You Don't Hate The Media Enough

Burn in hell, commie swine.

ICE Captures and Deports Violent Illegals + Collaterals From Sanctuary Cities

Many of these shitbags are rapists.

Don't miss the Haitian gangster saying "Fuck Trump. Biden forever, bro. Thanks Obama for everything you've done for me."

Sounds like most of these guys can take off and fail to land, for all I care.

Trump was clearly the right option.

MAGA.

Elon's "Nazi Salute"

Jesus, these people.

You'd think they might have learned something by getting their asses handed to them by a Z0MG SO FELON!!!111ononeone

Well, these things take time.

I still think they'll take the lesson to at least some extent.

Incidentally, this sort of batshit bullshit is mixed up with the postmodern roots of the politically correct left, and, specifically, the "death of the author" and extreme reader-response views. That's part of the theoretical underpinning for this aspect of their moonbattery.

So:

IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT ELON MEANT NOR HOW THIS WOULD BE INTERPRETED BY AN OBJECTIVE INTERPRETER WHAT MATTERS IS THAT WE INTERPRETED IT AS A HITLER SALUTE!!!!!111ONE

And, of course, since "everything is political," and political commitments can and should guide all thoughts and actions--including interpretations--they have no problem with allowing their hysterical cultish ideology to guide/determine their interpretation.

There's no clear difference to them between:

(a) Actually interpreting the gesture that way because their fucking nuts

and

(b) Pretending to do so as a political weapon.

I say again:

This is a persistent puzzle about the words and actions of the PC left:

Are they really that crazy, or are they pretending to be for political purposes?

And the answer is usually:

THAT'S EXACTLY THE KIND OF BINARY WE WANT TO DECONSTRUCT, BIGOT!!!!1111one

In fact, in this case, they're sort of right. Most of them seem to exist in a superposition of states, half crazy and half lying.

Yoo and Shu: Biden's Pardons Are Much Worse Than Trump's

I haven't heard the case for the other perspective on this comparative question...but Yoo always makes a strong case.

I don't know much about the trials, sentences, and pre-trail imprisonment of the Capitol rioters, but I've read a lot of stuff making plausible arguments that unfair treatment is rampant.

Largely, apparently, because D.C. is so absurdly blue, ergo the judges and juries are, too.

And compared to the BLM/Antifa rioters who were heroified...well...there's clearly a case there.

However, I'm generally not wild about the idea of going easy on people who attacked the Capitol and USCP.

And Biden's pardons were--prima facie--just jaw-droppingly awful.

So being less bad than those is a pretty low bar to clear.

But anyway, no matter how bad Trump and the Pubs are, these days the Dems always seem to outdo them.

Trump's Magnificent Blow Against DEI

link

Wolfgang Munchau: Why Europe Fears Free Speech; A War of Repression is Underway

There but for the grace of the First Amendment go we.

Kat Grant: What is a Woman

facepalm

Pretty much all the relevant fallacies packed into about a page.

Lysenkoism Watch: Scientific Inquiry About Race and Genetics is "Abhorrent Science"

Jeremy Carl at Aporia

The paper.

The left has lost its collective mind.

Trump's Capitol Riot Pardons vs. The Rule of Law

Don't even get me started.

The Gulf of Trump

No half measures I say.

Go straight at it: rename it The Gulf of Trump

Or: Trump!: The Gulf

Or maybe just: TRUMP

It's morning in Trumpmerica...

Sry: Trumpmerica(tm)

Trump Yanks Security Clearence from "51 Former Intelligence Officials" Who Lied About Hunter's Laptop

Excellent.

Rich Lowry: The Gave Trump the Center and He Took It

100%

Trump Pardons Nearly All 1,500 Capitol Rioters

Some of these people were treated extremely unjustly.

And it's likely that many more didn't receive fair trials in D.C.

But I find it very difficult to believe that 1500 of them deserved pardons.

Biden's Last Minute Pardons

As JQ just said to me: imagine Trump had pardoned members of his family, Giuliani, Bannon, et al...

The MSM would have gone into orbit.

Buckle Up

Here we goooooooo...

Annex Mars! Cold Fusion! Time-Travel Back to 1867...

...and add Greenland to the Alaska Purchase!

 Defeat Sauron!

Dogfight the UFOs!

Splash them mofos!

Carpet bomb the dinosaurs!

Taking Back the Panama Canal

facepalm x 10000

LOLOLOLOLOL "Gulf of America"

facepalm

Also, honestly, 'Denali' is a much cooler name.

Free Speech! Only Two Genders! No DEI! Reinstate Military Vax Objectors!

Ok, now he's rollin'.

Inauguration: Trump's Address

Oof.

He needs to throttle back a bit on the betrayal stuff et. al.

I mean, Biden and Harris are sitting right there dude...

You can make your point without basically calling the former POTUS and VPOTUS traitors.

Overall, he's doing a good job--if you can overlook that other stuff.

The Die is Cast

Ryan Bangert: Will VA General Assembly Open the Floodgates to Radical Gender Ideology

This seems like a stretch to me--but it does conform to a now-common Democrat strategy. I favor legal status for same-sex unions (though I'm currently inclined to think it's unclear to what degree such unions are marriages).

   One problem with declaring that "any two adults" can marry is that this, strictly speaking, opens the door to polygamous marriage. If ANY two adults can marry, then already-married adults can marry--i.e. marry others. Or, more precisely: if A is married to B, B would also be able to marry C. So you have to have some kind of clause ruling that out. We ordinarily take claims like "any two adults can marry" to tacitly rule out such cases. But they don't, strictly speaking, do so.

   Anyway, I do favor same-sex unions of some kind, and I tend to be ok with calling them marriages even though I don't think that issue is 100% clear. Normally I wouldn't worry about expansionist readings of the law leveraging it for gender-ideological purposes...but we can't really put such things past the blue team these days.

Trump to Sign 200+ Executive Orders Today

Errrgh...I still don't feel so good...

I either agree with or am at least vaguely sympathetic to all these...but I'm also averse to fast political change...

Some of these are really just rescinding radical changes the other guys made...but not all:

BREAKING: Donald Trump to sign 200+ executive orders tomorrow.

Per FOX and Eric Daugherty, they include:
- Declare emergency at the border + issue proclamation closing the border
- Designate cartels as foreign terrorist organizations
- Remain in Mexico, Catch and Release will be…

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) January 19, 2025

Trump is Now at the White House

Errrgh I don't feel so good...

I can't believe these were our options.

If I were religious, I'd be praying right about now.

Tech Billionaire Mark Pincus's Redpill Moment: Discovering that Trump Did Not Call Nazis "Very Fine People"

His realization was years later, but Charlottesville was a turning point for me, too, as it was happening. 

Trump made an excellent statement after the riot, and I said so here. I still had comments at the time*, and many long-time commenters freaked out, making really bad arguments against Trump's statement. That was also about the time I started losing virtually all readers--which was too bad, but it's not like I'm doing this for money or anything...

   Then, of course, came Trump's public statement and the left's initiation of the "very fine people" hoax...which many lefties believe to this day, which lies both Biden and Harris repeated in debates, and which constituted another inflection point in my mind.

   It was immediately obvious that they were lying...but the left clings to the lie. The formerly-respectable Snopes just finally admitted it was a lie last year--I'm not sure any other "fact-"checking sites have done so.

   More important to me, though, was the fact that the First Amendment rights of the Unite the Right protestors were violated. They had a right to assemble, and this was violated by violent leftist quasi-Antifa rioters. They were attacked for their political views, including with a "homemade flamethrower" (a can of paint, lit on fire). (Burning paint guy was later the subject of a fawning personal-interest story in the MSM, but I don't remember where.) Nobody in the media mentioned that the UtR protestors were in the right and the leftist "counterprotestors" were unequivocally in the wrong.

   In fact, that's basically all Trump should have said: the assembly was legal and, in fact, Constitutionally protected; the violent attempt to shut it down was not. (Here I'm not speaking of the tiki-torch march across UVA Grounds the night before.)

   Anyway.

*Speaking of comments, I've said this before: I stopped posting or even looking at them when I decided to shut this blog down...probably not that long after the Charlottesville riot... But then I just never got around to it...

I started  Substack quite some time ago...but never got around to posting to it...

Trump Memecoin: And So It Begins...

We have--at least for the time being--escaped the clutches of unhinged Orwellian progressivism...by leaping into cartoonish, comedic Trumpworld, filled with Trump Bibles (Trumpbles?), Trump debate trading cards (including a genuine piece of the very suit he wore to pw0nz0r FJB, and now Trump and Melania memecoins...which have...apparently...already crashed...

This is the stupidest timeline.

Happy (?) Inauguration Day

Well, here we are.

Could be worse...

Trump Day 1 EO: Sexual Dimorphism Is Real; Women are Adult Female Humans

A position I've been insisting on here since I first heard it challenged about a decade ago.

But, then, humanity has insisted on basically this position since time immemorial...so...I've got nothing like priority here...

   Imagine what kinds of EOs the Republican will have to sign after the next Democratic Administration...up is toward the sky and down is toward the ground. Day is when it's usually light and night is when it's usually dark. Winter is the colder season and summer is the warmer one. Dogs are not trees. Triangles have three sides...

Carolina 71 - Stanford 72

Tough year.

J.D. Vance on the ERA and Biden Doing Fake Shit

Hey Joe if we’re doing fake shit on the way out can you declare Pete Rose into the Hall of Fame?

See you in two days! https://t.co/a2mNoma1vV

— JD Vance (@JDVance) January 19, 2025

Israel Ceasefire/Hostage-Exchange: Whose Responsibility? Good/Bad?

On the face of it, I guess good. 

Criticism: Israel basically gives up. Some but not all hostages supposed to be released. 500 Hamas terrorists released in exchange. Hamas survives.

So far as American Presidents go: who's responsible?

Biden says he is, but I can't believe anyone outside the blue-team echo chamber believes that. Trump threatened Hamas, and now a day before he's inaugurated, suddenly they're up for a prisoner exchange.

But, if the deal is bad--see above--then it's still on Trump.

Of course Biden IS frantically scrambling to create the impression of a (non-terrible) legacy. So I guess this might be mostly or significantly on him. 

It's probably dumb to put too much weight on our guesses from outside.

But my guess is: mostly on Trump (Well, mostly on the Israelis...but I mean so far as USA influence goes). Not a great deal, but maybe ok. The Israeli government seems to think it's good enough to take. I guess that's the best evidence we have.

Also, I expect Hamas to break the agreement. Then Israel can go back to doing what it was doing.

But I'm just spitballin' here.

I'm pretty clueless about this.

Salena Zito: "My Decade With Donald Trump"

This accords with much about my own (obviously) from-a-distance take on the guy.

It's too bad that a man with so many virtues and strengths is burdened by so many vices and profound weaknesses.

Lysenkoism Watch: NEJM Paper: Free "Sex-Change" Surgery (etc.) For Prisoners

There is nothing I can say about this that would make its abject insanity any more vivid than it already is.

Well, I guess I could remind you that "gender" has nothing whatsoever to do with biology...except then of course it has everything to do with it, and biology must be mangled to accord with this secret semi-sex soul everyone has from fetus-hood...

I've seen some crazy pseudoscientific bullshit in my life, but nothing compares to the abject idiocy of gender ideology.

You could teach a whole critical thinking or low-grade philosophy course on this nonsense, just patiently shredding all the layers of idiocy.

Biden Governed as an Extreme Progressive

Toldja so.

"Harris Was Set to Crush Women's Vote; What Went Wrong?"

 link

Every week or so I come across a new piece that could be titled "The Contemporary Left in a Nutshell."

My summary of this one:

Harris said she would give out ponies! And there was this poll that said she was going to win women big! So for the life of me I can't figure out how she lost.

My favorite bit is probably the bit where the author can't figure out how 1/4 of people who said that abortion was the issue they cared about most voted for Trump...

A real head-scratcher, that. 

I Don't Really Understand This Story

At first it sounds like these two guys hazarded some kind of superhuman caving to rescue these miners. Then it turns out--as I understand it--that the miners simply refused to leave in order to avoid arrest...

Am I getting this straight?

So...South African jails are so bad that they elected to remain in a mine, without light "for weeks or months", eating "cockroaches and human flesh"...in order to avoid arrest?

Seems to me this just doesn't add up...

Globally, The Left Is More Unpopular Than Any Time Since The Cold War

link

And the obvious explanation: the left is crazier than at least at any time since it was basically a toady for Soviet totalitarianism...

Mittens Was Right About Self-Deportation; It's Accelerating As Trump's Return Looms

Good.

And, of course, what they should have said is: illegal immigrants.

Of course the MSM relentlessly tries to blur the distinction, hoping that the dogmatic or inattentive will think, even just a little, that it's legal immigrants who are leaving.

Dan McLaughlin: Biden's Constitutional Vandalism / Re: the ERA

link

Mazie Hirono, Our Dumbest Senator

This is disgusting.

I wish someone would ask her, in response, whether she's ever sexually molested anyone.

Merely being asked such a question, in the absence of any evidence that one has done such a thing, is an affront. And probably an intentional one.

The ERA/"28th Amendment" Is Not Part of the Constitution; It Has Not Been Ratified

Biden has lost it

and/or

He's just flailing wildly for a legacy on the way out the door.

The Archivist--in accordance with rulings by OLC--has already declared that she will not certify.

Biden's bizarre assertion, as I understand it, has no legal weight in this matter.

Ronald W. (Not M.) Dworkin: A Very American Madness

link

Note: not Ronald M. Dworkin, the legal philosopher.

(Must kinda suck to always have people pointing out that you're not the famous guy with your name.)

I found this very interesting, though I'm not sure what to make of it.

The point is basically that crazy, extreme political fads are common in America, but we're also able to withstand them.

Quoting:

From one direction, the threat that appears to come from individual progressives actually comes from impersonal forces of change, such as demographics, technology, and capitalism... [The rest of this para seems pretty weak to me.] 

From the other direction, as this essay suggests, the threat that appears to come from radical progressivism often has its roots in longstanding American craziness. What conservatives face is not some monster never before seen, nor some alien creature with mysterious powers, but a homegrown absurdity—an old wine poured into new bottles. That absurdity must be resisted and opposed in many cases, of course, but not with feelings of fear, surprise, or panic. The threat is too familiar to evoke such feelings. If anything, the threat should be resisted with a sigh (we’ve seen all this before), with a sense of humour (our craziness is a comic disease), and a shake of the head.

O.k, that could be. The madness that seized the American left over the last decade doesn't seem to be something we can/should just shrug off...

Anyway, I found the essay worth reading.

Biden Commutes Nearly 2,500 More Sentences in Final Days of His Presidency

I have little idea whether this is good or bad.

Of course, generally disagreeing with Biden and the contemporary Dems, it's easy to see this as:

(a) More Dem soft-on-crime lunacy.

(b) A post hoc attempt at damage control re: the Hunter pardon, by making it look like part of a principled "decarceral" orientation.

But, for all I know, many/most/all these people deserve clemency.

I do doubt it, however.

Here's a pretty safe prediction: this will cause a bump in crime.

Some people will die because of it.

Many of these people will re-offend.

Apparently there just aren't all that many people in prison for nonviolent drug offences--or so I've read. People who are nominally in for such offenses have generally accepted plea deals to avoid more serious charges.

The bottom line is that progressives/liberals/Democrats really do tend to be soft on crime. This is part of their bizarre selective empathy, their blindness to the plight of ordinary people. Their bleeding hearts bleed for the poor criminal wasting away behind bars...but not for the innocent victim. Waves of illegal aliens surging across the border, causing chaos? Oh, the poor dears! The ordinary Americans along the border whose lives are thrown into chaos, whose towns are flooded, whose jobs are taken? Why, fuck 'em. Now, send those illegals to Froofybunkport, MA, and suddenly it's an outrage! Suddenly the plight to which the blues were blind becomes obvious and intolerable. It's a bizarre kind of selfishness on the left. Virtue-signaling is more important than the plight of their countrymen...but not more important than their own comfort.

Or something like that.

This is the kind of thing that--somewhat independent of the left's adoption of Woketarian madness--has made me move toward the center-right. This sort of bleeding-heart nonsense...sometimes it's right...but generally it's stupid. Not just wrong. Stupid. It's dopey and weepy and childish. There should be a heavy burden of proof on it. If it sounds like bleeding-heart bullshit, it probably is. Go ahead and check it--make sure it isn't an exception. Sometimes it will be. But generally not.

This hunch can be checked in this case:

(i) Go through and see how many of these "nonviolent" drug offenders really are nonviolent.

(ii) Check in 5, 10, 15 years to see how many have reoffended.

Reeve T. Bull: Trump Should Adopt the Virginia Regulatory Model

I'm the farthest thing from an expert on such stuff, but it accords with my current general attitudes and hunches about government.

James Taranto: "Fact-Checkers" Become Rent-Seekers

link

Or as I've put it: the Washington Post "Fact-"Checker is just more Washington Post.

The WaPo's biases and the WaPo Fact-Checker's biases are basically the same.

And:

In Ye Olden Days, Dems and Pubs just called each other liars.

In Ye Now-en Days, Pubs call Dems liars...Dems create whole new institutions--academic departments, new branches of the MSM, novel bureaucratic institutions--to issue official proclamations that Pubs have been The Science(tm)-tifically proven to be liars.

And now, it seems, our new disinformation-industrial complex has ruled that this description of the disinformation-industrial complex is disinformational.

A thing is: we already know how to distinguish pretty well between (to focus on the media) reporting and opinion. But one of the main problems with the MSM is that its coverage of areas of American political and cultural disagreement is so obviously infused with leftist opinion. Think of, e.g., how rapidly--nay, even eagerly--MSM reporting (or "reporting") became infused with gender ideology. Not just mentioning it, but accepting it. Presupposing it.

Wikipedia is another example. It claims "NPOV," but leftist doctrines clearly rule the roost there. Consider e.g. just the fact that the gender ideological idea that "deadnaming" is out. Whole Wikipedia entries often fail to mention the fact that the person in question is "trans" at all. This is part of the radical doctrine that, basically, if someone doesn't want their former name or that part of their history disclosed, we--even our truth-seeking institutions--must comply. In such cases Wikipedia generally doesn't just report on the facts, reporting on past names and "genders"...it just pretends that there was no such name, and was no such past. But, of course: only in the super-special case of "gender"...it is not a generalizable principle.

In this respect, Wikipedia is the perfect Orwellian institution.