"How Dare You Suggest Election Fraud?"

 I can attest that I'm seeing left-leaning contacts on Facebook discussing these sorts of plans for getting people to 'move' to Georgia temporarily to vote in the Senate runoffs. It'd be easier to accept that they'd never countenance an attack on the sanctity of our elections if they didn't plan it right in front of us.

Those darn effective messages

Florida Democrats are unhappy with party messaging.

“Given the fact every Hispanic voter is either directly or [has] indirectly gone through their own experience as a victim of a socialist or communist regime, the potency around the branding of a political party as the second coming of socialism or communism in the United States is very effective,” Miami-based pollster Fernand Amandi said.

. . .

“Donald Trump did not make any bones about what he was running on and voters here said they wanted more of that,” said Raymond Paultre, a consultant aligned with The Alliance, a loosely aligned collection of progressive Florida donors. “That is disheartening.”

. . .

Centrists, who traditionally have made up the party’s base of power in Florida, say a lurch to the left will decisively doom the party’s chances of taking the governor’s mansion in 2022.

. . .

“I’m not a f---ing socialist,” Pizzo later said in an interview. “My life is a manifestation of the American dream. I believe in free markets.”

Maybe you belong to the wrong party?

Truth doesn't work, let's try something else

I couldn't even bring myself to read a Salon article entitled "Enough with "both sides"! Faux-neutral journalism is no way to fight the truth-deniers."

Unity or homogeneity?

Back when racial politics stumbled on the idea of solidarity among all "people of color," they were probably onto something. It's not a terrible idea to try to find common ground with all the different people who feel left out of the game. That was before the idea morphed into the absurd notion that any organizer was wise to pretend to himself that all people of color naturally had the same view of the "system" that by definition disrespects and excludes them, and that they would vote as a bloc no matter how crazy the organizer's platform got. It's not a package deal. They're entitled to unbundle the suite. They'll probably keep unbundling it even if you accuse them of racism or treason for leaving the reservation.

A Kolakovic moment

From "A Quiet Totalitarian Movement" by Rod Dreher:

In 1943, a Croatian priest named Tomislav Kolakovic escaped the Gestapo, and took refuge in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. Father Kolakovic began teaching in the Catholic university there, and told his students that after the Germans were defeated, the Soviets would rule their country. The Communists would come after the Church, he said — and he meant to get the young people ready for resistance, while they still had the freedom to strategize.

Slovak bishops chastised Father Kolakovic, saying that he was being alarmist. The priest didn’t listen to them. He knew the Communist mind, because he had studied it to prepare for missionary work in the Soviet Union. Father Kolakovic’s young followers came together in cells scattered across the country to pray, to discuss what was happening in their country, and to lay out plans of action. His method was a simple one: See, Judge, Act. That is, open your eyes to what is really happening in your country, come together to discern the meaning, and what you are all called to do to respond to it — then do it.

In 1948, Czech Communists staged a putsch. Shortly after, they began to persecute the Church, just as Father Kolakovic, who had expelled from the country two years earlier, had prophesied. The network the visionary priest built became the backbone of the underground church, and the only meaningful opposition to totalitarianism for the next forty years.

And so it begins

 And so it begins; the pushing of "reasonable" gun control.  Reading through those bills, I don't find any of that reasonable.  Thankfully democrats did not make any gains in the pro-2nd Amendment Texas legislature.  Even worse, for them, the 2021 legislative session will feature redistricting, which will not happen again until 2031. 

Maybe we can finally get rid of Queen Sheila.

Art I Sec 8 Clauses 2 & 5

 A US Senator actually said out loud that he opposes a FED nominee because he's afraid she might give control of the money supply to Congress.

Game theory and the "Chump Effect"

Society ignores the Chump Effect at its peril.

Is the "Socialist" tag unfair?

I didn't follow the Florida races closely, so I have no idea whether the press or the Republicans callously misrepresented Donna Shalala, as Bill Scher asserts.

Shalala made an unforced error when she called herself in an October TV interview a “pragmatic socialist,” which her opponent gleefully used in a late attack ad. Shalala clearly misspoke; in the same interview she said, “I’m as far from being a socialist as anyone that you’ll ever meet. I’m a capitalist.” But while it was disingenuous for her opponent to use the truncated clip, if Shalala had a deeper connection with her district, the attack wouldn’t have stuck so easily.

Still, if I'd heard Shalala make both those statements, it would take more than the press or her opponent being fair to her to make me think she could be trusted in office. One or the other, if not both, has to be a lie or pandering, if not both.

It's a Mystery

Gun control support drops sharply to 4 year low, Gallup finds. "Whyever would that be?" asks Hot Air.

Source on Differential Cities

I've seen this claim on social media that Biden underperformed Clinton's 2016 numbers everywhere but a few swing state cities, but here's an actual source for it. The source is Richard Baris of Big Data Poll. He's cited by another writer cited by this writer. It's hard to track things back given all the noise around this stuff.

It's not that nice kind of socialism

I picked this up from HotAir, but as far as I can tell it's a snippet from the New York Times, which I won't link to. Still, if it is the NYT, someone's hearing something he'd rather not hear:

The “average white person,” Mr. Gonzalez added, may associate socialism with Nordic countries, but to Asian and Hispanic migrants it recalls despotic “left-wing regimes.”…

To make matters worse, that Nordic "socialism" took a hard U-turn on the socialism thing some time back, which is why they still have an economy.

The Fury of the Fatherless

From First Things:

Like Edmund in King Lear, who despised his half-brother Edgar, these disinherited young are beyond furious. Like Edmund, too, they resent and envy their fellows born to an ordered paternity, those with secure attachments to family and faith and country.

That last point is critical. Their resentment is why the triply dispossessed tear down statues not only of Confederates, but of Founding Fathers and town fathers and city fathers and anything else that looks like a father, period. It is why we see generational vituperation toward the Baby Boomers, like the diss of “OK, Boomer” and the epithet “Karen.” It is why bands of what might be called “chosen protest families” disrupt actual family meals. It is why BLM disrupts bedroom communities late at night, where real, non-chosen families are otherwise at peace.

The stink of fear

It's not exactly Atticus Finch, is it?

Why go all-out, launching a boycott campaign targeting Jones Day, and doxxing lawyers, if the whole thing is futile? If Trump can't win, then conservatives are just wasting money that won't be spent on protecting the Senate majority in Georgia?

Winning over the unindoctrinated

David Shor draws lessons from the 2020 election results and concludes that it doesn't look good for credentialed progressives for the next 10 years:

But if we can’t reduce the structural biases that have appeared in the last ten years by changing the rules of the game, we will have to make the hard choice of changing our party so that we can appeal to these non-college-educated voters who are turning against us.

. . .

Turnout was up, but it was up for both parties. According to Nate Cohn’s estimates, Black turnout was probably up by around 8 percent, but non-Black turnout was up by something like 15 to 20 percent. So we had the highest-turnout election in a century, and despite that, we still only won because a bunch of people switched their votes in our direction.

Well, a bunch of people switched a bunch of people's votes in his direction, but the question is, were they the same people?

So the median voter in the presidential election is about 50 years old, watches about six hours of TV a day, and mostly gets their news from mainstream sources. And that means that, if you want to influence what this person believes, you’re probably not going to get them at the door or even through a paid message. They’re going to form their opinions based on how the media reports on and characterizes the parties.

Luckily, that generally works like a charm for the Party of Highly Intelligent College Types, but there is a dark undercurrent of doubt:

I think the reality now is that whenever any elected Democrat goes out and says something that’s unpopular, unless the rest of the party very forcefully pushes back — in a way that I think is actually very rare within the Democratic Party currently — every Democrat will face an electoral penalty. And that’s awkward. . . . I think that the only option that we have is to move toward the median voter. And I think that really comes down to embracing the popular parts of our agenda and making sure that no one in our party is vocally embracing unpopular things. I know that sounds reactionary.

The upshot:

And we also still have a chance to limit how much we need to compromise by winning in Georgia and then passing sweeping structural reforms. But if we don’t, then the reality is that the median voter who gets to determine Senate control is going to remain a non-college-educated 55-year-old in a pretty Republican state who voted for Donald Trump. Probably twice. That’s who we’ll need to win over in order to govern.

Good luck with that, unless you start lying a lot more effectively. And sure enough:

When you think through the optimization problem of, “How do we enact the most left-wing legislation possible without running over these trip wires that will make the public turn against us,” one part of it is that there are things that poll badly but are low salience. . . . And then there are also a lot of accounting gimmicks that are very promising. I will point out that we actually did finance a very large section of the ACA by nationalizing the entire student-loan industry.

Apparently these lies have been successfully market-tested on the Smart Credentialed demographic.

I always thought I got a decent education--but my alma mater wasn't like this when I was there.

When does it start to be a person, again?

Disney's Star-Wars-universe show "The Mandalorian" is enjoyable science fiction, but it ain't very woke. A recent storyline involved adorable Baby Yoda, who is always hungry, filching and devouring some of the incubated eggs of a minor character who's trying to reunite with her husband and prevent the extinction of her species. Twitter took to its fainting couch.

I don't get the outrage. He wasn't selling them for parts, was he?

Different aims, same tools

From "The Woke Supremacy" by Evan Sayet:

The Russian Socialists chose gulags and work camps, permanent confinement to mental institutions, and exile to frozen tundra. The German socialists opted for the more efficient and effective gas chambers and ovens, while the Chinese socialists, seeking to save on infrastructure and material costs, went with mass starvation and other low-tech means.

While these kinds of atrocities are typically blamed on the ideologies of these various Socialist entities--giving comfort to some that "this time," with today's Socialists embracing a different ideology, things will somehow be different--the fact is that gulags, death camps, and killing fields are not ideologically driven. Who is sent to them is.

We were blind, how can we contrive to stay blind?

I find articles like this hilarious.  This one at least tries to figure out what it means to have been so completely wrong about what so many voters think.  The author even proposes to view some of President Trump's achievements honestly, painful as that is.  In the end, though, he just moans about how wrong all those bad voters are, especially when there are so many of them.

Some of these numbers seem a little fishy

 Powerline has a good statistical analysis up.

And again, red flags are not proof of fraud, but they're a sure sign that some serious investigation is in order.  Listen to the experts on this.

Trust the experts, or else

Pandemic Hypocrites Produce Pandemic Cynics.  Also known as the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" syndrome. I think COVID really is a wolf, but if people in power lie about it enough, they'll erode the public's willingness to obey edicts, even if some of the edicts would turn out to be a pretty good idea once we actually talked about it respectfully and honestly.

I've been deluged with arguments this week from people who blame practically everything that has gone wrong in the U.S. in 2020 on President Trump's crime of not taking COVID seriously enough. It's impossible to engage them in a discussion of any action he took that supposedly stemmed from this improper attitude, or of a result that credibly followed from the action. Instead I hear claims that, if the President had made people understand how seriously they must take the danger, we would somehow have handled better the convulsive rush to universal mail-in voting.  If I object that the big problems were not just the difficulty of imposing enough antifraud measure but the concerted opposition to antifraud measures as a cruel and unconstitutional burden on the franchise, I get back an argument that somehow this would have resolved itself reasonably if Orange Man hadn't poisoned the well of public discussion.

Similarly, all the jobs lost? Somehow his fault for not talking the virus seriously. The 200K-plus deaths? Somehow there would have been fewer. Not up for discussion, it's intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. Riots? Arson? Murder? Catch-and-release perpetrators of same? Major problem: his attitude:

(1) Doubt in the public mind.

(2) . . . ?

(3) Bad result.

My own view, of course, is that's it's a lot easier to make the case that, if COVID-restraining measures really aren't working as well as they might in a perfect world, a large part of the explanation is that people are going through the motions on measures they don't believe in, at least in part because reminds them of hearing that eggs are good, then bad, then good for your health. It doesn't help when the most prominent and powerful voices for the most personally costly containment measures treat them with contempt in their own lives whenever they're inconvenient.

At least when President Trump sheds doubt on the effectiveness of a measure, he's acting consistently with his stated beliefs. What I hear him saying is, sure the virus can be dangerous, but some dangers have to be faced. We don't necessarily have a choice of a world in which we can eliminate the danger without bringing on consequences that are even more damaging. We wish we had that option, but acknowledging that we may not is not the same as wanting to kill Grandma. Nor am I entitled to believe that half the country is guilty of attempted murder because they're not as convinced as their not-very-trustworthy betters wish they were.