screws him over, as he so often does to people.

I'm no longer someone who dismisses concerns about e.g. vaccines and fluoride out of hand. If we've learned anything from the COVID debacle, it's that we cannot implicitly trust the health bureaucracy--nor even "the scientific community."

Remember, I'm a tinfoil hat guy for saying out loud--before it was permissible--that COVID probably spread from a lab leak.

Anyway.

I'm not opposed to a major review of vaccines.

And fluoride.

I mean, we must protect our vital essence...

Even if the relevant policy folk genuinely do know better in this case, and roll their eyes, I wouldn't oppose it--not given what little I know now.

I wouldn't support anything more radical/precipitous.

Why The Democrats Lost(?)

Of course they're flipping their shit right now, as losing parties generally do. This seems worse than usual, probably because:

(a) They have become a generally insane and hysterical faction.

and

(b) One aspect of this is that they think that Trump and everyone who voted for him is a Nazi fascist white supremacist sexist misogynist homophobic transphobic toxic masculinist evilwhiteracist...

   The more you demonize the other party, the harder it is to understand and come to terms with losing to them.

   And of course there's their industrialized echo chamber. We all have our own echo chambers...but we don't all have multiple, professional, national media organizations that are basically finely-tuned propaganda wings of our faction(s). I used to be locked up in that thing. It's not that easy to see your way out.

   Social media is helping to fuel the freakout, and lefties crying hysterically into their phones is a hot genre right now. Of course they've carefully set up the phones, adjusted the lighting etc. before their histrionics begin. Then they edit the video and upload it to TikTok or wherever. The meltdowns are carefully planned.

   And they've leaped head-first into the election was stolen mode--if anything, even more whole-heartedly than the right did. Which, antecedently, I might have thought impossible.

   Which, again, makes sense if you think that your opponent is a Nazi etc. Stolen election may well be a more reasonable explanation than half the country voted for a Nazi.

   Of course they also think that they're the good guys, apparently having no conception of how unhinged they have become, nor of how utterly demented many of their policies and guiding ideas have become.

   And they fell in love with Kamala on command, of course. And it's hard to understand why the most incredible and lovable and beautiful and ideal candidate there has ever been lost to a Nazi.

   Explanations abound on both sides. Everybody has their favorites--usually something they've been saying all along...

   Me too.

   Trump is Trump--the (in some ways very) good and the (in some ways very) bad.

   And the left is the left. They basically did what they do. That is, what they've been doing for the last ten years. They shrieked their wacko ideology at us--men are women and all the rest--called us racists and bigots and all the -ists and -phobes, said we were stupid and evil for refusing to agree with their deranged fantasies.

   And so guess what?

   If you're overtly irrational and terrible, people are less likely to vote for you.

   Even when the other guy is...well, let's say suboptimal.

   Of course: part of Trump's appeal is that he stands up to the shrieking left and doesn't flinch and doesn't apologize and refuses to be cowed when they call him all the things...that they call us, too.

   Like the meme says: they're not really coming for him, they're coming for us. He's just in the way.

   So there's not really much to explain here, IMO.

   Despite an insultingly superficial attempt to cast Harris as a centrist, the left was who the left is. And that's: a faction that seems to become more cultish, Orwellian, totalitarian and unhinged by the week or the day. Their vanguard, anyway; though undoubtedly many of them were as reluctant to vote for heir candidates as many of us were to vote for ours. There's no telling what new madness they will insist we must believe and bend the knee to tomorrow. The elite and activist vanguard of the left is even worse than Trump--and his primary virtue is that he will fight them.

   I said before the election that I was, to a significant extent, happy to trust this decision to the American people, whose collective judgment on such matters I trust more than my own. A narrow victory would have been a somewhat different matter. But this massive repudiation is epistemically significant: most of our (normal, basically reasonable) countrymen basically saw what we saw--and decisively rejected it.

   Again: despite the Trumpiness and flaws of the other side.

   In short, there just doesn't seem--to me, anyway--to be all that much to explain here. It's pretty much all on the surface. It basically is what it seems to be.

Carolina 89 - Kansas 92

Basketball at last...

Heels looked and came back big. If a Cadeau 3 had fallen at the end, it'd have been overtime.

Dickinson's a load, but our frontcourt by committee did pretty well.

Always love playing the Jayhawks.

The New Yorker--And I'm Not Making This Up: "What Does It Mean That Donald Trump Is A Fascist"

These people have simply lost their @#$%ing minds.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but there is all the difference in the world between:

(a) What does it mean to say that Donald Trump is a fascist.

and

(b) What does it mean that Donald Trump is a fascist.

Not that (a) isn't insane enough...

The Orwellian psychopaths at the New Yorker clearly mean what they wrote. They're not as linguistically adept as they like to think they are...but they're good enough to get this right.

So that's to say:

Donald Trump is a fascist.

What are the implications?

Well, here are some per the subtitle:

Trump takes the tools of dictators and adapts them for the Internet. We should expect him to try to cling to power until death, and create a cult of January 6th martyrs. 

Well now, there's a couple of what we call testable predictions...

Wonder whether anyone at the New Yorker would like to put some money on them?

Nah...didn't think so...

In closing:

I'm not the world's biggest Trump fan.

But let me repeat myself repeating myself:

You asshats are a totalitarian, Orwellian cult.

Trump has proven himself to be a better-than-average President when he can keep it between the ditches.

This includes proving himself to be a federalist.

He ain't perfect.

But he is--far and away--better than you people.

In fact, part of why he's needed is that he's opposing you.

And you are horrible.

[Note: I just saw that this is Timothy Snyder. As I've said before, I though Bloodlands was good...though, like my history buff FIL, I didn't make it all the way through. It was just too much. But politically, Snyder is an abject hack. On Tyranny--more a pamphlet than a book--turns into a thinly-concealed anti-Trump screed. He's a member in good standing of the progressive cult.

So no wonder.]

Mad Mandy Marcotte: The Trump Voters Who Want Progressivism

The problem, you see, is that Trump voters are not intelligent and well-informed like progressives...

They do not understand that "inflation is down, border crossings are down, crime is down, and [COVID?] vaccines "work great"..."

   Nor that women have penises, men give birth, children have secret gender souls from conception, the USA is made of racism, all whites are racist, Donald Trump and all his supporters are Nazi fascist, borders are violence, free speech is violence, fossil fuels are violence, the apocalypse is nigh therefore socialism, democratically electing Presidents is bad for democracy, straight white men are the devil...and on and on...

   Bad, bad, ignorant conservatives...SO inferior to the intelligent, scientific, knowledgeable left...

   And two states raised their minimum wage to $15!

   Plus there's an alleged survey done by two liberal journalists that proves that Republicans like Harris's policies better than Trump's if you hide the names!

   If you believe that, then I've got a bridge to sell you. But by 'bridge' I mean 'advice,' and by 'sell' I mean 'give for free': You can be sure that survey is bullshit...

   tl;dr: Marcotte's full of shit.

Liberal Women Withold Sex, Shave Heads to Protest Trump's Election

To paraphrase the immortal Malcolm Reynolds, my time of thinking that you people are nuts is certainly coming to a middle...

Brainwashing and sexually mutilating children: fine.

Pretending that men are women: fine.

Letting autogynophiliac men into women's restrooms and locker rooms: fine

Letting them compete against women in women's sports: fine.

Declaring anyone who objects "trans" "phobic": fine.

Calling everyone to the right of Bernie Sanders a Nazi, fascist, etc: fine.

Declaring all white people racist: fine.

Declaring all men misogynist: fine

Insisting that the USA is inherently racist: fine.

Blowing $1.2 trillion on climate pseudoscience bullshit: fine.

Calling it the "inflation reduction act" while blowing the lid off inflation: fine.

De facto opening the border and letting millions of illegal aliens, including murderers and rapists, into the country: fine

Undermining free speech: fine.

Using the courts against political enemies: fine.

Going the full Orwell: fine.

Fine, fine, fine...

But do absolutely nothing to change the status quo of the last two years with respect to abortion:

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWE'REALLGETTINGHYSTERECTOMIESATTHEAGEOF20REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Among other things, this alleges to be tantamount to the return of political lesbianism, which I kinda thought was a relic of the radical feminist past...

Progressivism really has become a kind of contagious mental derangement.

A lot of this nonsense seems to be for show--virtue signaling on social media.

But even if that's all it is, it's still a sign of derangement.

Try to bring any measure of sanity to our wacko political cult and we'll refuse to have sex with you AND sterilize ourselves!!

Kinda redundant, among other things.

Trump Contra Gender Ideology! [Oops, looks like this is old...but still...]

Holy crap!

Even if everything else Trump does as 47 is mediocre, this will go down in history as a monumental initiative--and, let's hope, achievement. Stamping out gender pseudoscience is long overdue...though, of course, Trump coming out against it will almost certainly cement--in fact strengthen--the left's commitment to this new age madness:

Unbelievable. 

Right out of the blocks.

Almost instantaneously we go from an administration that did almost everything it could to promote this horrific pseudoscientific gibberish to one that is going to throw its weight behind an effort to stamp it out.

I retroactively upgrade my support for Trump from reluctant to downright enthusiastic...

[The only thing Trump said that was wrong was: he referred to maleness and femaleness as genders, and he referred to sex being "assigned" at birth. But I'm willing to give him a pass.]

Kamala's Concession

Just wanted to say that I thought she did a good job with the concession speech. There was a bit toward the end that I couldn't understand. But overall, good speech, good job.

Needless to say, she blows Trump out of the water in this respect.

Seemed a little odd to wait until so late in the day to deliver it, but what do I know?

Trump Wins

Ok.

Good news.

Worst outcome avoided.

Now we're looking at four more years of the second-worst outcome...

But if he can just keep it between the ditches, we'll be ok.

With a bit of luck, significantly better than just ok.

This really could be a transformative Presidency.

Things Are Looking A Little Trumpy

So uh...yay I guess?

Election Day in the OD

...or my little corner of it, anyway.

Hit the polls before office hours this morning. It was a beautiful day here. Chatted with both the blue team and red team folks handing out literature. Went on in and walked right on up to the table--no line whatsoever and only a couple of people already filling out ballots. Did the deed. Had my usual OCD ballot-checking and -rechecking episode. Voted for the bad orange man--in fact, voted straight-ticket red team. The one amendment on the ballot is agreed upon by both teams. Cao is a bit conservative for me, but Kaine will win anyway, so NBD. And Kaine is alright. I wish he'd fight the power in the party more. But he's alright. Fed my ballot into the counter--VA has a great, standard system of paper ballots...dunno why everyone doesn't have it. Walked on out. Chatted with the people again. Petted some dogs. Went on to office hours...

JQ went later. I didn't go with her to monitor her voting as is my husbandly duty...but I'm sure she'll do as told. She's pretty sick, so she said she got there and just sat in the truck reading for a bit--long enough that the cop on duty there came over and checked out the situation. They chatted for a bit and she eventually made it inside and out again.

Voting's always pleasant here.

May the best man/person win.

Whatever happens, the nation will survive.

All best to my blue-team homies.

Nikki Haley: Trump Isn't Perfect, But It's An Easy Call

Yes, agreed.

Hold your nose and pull the lever.

This is about the future of the nation, not your squeamish sensibilities

It's not really that close a call.

Doyle McManus: The Case for Kamala

 Wow.

   I went into this with as open a mind as I could muster...but it's awful.

   I don't mean that it's bad work...I mean it's tantamount to an anti-Harris case: if this is the best you can think of to say about her, you'd have to be a fool to vote for her.

   It's basically a combination of lies about Trump (now de rigueur for Dems) (e.g.: Trump loves Putin) and groundless assurances that she's going to completely change her political stripes...and stop doing the few things she's managed to actually do. She's now all about the border! Inflation bad! Um...

   The only thing McManus mentions that plausible is abortion. She seems honestly pro-choice. And that's something I can generally agree with.

   Though obviously that's not enough.

   Look, here's the only significant argument for Harris: She's not Trump.

   And a weighty argument it is.

   If I even vaguely agreed with the platform and worldview of the new new Democrats, then, awful as she is, she'd be good enough for me.

   But that's a radically counterfactual state of affairs.

A Leftist Group's Weirdly Threatening GOTV Campaign

This is fcked up.

Apparently they're threatening to basically publicize whether people voted or not--revealing the information to their neighbors.

What the hell is wrong with these people?

I have one acquaintance who is afraid to vote for Trump because she's afraid she'll slip up at some point and reveal the fact to her kids and extended family.

Again, there are plenty of good reasons not to vote for Trump...but it's extremely messed up that people have to fear the reactions of their own friends and families.

The majority of my friends and acquaintances will undoubtedly be voting blue. I think this is a mistake, obviously, but I certainly don't hold it against them. Hell, they could well be right. It does bother me that many of them are basically just running down the ruts in the path, listening to the MSM, and that they will basically vote for the Dems no matter what...but, then, it also bothers me that I've turned into a freak about this stuff and have become obsessed about it and waste so much time reading about it and am voting for the orange loon...so there's that...

Tucker Carlson: I was Attacked in My Sleep by Demons

Still more facepalm.

He did go through a brief period of doing some good work, though, IMO. I didn't watch him before that, so I can't speak to that. Just about as soon as I started checking him out, he descended into UFOs and the CIA killed JFK and that sort of thing.

Insty: Harris Would be as Much a Figurehead as Biden--We'd be Ruled by the Swamp

Agreed.
Of course one could reasonably argue that it would be better than Trump.

Seven years ago, I'd probably have agreed.