Monday, November 04, 2024

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.

Sunday, November 03, 2024

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"?

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.

Saturday, November 02, 2024

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 (?)

   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.

Friday, November 01, 2024

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.

Thursday, October 31, 2024

Nicole Russell: "I Don't Like Trump, But I'm Voting For Him"

link
Actually, I kinda like him.
Not, y'know, a lot...
But I do like things about him.

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

The Left in a Nutshell, Again

Just me yammering this time:

No freedom for you! Except for sex stuff! Then all freedom. To kill your fetus at the last minute! To turn into a girl! Or a boy! Or a birl! Or a fox! A sexy fox! Anything! Whatever you want! Next up: pedophilia is just nonstandard, minority sexuality! Or Zoophilia. It's kind of a race right now. But why not both? Underage animals is the new drag queen story hour! And don't forget about polygamy...they're just biding their time with that civilization-destroying idea...

Lemme tell you what a loony pervert you have to be to turn me into Rick Santorum...

Betting Markets: Trump +30%

Basically. Right now. On average.

Right vs. Left in Yet Another Nutshell

This is more-or-less my current view.
  It's not just two teams against each other.
  It used to be.
  Not anymore.
  Now it is--not entirely, but to a significant extent--ordinary people and reason and science and the United States and liberalism and the West and, basically, humanity...against the revolutionary nihilistic death cult that is the radical left.
  And, why, yes...I do realize that sounds crazy...


   Again: only to some significant extent.

Help Us, Obi-Wan TheDonald--You're Our Only Hope

The thing is is: Trump is not merely a lesser evil than the Democrats and their basically-irrelevant, placeholder candidates.
   He comes with massive risks and downsides that I've harped on.
   But if he keeps it between the ditches and does his job even passably well, he has the real potential to be a truly transformative President.
   And that's a massive difference.
   If Harris is elected, then, even if the Dems manage to keep the House and Senate, we know beyond any reasonable doubt that she will continue to implement the lunatic Orwellian agenda of the progressive left.
   If Trump is elected and manages not to shoot himself in the ass overmuch, we know he will begin pushing back against the left's catastrophic, "whole-of-government" / "Whole-of-society"--i.e. totalitarian--agenda. Against the infusion of race and gender pseudoscience into government and all our institutions. Against Lysenkoism. Against climate apocalypticism. Against free speech reductionism/eliminativism--including in its new "disinformation" guise. Against open borders and other elements of globalist anti-Westernism. Against progressivism per se--i.e. rule by "experts" and "elites"...  And that's not yet to mention the possibility that he might be able to appoint successors for 2-3 of: Thomas, Sotomayor, and Alito. Whatever else you think about him, you must admit that he saved a lot of our bacon already with his generally excellent SCOTUS appointments.
   When I can tamp down my disgust and anger at and with Trump the person--for he could, indeed, make the Pope cuss--I'm able to recognize the extraordinary good a second Trump Presidency really could do.
   His downsides are very significant. To say the very least. But ditto his upsides.
   It's easy to slip into I-just-hate-him-less mode--perhaps as a tactic for deflecting criticism/blame if he flames out spectacularly and wreaks havoc on the way out.
   But that's a dishonest thing to do.

"Why the Race Isn't as Close as You Think:" 1980esque Landslide Incoming?

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

The Harris Campai[g]n Astroturfs Reddit

Reddit is a smoking husk of what it once was.
It's a wasteland of leftist stupid.
And the left is a nihilistic death cult that destroys everything it touches in its relentless quest for control.


[Now with more 'g'!]

Harris Campaign Surrenders in NC

Don't let the screen door hit you in the carpet bag on the way out.

Trump! White Nationalist! Final Hours! Women-Beacons! Trump To Break Up Interracial Marriages, Deport the Brown One! Total Chaos!

Progressivism is a mental disorder.

Did Liz Cheney and Cassidy Hutchinson Colluded to Lie About Trump's Actions on 1/6/21?

Kinda sounds that way.

John Stossel: The Crisis Industry: How Activists Profit from Panic

I used to couldn't stand Stossel. I still find his tone rather annoying. But I now think he's generally right. This, for example, isn't the whole story of activism (obviously)...but I think it's a big, important part of the story:

The Editors: "Donald Trump and the 'Brilliant' Dictators"

The Nation: "Michelle Obama is Finally Ready to 'Go Low' Against Trump"

Another fascinating/horrifying peek into the contemporary Democratic mind.
A very incomplete list of puzzles and nonsenses in there:
  • Er...so...are we finally putting the "when they go low, we go high" myth to rest?
  • Er...so...what you were doing before...calling us all Nazis and whatnot...that wasn't low, then?
  • LOL "incandescent"
  • "Women's bodies are complicated"? So...women have determinate kinds of bodies now?
And, uh...menopause???
How the hell did that get in there?
A hypothesis: because most of the women they're still trying to get to aren't directly affected by the possibility of pregnancy and abortion.

Some old distortions and lies--now part of the leftist canon:

“I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little frustrated that some of us are choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn. I hope that you’ll forgive me if I’m a little angry that we are indifferent to his erratic behavior. His obvious mental decline. His history as a convicted felon. A known slumlord. A predator found liable for sexual abuse. All of this while we pick apart Kamala’s answers from interviews that he doesn’t even have the courage to do, y’all."

And/but: a hilarious new talking-point I've been seeing around the last few days:
“We expect her to be intelligent and articulate, to have a clear set of policies, to never show too much anger, to prove time and time again that she belongs,” Obama said. “But for Trump, we expect nothing at all, no understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals.”
The mind...it reels...
This is the problem, you see...Kamala Harris isn't an empty suit/DEI candidate... No! We just hold her to unreasonably high standards...
This is the old women have to be twice as good as men to etc. assertion. It's almost never true anymore. 
But progressives live in an alternate reality of their own creation.
This is just part of the elaborate fantasy landscape they've woven for themselves out of the echos in their chamber.

The Trump is Literally a Fascist Hitler Racist Insurrectionist Faction vs. The Trump is Great and Did Nothing Wrong Faction vs. Me

On the Twixxer it seems like almost everybody [accepts one of the two former positions]. Now, I don't think Trump was trying to foment insurrection, and I do think it was permissible for him to pursue the legal avenues he pursued. So the "he tried to overthrow the government" hysteria is...well...I wish I could say totally false...but I may have to stick with extremely very inaccurate. I continue to be unclear on many details, but it seems to me that pursuing the Eastman strategy was permissible, but showed bad judgment. It's often possible to remain committed to a theory or proposition long past the point at which it would be reasonable to admit error. Notoriously, there's generally no bright clear line past which continued belief becomes irrational.
   At any rate, it seems to me that his actions after the election were, though not insurrectionist, virtually indefensible. For a President, that is. Similar acts in less profound contexts are accepted and defended all the time. But, of course, it's the Presidency we're talking about. It was just too important a f*ck up.
   Sidebar: my position about whether the 2020 election has changed a fair bit. I won't describe the whole trajectory, but: one thing is clear: it was not the most secure election of all time. That's a brainless bit of political correctness. It's simply not true. But that doesn't mean that we're justified in believing that it was stolen.
   But I don't dismiss the idea out of hand anymore. I now think we are justified in believing that our elections are only marginally secure. And Dems have shown a willingness to engage in the most outrageous political shenanigans and dirty tricks (see e.g. Russiagate, the 'very fine people' hoax, lawfare, and now what we might call Nazigate). I really do not doubt that many Democrats would cheat if they could get away with it. I mean, wouldn't you cheat to keep a Hitler 2.0 out of power? I would.
   So anyhoo, I guess I'm a weird voter. I think Trump probably lost the election of '20--but I'm not sure of it. Nevertheless, I think his actions subsequent to the loss disqualified him from holding high office...especially the Presidency. But I think that the Democrats have become like a plague of crazy on the land. Their policies, platform, and philosophy/worldview are Orwellian. Totalitarian. Insane. This is hardly about Harris at all--she's like Biden: a featureless functionary, a smooth-running [cog] at the center of the big blue culture-smashing machine.
   Anyway.
   To me, this is a choice between (a) someone whose unreasonable and unpatriotic actions made him genuinely [though probably not legally] ineligible for the office, and (b) a political party that has adopted and is implementing a set of insane dogmas that are actually destroying the nation.
   Oh and: the (a)-guy actually has good policies, and many are correctives for the insane ideas of the (b)-guys....
   So I'm basically running on consequentialist considerations.
   National dignity requires that we never elect Trump again.
   National survival and flourishing, however, require that we keep the Democrats out of office almost no matter what that takes.
   And, specifically: even at the cost of our national dignity.
   Or something like that.
   So, anyway, my sense is that I'm weird in that I really do worry about besmirching my patriotic soul by voting for Trump.