Regiment of Foot
"White women voters are footsoldiers of white supremacist patriarchy."
At this point we've traveled so far that the insults are farcical.
UPDATE: Even more than I realized: apparently Virginia elected a female former Marine who happens to be black to the lieutenant governor's position, a first ever for a black woman in Virginia, or even just a woman. There have probably been Marines before.
For once, the media is helpful
Normally having an unprincipled media on your side is the wind at your back in an election, but it can backfire if the candidate smokes his own product. Timothy Carney argues that Terry McAuliffe listened to the WaPo's theory that parental concern about education was code for white supremacy and assumed that anything WaPo spouted was bound to work like a charm on undecided independent Virginia voters.
Having the news media as a yes man is dangerous.
* * *
Having the whole news media on your side is often helpful — such as when Joe Biden enjoyed a media blackout on his son’s influence-peddling. But when it convinces you that issues matter that don’t, or that issues don’t matter that do, it’s a handicap.As Ben Shapiro put it the other day when Juan Williams floated this same theory, "Please, Democrats, make this your platform for 2022. I'm begging you." As a winning campaign message, it's right up there with "CRT doesn't exist--and it's awesome."
I realize McAuliffe hasn't conceded yet, but with so few votes uncounted this morning, I have my fingers crossed that even he and the national machine will judge this one a bridge too far. if 138,000 D votes suddenly appear from someone's car trunk, another election contest may do them more harm than good nationally, no matter what it gets them in Virginia, especially if the message is "We had to contest this election, because Virginia parents are racist."
Saving America
The real issue here isn't that 30% of Republicans think that violence may be necessary, but that people still believe that America can be saved.
The finding is part of PRRI’s 12th annual American Values Survey released Monday which, among other things, highlights the continued impact of the same falsehoods and conspiracy theories...
If that's where you're starting from, of course you can't see the truth. At this point it's obvious that election laws were widely violated, and the Constitution ignored. What remains to be decided is whether a legitimate election can ever be held again; or, if not, what that means.
The Most Important Matter
Keeping these people from being in charge matters more than anything else, except for metaphysical matters like salvation of our souls.
One More
It’s going to be in the 20s this coming week. Fall is suddenly over.
Early Afternoon
The only problem with the mountains is how early the afternoon sun vanishes behind the ridge. The Nantahala gets its name from a Cherokee word for "land of the noon-day sun," or as it is more popularly translated, "the land where the sun sets at noon."
This is from a roadside stand near the forks of the French Broad River, where there's a nice taproom and occasionally a good food truck called Mama Bear's (although she's going offline for the winter starting tomorrow to pursue motherhood rather than food-truckery). It may be technically in the Pisgah Ranger district rather than one of the Nantahala ones, as the border between those is right about here. The road that runs up to the Blue Ridge Parkway from this spot also serves as the border between the Middle Prong Wilderness and the Shining Rock Wilderness.
SE Texas does have fall
Granted, fall down here may last a month, week, or happen intermittently between October and February. Still it was a great day to take the DR out. This is on the Brazos river.
That's not FUNNY
These leftist kids today are a little slow on the uptake. Some are just now figuring out that "the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule." Well, ve haff vays to put a stop to that.
“Once literacy on the extremist underpinnings of strategic humour is established, the next step is to closely monitor dynamics around far-right meme cultures,” the [EU] report states. “Online cultures quickly develop into extremist movements, as seen in the conspiracy cult around QAnon and the anti-government militia in the United States known as the boogaloo movement.”Wait--there's an anti-government militia movement called boogaloo? Should I have known about this already? I'm beginning to doubt my chaotic fascist bona fides, though I've been carrying a "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy" card in my wallet since the first Clinton administration.
OK, yes, I see I've been caught napping, but Wikipedia brings me up to date. I've been advised that, before I engage with a potentially harmful ideology, I should check in with Wiki to see whether the new source is trustworthy and approved. I am all about compliance.
The term boogaloo alludes to the 1984 sequel film Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, which was derided by critics as a derivative rehash. Subsequently, appending "2: Electric Boogaloo" to a name became a jocular verbal template for any kind of sequel, especially one that strongly mimics the original. The boogaloo movement adopted its identity based on the anticipation of a second American Civil War or second American Revolution, which was referred to as "Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo" and became popularly known among adherents as "the boogaloo".
Participants in the boogaloo movement also use other similar-sounding derivations of the word, including boog, boojahideen, big igloo, blue igloo, and big luau to avoid crackdowns and automated content flags imposed by social media sites to limit or ban boogaloo-related content. Intensified efforts by social media companies to restrict boogaloo content have caused adherents to use terms even further detached from the original word such as spicy fiesta to refer to the movement. The boogaloo movement has created logos and other imagery incorporating igloo snow huts and Hawaiian prints based on these derivations. Adherents of the boogaloo sometimes carry black-and-white versions of the American flag, with a middle stripe replaced with a stripe of red tropical print and the stars replaced with an igloo. The stripes sometimes list the names of people who have been killed by police, including Eric Garner, Vicki Weaver, Robert LaVoy Finicum, Breonna Taylor, and Duncan Lemp.
Adherents attend protests heavily armed and wearing tactical gear, and sometimes identify themselves by wearing Hawaiian shirts along with military fatigues. The boogaloo movement has also used imagery popular among the far-right such as the Pepe the Frog meme.So, if I have this right, Hawaiian shirts now carry a sinister meaning, especially if mixed with fatigues and memes and anything with "loo" in it, such as "igloo." (The Wiki piece helpful clarifies that the reference is to a "snow hut," but I imagine that a properly labeled camping cooler might do.) Even a swatch of fabric with a tropical pattern may serve as the secret handshake. "Big luau" is a good one, mixing the sounds of "boogaloo" and "igloo." I think I now understand the appeal of an increase in articles about Boolean analysis. Bootleg? Bu Lu Lemon? I see a huge future in merch.
Stop laughing this instant. This is a deliberate attempt to make official censors look ridiculous by cracking down on posts about spicy fiestas. We will have no more unapproved jocular verbal templates.
Smooth
Dr. Sheena Mason and Jim Hanson on "Racelessness"
I have never spoken to Dr. Mason, but Jim had a long talk with her on an alternative to Charles Mills' theories of embracing racial identity as the only way to pursue justice.
Working Towards Free Elections
Margot Cleveland on the Virginia race, and what it portends for 2022.
Earlier this month, Fairfax County, Virginia... previewed the attacks on election integrity likely planned for the midterm cycle of 2022 and beyond. There, election officials in the deep-blue county approved absentee and mail-in ballot applications lacking the statutorily mandated last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number, then promptly mailed these unauthenticated individuals ballots for next Tuesday’s election.
So, executive agencies violating the laws passed by the legislature -- and signed into law by an executive -- again. As she points out, courts are not stepping up here.
Judge Andrew Oldham dissented from the Fifth Circuit’s decision. In concluding the case was not moot, Oldham, a Donald Trump appointee, highlighted the supplemental letter brief submitted by the county. “Harris County not only refused to disclaim unlawful drive-through voting for future elections — it promised to continue that practice,” Judge Oldham wrote.Oldman continued, “Harris County has taken the remarkable position that it (1) wholly ignored provisions of the Texas Election Code in 2020, and (2) can continue wholly ignoring those provisions in future elections — notwithstanding the Legislature’s express instructions to the contrary.”
What is to be done? She recommends making these practices crimes.
Make it a crime for an election official to mail a ballot to a resident if the application submitted fails to satisfy the requirements set by the legislative branch. Make it a crime for an election official to provide a ballot to a resident if he or she lacks the mandated identification. Make it a crime for an election official to count a ballot if it is returned beyond the legislatively established deadline.Line-by-line review the election code and for every mandate make clear that ignoring it means a fine or imprisonment. Then authorize the state legislature to appoint a special counsel to prosecute the offense if a local prosecutor refuses.
There's more, but that last line is crucial: the executive branch will simply refuse to prosecute crimes it wants to encourage. We saw that yesterday in Wisconsin, and it has become standard practice in many cities and a few states.
Resisting madness
Ann Bauer has not had good luck in her life, but she seems to have a tough core, a commitment to truthfulness and rationality that will see her through.
Good climate news, shut up
Roger Pielke unwraps the brand-new IPCC report:
For my technical readers, the scenarios judged unlikely by the IPCC are high emission (“such as RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5”) and the scenarios “in line” with current policies are intermediate scenarios (“RCP4.5, RCP6.0 and SSP2-4.5”).
This is huge news. Fantastic in fact. Why? The extreme scenario RCP8.5 was in the most recent IPCC report identified as our most likely future. Now IPCC has completely reversed that, and it is now considered low likelihood. There could not be a more profound change in the scenario foundation of climate science.
Instead of apocalyptic warnings about “immediate risk” a top line message of this report should be: Great News! The Extreme Scenario that IPCC Saw as Most Likely in 2013 is Now Judged Low Likelihood. I am actually floored that this incredible change in such a short time apparently hasn’t even been noticed, much less broadcast around the world.
Racist obsessions
Maybe it's a sign of creeping old age to have lived long enough to see the better part of a century lurch from one racist extreme to another. Don't get me wrong: it's always been obvious that you can identify human genetic groups with striking differences in their averages according to an impressive variety of measurements, from height to intelligence to resistance to different diseases. Racism is something different: an insistence that race, however defined, is a reliable basis for assessing human worth and a proper basis for rigid social and political ringwalls around individuals regardless of their actual traits and behavior. As a shorthand, I think of it as dreaming up of reasons why Jews can't be admitted to good universities or hired by good law firms. You have to be an incipient geezer like myself even to remember when excluding Jews didn't make most people scratch their heads in bewilderment--but the same people who've forgotten the treatment of the Jews in the not-all-that-distant past often have little difficulty swallowing an explanation for why universities and law firms must now employ similar practices to enforce quotas against whites or Asians. (I leave aside for the moment the resurgence of bare-faced Jew-hatred.)
Decades ago I read and enjoyed "Guns, Germs and Steel." That was near the beginning of the online discussion age, so I was unprepared for the bizarre debate that broke out in the Amazon review section. Back then, as I recall, the fury was provoked by Jared Diamond's undervaluing the virtue of superior cultures, which led him to use environmental determinism to explain variances in success among ancient genetic/geographical groups. Certainly his analysis was flawed in many ways, but not in its basic curiosity about the impact of the regional availability of suitable crops and animals for domestication, or suitable East-West migration routes for expansion without encountering radically different growing conditions.
It's amusing now to discover that a new crop of critics detests Diamond for his failure to acknowledge that the only acceptable alternative to the racial superiority explanation is racial oppression. Diamond is no more a racial supremacist than he is blind to horrifying clashes between genetic groups, but he has sinned against his culture by opting to consider any other factors at all. For the most part we appear nearly incapable of imagining that a lot of things can be going on in a clash between cultures, from bigotry to luck to disparities in cultural competence--and that none of these factors proves a moral superiority in either the culture or the individual hearts of the victors or the vanquished.
Sheriff: State Officials Ordered Voting Laws Ignored
Wisconsin's Racine County Sheriff is partially just restating what we already knew from the Time Magazine article: several states violated their own laws in the 2020 elections. It is news, however, that officials ordered citizens to go along with violating the laws. Nursing homes across the state, for example, were ordered to comply with the election law violations.
The US Constitution says that states or Congress shall set the laws governing the conduct of elections; instead, such laws were violated in favor of the edicts of bureaucrats and governors. The election was consequently illegitimate, root and branch, in all such states. There appears to be no remedy for this.
UPDATE: The Sheriff says that the state Attorney General has rejected calls for an investigation at the state level. No charges are being brought at this time by prosecutors.
UPDATE: This is a slam-dunk case with hard evidence.
The investigation focused on abuse of voters confined to nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Investigators discovered that Wisconsin Election Officials expressly discussed that their proposed conduct for the 2020 election would violate state law, and yet they decided to do it anyway. They memorialized their decision in a letter they wrote and disseminated to every single county clerk’s office in Wisconsin.
Sheriff Schamling stated that officials indicated that they “needed the flexibility to violate the law,” and that they needed to “instruct county clerks to break the law.” Despite the blatant absurdity of the statements, the express illegality of their activities, and the fact that they were all being recorded on their Zoom meeting, election officials went ahead and violated the law anyway. The sheriff’s office played the video from the Zoom meeting of the commissioners discussing their need to break the law and instruct others to do the same.
Emphasis added. They estimate somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand fraudulent votes from this activity alone, in a state Biden allegedly won by only twenty thousand.
Republican Perfidy
This guy is one of my Senators. Both of their names always turn up every time there's an establishment compromise, because he's really there to represent the corporations -- woke or otherwise -- and to line his own pockets.
After Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina dumped more than $1.6 million in stocks in February 2020 a week before the coronavirus market crash, he called his brother-in-law, according to a new Securities and Exchange Commission filing.They talked for 50 seconds.Burr, according to the SEC, had material nonpublic information regarding the incoming economic impact of coronavirus.The very next minute, Burr’s brother-in-law, Gerald Fauth, called his broker.
Fauth has been dodging the subpoenas inquiring about this from the SEC, but has managed to find time to be re-appointed to his government sinecure by Joe Biden. Trump originally appointed him, I would guess as an unrequited favor to Burr.
The Left is crazy, and many Democratic politicians are likewise corrupt (for example look at Pelosi's stunning success in the markets). The problem isn't as simple as swinging party control of Congress or the White House, though. Corruption is systemic: both parties and the bureaucracy have turned government into a wealth-extraction business for themselves. Bigger changes need to be made if this corruption is to be resolved.
"Why won't anyone listen to us?"
The scary thing about progressives wailing when people won't listen to their wisdom is how quickly they're willing to conclude that they'll just have to find ways to use more force than persuasion, for our own good.
In the Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber conducts a long-winded analysis of the "Obama-Springsteen" echo chamber. I had to get to the very bottom to find his point: his crowd always has hoped and believed, with good reason, that they can conduct stealth politics by controlling popular culture, but now he finds with dismay that people sense the stink of propaganda and tune out the culture. People outside the Obama-Springsteen echo chamber may actually recoil and find both their entertainment and their political messages elsewhere--from those bad, bad people with a different message that we haven't managed to squelch yet.
Indeed, many of the people Obama wants to reach are the ones who systematically avoid him for reasons of culture, politics, or both. . . . Obama demonstrates the toxic effects of Fox News by recalling an anecdote from late in his White House tenure. He had gone to visit a community college in a red state, and the locals tuning in to his speech from a nearby bar asked, “Is this how Obama usually sounds?” to a reporter who was there with them. Clearly they had been getting their news from sources that rarely broadcast the commander in chief speaking uninterrupted.
“Now, keep in mind, at that point I had probably been president for the last five or six years,” Obama says to Springsteen. “The filter was so thick that I, as president of the United States, could not reach those guys unless I actually went to their town.”
Why, yes, you can inspire a target audience to recoil in horror and, even if they can't escape your deeply unpopular laws, to exercise their right not to soak up your condescending lectures. They aren't required to continue to listen. They may even start listening to other people whose messages you deplore. This is what happens to people who don't genuinely believe in the power of persuasion, only the power of propaganda and, if that fails, censorship and force.
Kornhaber concludes that the peril of the echo chamber "only emphasizes the limits of politics-as-culture":
The Biden era has already provided a clinic in the seriousness of those limits: Here is a president, like Obama before him, backed by Hollywood and enjoying a popular-vote majority—yet still unable to pass his agenda due to intractable political obstacles. Would any amount of conscientious conversation nix the filibuster or sway Joe Manchin? Money, demographics, institutions, and pure power still rule, and many of the stories we tell lately in hopes of shifting that reality just end up distracting from it.So the problem is money, demographics, institutions, and pure power, not that Biden can't get his way because too many people despise the policies he's now pushing, after running a campaign in which many understood him to be promising something completely different. Kornhaber seems to labor under the delusion that Biden conscientiously conversed with voters, who inexplicably failed to listen. Frankly, Biden didn't try, and if he had, the voters' rejection wouldn't have signaled a problem with their ears, but with the content of the message. Thus Biden follows up with the notion that he's "running out of patience." And the terrible voters don't like that either.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)