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.

Did Trump Promise RFK Jr. "Control of Health Agencies"?

facepalm

If so, I certainly hope he was bullshitting again.

Abigail Shrier: The Kindergarten Intifada: The Latest Thing Your Kids are being Brainwashed With

Honestly, I gave up on this.

Just too long.

I got the general idea and moved on.

I don't need to be convinced, actually.

Rufo: How Gender Ideology Captured the State Department

Thing about the progressive left is: it's not only filled with shit ideas, it's totalitarian.

"DEI" and gender ideology would be crazy and bad enough if they were relatively isolated ideas.

But the totalitarian tendencies of the left drive it to force its bad ideas into every crevice of every institution.

Not only can boys be girls, but brainwashing people into believing that boys can be girls must be the #1 goal of every institution in America.

Ditto "antiracism," climate hysteria, etc. etc. etc....

They're all the most important thing ever.

This is basically what "intersectionality" does: elevates all the left's crackpot ideas to the rough equivalent of #1 most important thing e-var. "Intersectionality" basically says that you can't fix any one of them without fixing all of them. Thus if any one of them is the most important thing e-var, they basically all are.

Isaac Schorr: No, Trump Didn't Call for Liz Cheney to be Executed

Agreed.

I've now seen the clip instead of just reading quotes.

Doesn't change my mind.

I still think, as I said yesterday, that Trump was caught between (a) a chickenhawk ad hominem and (b) stupid, f*cked-up quasi-fantasizing about Cheney facing a firing squad.

The Dems are lying about what he said because that's what they do.

But the people defending him are, IMO, letting him off a little too easy.

What a f*cking choice we have.

Trump Says He Will Protect Women "Whether They Like It Or Not;" Harris Lies About it

All they do is lie.

Trump is a paragon of truthfulness compared to these people.

Even Jake Tapper pushed back on this one.

WSJ Editors: How Risky is a Trump Second Term

Seems pretty right to me.

America is Like Antelope, OR; Progressives are the Rajneeshees

Democracy works passably well (not that we're exactly a democracy, of course)...until the cult moves to town...

Sasha Stone: The Democrats Deserve to Lose

Agreed on basically all points.

Though I'm not sure how right it is to put so much blame on middle-aged cat ladies...

I don't care about it being insulting or politically counterproductive, of course.

I'm just not sure it really captures what it needs to capture.

Maybe it does, though.

Zach Beauchamp: A Second Trump Term Really is an Extinction-Level Threat to Democracy

It is, of course, hard to say who the stupidest person on the internet is...

The competition is stiff.

But Beauchamp has at least got to be in the running.

Anyway, as many have pointed out, the left likes to accuse its opponents of the very things it is doing. And it's impossible to keep a straight face when Beauchamp suggests that Trump might take over all of our institutions and turn them to his political ends.

Honestly, progressives live in a fantastical alternate universe they have woven for themselves out of the contents of their echo chamber.

There are plenty of reasons not to want Trump to be President. Fear of him taking over our institutions is not among them. That's not how the right operates.

It is, of course, exactly how the left operates, and how it is operating right now, and for the past several decades.

That they seem so incapable of seeing this--and seeing it about themselves--is yet another aspect of their unhinging.

Iowa Flipped to Harris?

Big if true.

Probably just an attempt to infuse hope into the blue team...but could be.

[Incidentally this could make Nevada matter...]

Trump Down to +9% in RCP Betting Market Average

Polymarket still has him at +14...but I have no reason to think it's any better than the others...I just happen to know its name.

I liked +30 much better.

Basically a toss-up.

Peanut the Squirrel Murdered by NY Bureaucrats

No, they did not do it to test for rabies.

That's a fucking lie.

You don't have to kill an animal to check for rabies.

Even if it were absolutely necessary, you'd euthanize the rescue coon first; if it's clear, you don't have to fucking kill the pet squirrel.

This was some bitch-ass bureaucrat punishing the owner for failure to bend the knee.

I hope all the people responsible are sued until they're living in cardboard boxes on the side of the road.

Actually, they belong in jail.

More Trumpian Stupidity: Liz Cheney / Firing Squad (?)

link

   He's largely an idiot, and nobody can tell what he's saying half the time. He just blathers endlessly, rally after rally. The left, of course, pseudointerprets everything he says in the worst possible way. I say 'pseudointerprets' because even in cases in which Trump clearly says that p, progressives just ignore it and claim that he said not-p. This isn't limited to Trump, of course. Perhaps because of their Freudian and postmodern roots, they assume that their opponents have reprehensible beliefs and motives, and they don't quite believe that words have meaning...independent of the preferences of the "interpreter," anyway. Scare quotes because: that's not interpretation, that's fabrication.

   And, of course, he'll say basically anything about his opponents when he gets mad.

   Now, I haven't looked up the video. Basically I don't have the heart. This shit disgusts me. IMHO we have no alternative but to vote for him. I just can't bear to listen to him right now.

   But: it sure sounds bad.

   Kinda sounds like he got caught halfway between saying something about (a) the willingness of war hawks to go into combat and (b) the firing squad thing.

   It's angrifying and disgusting to have to even try to parse such stupidity...but the first thing he said was about giving her a rifle. So that's not at all consistent with (b). OTOH...why nine? That's in the vicinity of the size of a firing squad, anyway, if I'm not mistaken...

   What a cesspool American politics has become.

   Of course he has no intention whatsoever of putting anybody in front of a firing squad. Anyone who doesn't understand that is delusional. The problem is that he can't control his mouth. He babbles inanely and ends up saying stupid bullshit like this.

   And that makes him unfit for the Presidency.

   But, of course, you know the other half of the story: IMO the other side is much worse.

   No need to go into that again.

J. Peder Zane: Democrats in the Grip of Madness

This is basically right.

Though there's a fair bit of gaslighting/strategic lying in there as well.

You've got true believers and you've got those who will say whatever is politically correct despite what they think about its truth. And you've got people in a superposition of those states.

It's no longer two equally sane-but-all-worked-up teams fudging the truth a bit in different directions. Now it's the basically (but by no means entirely) sane team vs. the basically nuts team.

Polls Tightening?

Looks like the popular vote and all the blue wall races may be tightening up...but it all seems to be on the strength of a late Marist poll that is out of line with most of the other polls. Marist gets an A+ rating from 538...though 538 now leans even farther left than when Silver was running the show...so...who knows? I'm assuming that Marist leans left, since I don't know them to be right-leaning...and a left-lean is the standard (as in all things now). Media Bias / Fact Check gives it a least biased rating--which probably means it's somewhat left-leaning.

   If the late Marist poll is right, the Dems will win.

   Trump just needs to peel one of the blue wall states away...but I've read that they've voted together since '88 or something. So the new Harris lead in MI and WI, and the diminished lead in PA seem like very bad news.

   Of course, Trump's now positioned much better than he was in '16, and much much better than '20, when he barely lost.

   If the polls underrate him as badly as they did last time, he's fairly likely to win even given the Marist results.

   And, given that Marist is basically at odds with the RCP rolling averages...I'm guessing...and hoping...that they just botched the samples.

   Betting market average odds have reverted to Trump plus 20+, down from Trump + 30.

   It's hard not to be apprehensive given how important this election is, and how bad for the country a Dem win would be. But I'm trying to remain stoic about it.

   Another important factor is that, if the right gets Hillaried on this, they're going to lose their minds. I expect that'd make the Capitol riot look like church social. The fever swamps simply will not ever accept a loss on this one.

   I expect Trump to win. It's hard to look at the numbers and the history and the Dems and Harris and Walz and the campaign they are running...and come away expecting them to win. Trump's bad (in important ways), but they're terrible. And fake--or at least fake-seeming. Maybe, God help us, they're not...

   Anyway.

   I'd say we'll know on Tuesday...but some Democrat strongholds have already told us that they won't have the votes counted for...quite some time. This sort of anticipatory foot-dragging may be based on good reasons, or it may be to troll Republicans...or it may be an indication of shenanigans in in the offing. I just don't know what to think of it anymore. But I can't see how anyone can trust the system implicitly given what we know about it. I used to. But anomalies have piled up to such a point that I don't know what to think anymore. We know that the Dems cheat in ways that permit them to maintain plausible deniability. We know they're willing to engage in outright dirty tricks of great consequence. It's as if we have all the other pieces of the puzzle in place. We just don't know what the center looks like--don't know whether there's any outright cheating. Or, rather: we know for sure there is some--we just don't know whether there's enough that it might actually matter. This is an untenable state of affairs.

   It's insane that there weren't much more extensive investigations after '20. We needed to crush all the fraud hypotheses to restore faith in the system--not that I think it would be possible to do so completely given the swamps' inability to admit error. But we could have improved the situation a lot. And, in fact, the resistance to investigation by the blue team--and its preposterous insistence that it was "the most secure election ever"--leads otherwise-normal people like me to lose faith.