Even ten years ago, Obama and most of the top Democrats opposed it…

I know the point here is that gay marriage was unpopular enough that top Democrats had to pretend they opposed it, but I did always wonder: how many people actually believed them? Ditto their denials of atheism, etc. Were there really that many people who were that stupid?

Some thoughts:

1. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant” doesn’t even work on the rhetorical level. Bleach is a better disinfectant, fire an even better one. If the Nazis had won the war, does anybody think German kids would know who Magnus Hirschfield was? (Something for J.K. Rowling to think about, lol)

2. I’d say the odds are close to 200% that most of the signatories have participated in some poor bugger’s “cancellation”. I didn’t see any mea culpas in that turgid letter.

3. Reading between the lines:

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. […] More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms.

By God – what could possibly be more troubling, to this group of inner-party writers, than the constriction of the lifeblood of society? Only that institutional leaders might be hasty and disproportionate in their punishment: don’t you see, boss, I really just deserve a slap on the wrist, not to lose my perch entirely…

This letter is just those who benefit from their membership of “institutions” trying not to get thrown out of the club. Less panic and haste, more consideration and proportion; reform, not damage control. If they were parliamentarians, they’d be calling for a commission: let’s shunt the whole thing off to some committee, and hopefully that’ll mollify everybody and we can go back to the way things were.

I don’t know if that’s going to work, though: what these people consider “considered reform” is probably something like the 1619 Project, and that just seemed to accelerate things.

This is just the old guard burying their heads in the sand and/or hoping that they’ll be eaten last. Gay.

…this Codex guy voted for the Hildabeast? I could see not voting for Trump, but as soon as I’d read that, it’d be it for me for that blog. You start off stupid, and it’s bound to come back.

I felt the same way when I found out he was banging a tranny

(I don’t feel right commenting on the gentleman’s personal life, but, well, it’s public information already, and I’m half-certain that he was the one to put it out there anyway, and also, you can’t ask people to take you seriously when your girlfriend’s a dude and you’re pretending he’s a lady)

…[Slate Star Codex] gets six hundred thousand monthly page views.

That’s less than iSteve, although SSC’s pages are likely considerably longer.

Don’t worry, Steve, size doesn’t matter, it’s what you do with it that counts

As a psychiatrist, he suspects that his relationships with his patients could be compromised if they were made aware of his “personal” blog, which gets six hundred thousand monthly page views.

Love those scare quotes around “personal”: oh, sure, he provides a rational rationale for his anonymity… but that’s just the lies of an evil blogger!

Apparently if your writing is popular, you’re de facto a professional writer and therefore a public figure. I suppose the logic goes like this: I, an occasional contributor to The New Yorker, probably with an MFA behind me, am definitely a Professional Writer and a Public Figure, but I don’t get a fraction of SSC’s page views – therefore how much more professional and public is Scott Alexander?

Alternatively, I misremembered, or was misinformed in the first place, and never cared enough to investigate the man’s personal life further.

I will say though that banging a girl dressed like a boy is still weird and gay. Call me old-fashioned…

You people disgust me… You are dedicated to untruth that besmirches other people in a sexual manner because your own natural sexual urges have gone awry.

Did you not notice the irony, or did you mean that you disgust yourself, too?

I expect it’s hard to get rich without believing in it. A major point of persuasion is the degree to which you’re getting screwed over by the elites, but if you’re benefiting from the screwjob, it’s easy to think that it’s all right and good.

I also think it’s still pretty easy for a rich person to get crushed. Lots of those people are more precarious than you might think, and their reputation is easily attacked. Remember Donald Sterling? What was his life like after he lost the Clippers? Reviled, abandoned; still rich, but your only company is employees and grifters…

Some zillionaire really should pay for Scott Alexander to take as much time off from his practice as he wants to write, and to pay for a research assistant.

Me too

Leaving aside that the use of anonymous signatories undermines the letter’s claim to speak for a great many people – because how do we know they really signed it?…

…153 of the most prominent journalists, authors, and writers, including J. K. Rowling, Malcolm Gladwell, and David Brooks, published an open call for civility in Harper’s Magazine.

Why “open”?

The sentence already tells us the letter was published in Harper’s Magazine, which makes “open” redundant. [Sidebar: the word “magazine” contains the word “MAGA”, and will therefore soon be abolished.] The same sentence tells us these 153 writers signed their names, which makes it doubly redundant.

“Open” is sputtering, finger-pointing, indignant shrieking. It’s an intensifier: bad enough that they should call for civility, but to do so openly?! Oof, madonn’!

We can therefore see that the signatories thinks civility is a terrible thing in and of itself, and that it is shameful to call for it. Signatories to the Harper’s letter ought to meditate on this: they are calling for civility from people who consider it a vice, and its opposite a virtue.

The Black and brown founding fathers of “Hamilton” make the story of America something that can finally be owned by people of color, as opposed to the reality, which so often refutes the relevancy of their lives and contributions.

She meant “rejects”. Ironically, “refutes” is more correct, which, as Steve has pointed out, is largely what this whole thing is all about.

The thing by this guy, the professional-son-of-a-gay-rabbi, is a couple of thousand words too long, not to mention anti-intellectual. He must have been paid by the word.

It’s that sprawling New Yorker shit

Hunter Thompsons sez

The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

I thought he was from North Kilt-town?

As I’ve been mentioning for awhile, the last two Black Power moments (late 1960s, early 1990s) got cancelled over black anti-Semitism.

I wasn’t aware 60’s black power went anti-semitic. Is this what was behind the ideological shifts of your David Horowitzes?

It is unsafe to fully reopen the country until a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available

Did the survey define “fully reopen”? Possibly quite a broad swathe of opinions being lumped together there.

I pointed out years ago that Interstate 5 was built through California’ Central Valley with a 206 mile long stretch where enough room was set aside to build 4 more lanes on the present median. Probably other interstates were constructed similarly, which could allow robot trucks to segregate themselves away from cars driven by mortals. How much fuel could 18 wheelers save if they could draft like cyclists in the Tour de France? There’s no way I want to share my roadway with, say, ten 18 wheelers only a few feet apart, but letting them do it on their own lane seems fine.

As long as we’re building huge new chunks of infrastructure, why not just build new railroads?

Autonomous trains already more-or-less exist, and to the extent that they don’t, they’d be easier to invent, since they’d require a lot less computing power than autonomous cars.

Autonomous cars are a bad solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, and are never ever going to happen – but by the time everybody figures that out, quite a lot of people will have bought their second retirement home in Maui.

The rest of us will have to suffer our grandkids zinging us for our mad pipe-dreams, the way we zing our elders for thinking by now we’d have jet packs and house pods on the moon.

On a long enough timeline, the accuracy rate for every prediction rises to 1

Imagine, in the next world, having to explain to your ancestors and descendants that your whole country got took down by a bunch of trannies

white voters in heavily immigrant California had supported Trump in 2016 by 20-25 points less than whites in the rest of the country, with the sharp disconnect between his anti-immigrant rhetoric and their own personal experiences probably being a major factor. By sharp contrast, immigration was an especially powerful issue for Trump in a state like West Virginia, which has almost no Hispanics or immigrants of any kind, and whose voters therefore received their entire understanding of the issue from FoxNews and Breitbart rather than from real life.

Alternatively, whites who don’t like immigrants or Hispanics tend to live where there aren’t any, and vice versa.

A xenophobic population is going to do less to encourage immigration, and may actively resist it; if they fail, they’re more likely to migrate themselves. Under this hypothesis, then, California was already quite xenophilic, and will have become more so as its xenophobes fled the state; meanwhile, Virginia had a higher proportion of xenophobes in the first place, and succeeded at resisting immigration.

On top of that, there are confounding factors, like California’s proximity to Mexico and dynamic economy, vs. Virginia being, as I understand it, a place where people take heroin because there aren’t any coal mining jobs anymore.

“The charity has expanded its charitable purposes to include educational opportunities for all youths and underprivileged children through programs that use sailing activities to teach teamwork, responsibility, reasoning, critical thinking and general life skills. The charity will also use its resources to support other exempt organizations including educational institutions with similar goals to help youths of all cultural backgrounds”.

So… he’s bought himself a yacht?

I heard about this Washington Post thing the other day, but I thought it was a joke. Good lord.

There’s an argument to be made, though, that the Washington Post is just ahead of the curve here: (1) relentless demonising of whites will eventually cause whites to glom together, if only in self-defence; (2) there is a gap in the market for a unifying identity for America’s white population, and both “American”, “hyphenated-American”, as well as various religious or ideological alternatives, are insufficient. Ergo American whites will eventually come to define themselves as white.

This argument would also apply to all other countries with large white populations, unless that population does not face racial demonising, and/or has a strong alternative identity, e.g. a prevailing ethnicity or nationality.

Video Link

Morrissey courted similar controversies in the 90’s.

The British skinhead hardcore punk scene was far from exclusively left-wing. It’s just that the music press was exclusively left-wing, and so bands like Skrewdriver tended not to get any publicity.

You might object that a relevant factor in their obscurity was that they were shit, but that didn’t seem to hold Crass back.

So you have, basically, a black gang running a protection racket, and you can’t go to the police.

Isn’t this exactly what the mafia’s for?

I think it would be worth an intrepid journalist’s time to check whether other BLM locals are trying this, and in what cities they find it most difficult.

Are you not letting a narrow focus on legalism blind you to a problem here? All other things being equal, immigrants voting in primaries is going to push either party’s candidates in the policy directions favoured by immigrants. Even if they’re prevented from voting in the general election, they will still have had an impact upon it.

This is all closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, of course: millions of immigrants are going to make their presence felt, politically, even if they’re prevented from doing so formally. (Which doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be worth the effort to at least prevent them from doing so formally.)

Industrial-grade cringe. As a gay black Democrat politician, I apologise

I’d love to support her for president, but I don’t want to go through the charade of a shared bedroom for another eight years. I’ve proposed a secret tunnel from the White House to a Georgetown apartment that I’ll share with my assistants Rufus and Chad; negotiations are ongoing

You’re talking to a president, Gary, let’s try and keep it classy

Guns and blacks are not a good combination.

Is there a black population that suffers gun restrictions and thus has a lower murder rate?

Yeah, their Firearm murders are down, but their Sharpened Toothbrush and Bits of Old Dumbbell murders are off the charts

Many years ago, Steve Sailer suggested it would be a winning strategy for the GOP to implicitly label the Democrat party as just that–the party of and for blacks. But the Democrats have done it on their own. And they’ve done it against the best efforts of Republicans, who indefatigably try–and perpetually fail–to convince blacks that the party of Lincoln is their natural home.

I did have a 4D chess cope theory that the Republicans, at least under Trump, and maybe since before, are doing exactly what Steve suggested, just more subtly.

They can’t openly call the Democrats the black party, since that would be tantamount to admitting that they’re the white party, which would be racist, and would scare away white voters. They need to tag the Democrats as black without looking racist: how about making a big and ineffectual stink about attracting black voters? You don’t look racist, because you’re trying to reach out to blacks. (And whites surely appreciate it… Question for our gracious host: is there any data to assess the impact of Republican black outreach on the white vote?)

But, done right – that is to say, wrong – you drive blacks away. Maybe you’re condescending; maybe your eagerness is repulsive; maybe your policies are geared against them, and there’s no talking your way around that; maybe your focus on prison reform is insulting; maybe your black spokesmen are white-acting Uncle Toms and sellouts; etc, etc.

And if blacks are driven away from the Republican party, they are de facto driven into the Democratic party, which exacerbates their power within it. Meanwhile, by making such an open play for black voters, you tempt/push Democrats and/or blacks into one way or another publicly declaring Democrat ownership of the black vote, black support for Democrats, etc.

It would interesting to see Democrat/black reactions to Trump’s prison reform, palling around with Kanye West, retweeting Candace Owens… What message are they sending?

Reminder: this theory is cope, even if the effect described is real, it is most likely an accident. God smiles on fools, drunks, and the United States of America, and the Republican party ticks at least two of those boxes

This right here is why Trump’s continued success is absolutely vital: it discredits the media. Plenty of nice normal people still naively trust that the newspapers are accurate, and they need to be disabused of this notion as fast as possible.

Steve is fond of thinking that the powerful in America are using idiots like Ibram Kendi to stir up trouble, and that they think, perhaps wrongly, that they can tamp things down again once they’ve reaped the benefits.

But we must also consider the possibility that the powerful in America don’t think Ibram Kendi is an idiot, i.e., that they’re idiots too. It’s idiots all the way down!

You can tell that this guy was a phony by his name – which correctly spelled should be Bezimenov – which of course means “Without a name”.

Can someone confirm this? Google Translate is giving me “bez imeni”.

Odd that OP’s linked Twitter thread would leave out this detail; if this is true, then presumably the “Bezmenov” family mentioned did not actually exist, and the ID documents shown are phony, and so on.

FWIW, the videos I’d seen, he claimed he defected because he was appalled at USSR fomenting of revolution in Kashmir. Possibly he said different things depending on who was listening, or who was paying.

My question re: Bezmenov: is it necessary for him to be what he said he was? He’s like Q: sure, it’s a load of old bollocks, and maybe none of the particulars check out. But it’s not actually wrong, is it?

What I mean is, the brainwashing/propaganda process he described, at least in the video that I saw, seemed to be right on the money. Even if his timeline was wrong; even if the actions he ascribed to the KGB were more properly the actions of an independently motivated pinko class within the USA; even if he was overegging the pudding to squeeze money out of the John Birchers, or whoever it was; and even if he was a total fraud: is it not correct to say that the US has been, in his terminology, “demoralised”? Is that not a useful idea to float?

Hopefully it will still get an airing now that he’s been co-opted by the Russiagate crowd.

You jest, but the point probably still stands: Jews don’t secretly control your country, but your government does, and their methods are probably very similar to what’s in that book. (I wouldn’t know, I haven’t read it.)

The point stands, more broadly, for all fantastical claims of dubious provenance, religious texts, myths, even outright fiction: we don’t need things to be real to draw lessons from them.

Imagine if we restricted ourselves to only learning from that which we could verify to be true! We would, ironically, have to ignore OP’s claim that Bezmenov is “a fraud”, since his source is a Twitter thread full of (a) unsourced claims, (b) claims directly contradicted by sources, (c) claims that are neither proven nor disproven by sources – and all collated by (d) a guy who apparently thinks that Middle Earth is real.

(inb4 “Ah so u tHinK BeMENZTOB is TOTALLY LEGIT then!??!?” – no, see earlier comment)

I hate to go all conspiracy theory – oh wait, no I don’t – it’s precisely Detroit’s paucity of whites and college-educated blacks that prevents the organising of riots by the DNC/CIA/State dept./George Soros/Lex Luthor – the only option for controllable footsoldiers in Detroit is probably black gangs, who are too tough and scary for the bowtied bagmen to go near – Deep State’s only conduits to black gangs are black politicians and local police: the latter aren’t going to help get themselves defunded, and in Detroit the former, I dunno, maybe they’re still upset that Kwame Kilpatrick got hounded by the Feds and replaced with a white guy

I’m loving that guy pointlessly smashing up the displays while wearing a COVID mask and no shirt

I’m starting to have my doubts about all this. I mean, the idea is that the DNC arranges these riots in order to oust Trump, right? But can they really be that stupid? Don’t they remember Willie Horton? In their own telling, that’s what won Bush I the election. Ditto Nixon in ’68.

1992 is the counter point to that. Obama’s reelection also benefited from the Trayvon agitation in 2012. Stirring up black anger in an election year does seem to work.

Don’t I know it!

But there’s a knack to it that my colleagues seem to have lost. Election year black rage is best kept simmering under; you don’t want to let it boil over. We didn’t have any riots in 2012.

Re: 1992: LA riots were in May, and got shut down comparatively quickly. Maybe 6 months is enough time for people to forget – or maybe Bill Clinton was just that charming – or maybe George W. Bush was just that repulsively pussified – or maybe Ron Unz is right…

Jorge Ramos looks more the Aryan superman than Anderson Cooper

Sounds like a Michael Barrymore party

Why do these fakers run such terrible risks? Surely the idea would be to fake being black until you get tenure, and then “discover” that your parents had lied to you about your upbringing. Then you wouldn’t have to spend the rest of your life telling lies that could eventually be found out.

I suppose my mistake is in thinking these people, or any criminals or scammers, are level-headed and pursuing a rational plan with a sensible goal, rather than simply being barking mad, reckless nitwit shitbirds

Originally, Steve Martin was going to play the FBI agent and Arnold Schwarzenegger the mobster, but Arnold dropped out, so Martin switched over to playing the Henry Hill-derived character with Rick Moranis as the FBI agent.

Originally, it was going to be terrible, but after casting trouble, it was decided to make it even worse.

I was more thinking of Steve Martin’s awful cartoon wop mobster you can see in the trailer above

Haven’t seen it, but it strikes me that Cuties could make an even more powerful critique of paedo culture by simply being a documentary and using real clips that girls have uploaded onto TikTok (with their faces blurred out) – although it would still be gross… I guess what I’m saying is, if your argument is “These chicks are doing this stuff anyway, that’s why I’m critiquing it with my film” – well, if they’re already doing it, and it’s already on film, then you don’t need to generate any more of it, do you? You could critique precocious sexuality without increasing the sum total of it in the world.

And I don’t think blurring the faces of the young girls doing gross things would really accomplish much.

It would protect their identities, at least. I’m not arguing that anybody actually make such a documentary: it would be as disgusting as Cuties.

are you really suggesting that the world of fiction has no business exploring situations that exist in the real world?

I’m suggesting that “exploring the situation” here needn’t have meant paying teenage girls to twerk half-naked on camera, or whatever it is that they did. I’m frowning on the practice.

Do you need to understand *why* it’s a problem? Isn’t it enough that the narrator flat out tells you its was a problem?

And then, as the other guy said, all the body language etc suggests that this was different; on top of which, doesn’t Liotta’s narration explain the whole made man thing anyway at one point?

Concerns about the young actresses in Cuties are legitimate, but I think the concerns are mostly somewhat undefined. “It’s just wrong.” Well, how wrong? And wrong, how? What consequences are likely?

I personally am worried that a deranged paedophile will stalk one of the actresses and then try to impress her by assassinating the president

Imagine having to deal with that on top of being in a creepy Hollywood paedofilm in the first place – it’d be enough to turn you lezzer

Rawls will go first, because they, like me, don’t know who he is

Someone has to be heard of to be cancelled

No, they don’t. You think these mobs of nitwits have any idea whose statue it is they’re pulling down today?

It’s sufficient for one person to have heard of Rawls, and to denounce him. Nobody inclined to cancel him will be double-checking those claims, or researching his contributions to whatever field it was he contributed to. What does it matter what he did? He’s a racist!

Rawls is getting cancelled for sure, very problematic person, here he is using the N-word publicly

He probably thought he could get away with it because he’s a victim too

You sound bit testy, is Michelle threatening to throw you out a window again ?

She was speaking in code: she meant “drag me out of the closet”.

My point is that no-one’s going to defend Rawls, nor feel conflicted about his defenestration – or at least, not with as much gusto as wi’ t’others. No resistance = pushover

There’s so many fakes now, my new theory is that there aren’t actually any real black people. I mean, has anybody ever actually seen one?

I know I haven’t – I mean, take my own “black” family: I’m really Indonesian, and my wife is entirely animatronic

I reckon most Hispanics consider themselves white, even if they reject the label. Divide the world up into two, white and black. Which side will Hispanics break for? Maybe they don’t like whites, but they really don’t like blacks. Affirmative action is a black thing, ergo support for it makes one black; Hispanics hate blacks, and don’t want to be them; ergo, they don’t support affirmative action. Affirmative action is a thing to complain about, not to want.

Many eggheads will decry the above as illogical, even nonsensical (to say nothing of racist). Maybe they’re right – so what? It’s still true. Political support is a question of how a broad group of people feels, and feelings don’t have to make sense. The above analysis probably better explains the situation than anything else – or maybe it doesn’t, what the fuck do I know? I’m literally in my underpants right now

I thought she was already dead? Serious question: I thought she hadn’t been seen in public for months.

Perfect timing, for both sides: let’s not forget that this will greatly energise the Democrat base, and boost their turnout and grassroots funding – as well as granting cover to non-grassroots funding.

I realise this is a nitpick that doesn’t invalidate the spirit of the post, but I see no reason to believe she actually said that.

Personally, it’s not credible that the password’s publishing was an oversight, no matter how rushed the book was. The password is a totally irrelevant detail, story-wise; there’s no reason to include it. And if it were rushed, we’d expect more mistakes in the text. Are there spelling mistakes, or other errors of fact, that would indicate the usual internal scrutiny was bypassed?

I can maybe buy the Guardian’s assertion that Leigh believed the password was temporary, and chalk it up to a misunderstanding on his part. Perhaps he thought it made the story ever-so-slightly more dramatic, and that sharing the password was so inconsequential, security-wise, that it didn’t occur to him, or anybody else at the Guardian, not to do it. But it’s a huge stretch.

Far more likely is that there was at least someone at the Guardian who understood how grotesquely irresponsible revealing the password was, and someone else who understood it was unnecessary to include it to tell the story, and therefore that the leaking of the password was no accident.

Well, I don’t know all the ins and outs. But like I said: it would be a huge stretch if true; far more likely, it was deliberate.

I can only speculate as to why, but “to undermine and discredit Wikileaks” would be at the top of my list of possible motives.

Further baseless speculation: I find it curious that the release of such a large cache of secret documents would lead to, as I recall, exactly zero embarrassment or scandal or negative consequence of any kind. Even the supposed leaker – an agent of US military intelligence – got a presidential pardon. Meanwhile, the Guardian journalists who collaborated with Assange deliberately leaked the unredacted versions of the cables, which was used to discredit and prosecute him. Also, the cables were given to Assange the same year he was hit with bogus rape charges.

Was the whole thing a set-up? There’s no proof of that, and so the answer is definitely yes

This is Carlos Slim telling George Soros to quit while you’re ahead; it’s Steve’s much-mentioned “Antifa wind-down” in action, just a couple of months early. (Maybe Biden’s post-debate numbers really were that bad?)

Anyway:

…perhaps the mysterious Umbrella Man who apparently started the looting in Minneapolis by smashing an AutoZone window was a white leftist. The media trumpeted back in July that he’d been proven to be a rightwing extremist, but then that story vanished.

That was after Minneapolis PD turned up CCTV footage of the offender in action.

I saw a clip of some Proud Boys doing their initiation ceremony earlier. It was the dumbest gayest shit I’ve ever seen

Question: is it possible that back in the 50’s people thought the same of the KKK? In the movies they look like this fearsome terrorist group, but after being told to worry about the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Boys I’m starting to wonder. There seems a similar emphasis on the clothing, for instance

I suggest you take another look at the film’s politics. Some questions to ask yourself:

– The Russian villain got his start in life with some gold bars sent him from the future. Were there gold bars elsewhere in the film?
– The Russian villain’s chosen method of suicide is a suicide pill that the audience knows is a fake. Apparently he doesn’t know. Where did he get this pill?
– Who recruited the various members of the good guy’s team?
– Why don’t we ever get any information about these mysterious villains from the future? Why don’t they send back any futuristic technology?
– If time travel was invented in the future, then why are there time travel machines in the present?

If it irritates you that I’m being coy, I’ll explain what I mean below.

1. Trump is not a white nationalist, never has been.
2. Trump’s trying to win an election, not lose it.
3. Peeling off even small numbers of black voters upsets the Democratic applecart.
4. Black outreach is however more about the non-black voters: whites: fence-sitters, civnat boomers, women, etc: by conspicuously appealing to blacks, Trump neutralises the accusation of racism, which means those worried about being racist can vote for him comfortably; Asians, Hispanics: Trump demonstrates that he’s not just the white candidate, and hopefully prompts the Democrats to take steps to shore up their black vote with BLM-grade shenanigans that tag the Democrats as the black party and drive racist Asians and Hispanics to Trump.
5. $500 billion is small change and will probably never get spent anyway. Nobody should ever actually believe a politician’s promise, especially on the fine print, especially when the politician is Donald Trump.
6. OP is an idiot.

What are the odds a person will suffer an attempted carjacking at least once during their lifetime?

What are the odds a person will meet Bill Clinton at least once during their lifetime?

What are the odds that a person who knows Bill Clinton will suffer an attempted carjacking?

We were all expecting Biden to come down with it, we all forgot about Trump. Now that’s 4D chess!

An English friend recently described someone as “overfamiliar,” and I realized that in the US that concept doesn’t exist.

Showed this to an English friend: “This explains a lot about every single American I have ever met… another concept that apparently doesn’t exist in the US: talking quietly”

I don’t know

He also said American have “big faces”, I don’t know what that’s about

…Iqbal Khan, 39, who had been born in Pakistan but moved to Switzerland as a child. The two were discussing strategy one day late in 2015, according to people familiar with the incident, when Mr. Khan announced that he’d bought the house next door to Mr. Thiam’s in Herrliberg, a suburb with lofty prices and views of Lake Zurich. Mr. Thiam asked Mr. Khan if he was serious. Mr. Khan said yes.

Lol! Khan knew exactly what he was doing.

CCTV footage of the conversation

“If they’re cheating, then I’m stupid, therefore they aren’t cheating”

Off the top of my head: fake IDs, phone hidden in the bathroom, notes left in the bathroom

And that’s just outright cheating. The other gentleman explained what is meant by “gaming”.

If you think they’re not cheating, and “gaming” is the same as learning, by all means, surprise one of these kids, a year or two later, with some calculus questions. (Hey, there’s an idea for a study!) The whole point of learning something is that you’re able to recall it later without having prepared to recall it. Can these kids do that?

…at Westminster an A was 70% right on a test. The point was to make the tests so hard as to remind even know-it-all youngsters that they don’t know it all.

Wouldn’t that be rather counterproductive? No wonder Britain’s elites ain’t what they used to be

Sorry, maybe I’m stupid, but is this saying that Asians are a greater proportion of students, or that Asians are getting smarter?

The worst was “Did not attend any White House Correspondents Dinners”

There was a time when, if I saw something like that on The Simpsons, I would have been sure they were joking

Isn’t this just like the old saw about the stock market, that the crash comes when too few people remember the last one?

How many of these younguns were in a fight when they were kids? When they were adults? Ever got robbed, etc?

Possible proxies: does the survey break down by income, social class, university education, location? I note high support among “liberals”.

Arguing against this is high support among Hispanics and blacks, who are poorer and more exposed to crime.

“And where else but Victoria, and where else but Melbourne, would we be getting that opportunity?”

Several other places in Australia

> extreme differences in cultural attitudes and laws regarding speech and guns

More urbanised, less organised

When we say, “Tonight, you’ll be hearing symphonies by Johannes Brahms and Edmond Dédé,” we’re linguistically treating both composers as being equally worthy of attention.

It still stuns to find that there exist people daft enough to think this gaslighting would actually work.

Knock knock

Who’s there?

Knock knock

Who’s there?

Knock knock

Who’s there?

Knock knock

Who’s there?

Philip Glass

Who reads this things?

Pretty much just Steve Sailer

“We fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here”

…the burned-out jeep with the bundle of forged plans in the front seat designed to frustrate the Japanese advance; the carefully abandoned haversack full of misleading information; the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force member in the Allied Commander Lord Mountbatten’s HQ in Ceylon instructed to write letters about spurious troop movements to a non-existent boyfriend in the hope that they would be steamed open by enemy agents.

How much happened in the 20th century because well-to-do overgrown children wanted to LARP as spies and adventurers?

Incidentally, I believe some historians make the argument that German intelligence wasn’t fooled by this stuff, but passed it upstairs anyway, because German intelligence, or elements therein, were part of a rival faction, and sought to undermine Hitler et al. (This jibes well with the stuff on Admiral Canaris’s Wikipedia page.)

(My personal conspiracy theory is that the Allies, or elements therein, intended to use Germany to destroy Russia (and thereby communism), and vice versa, and that this explains much of the activity on the western front in the early years of the war: the Phoney War, France’s “defeat”, German restraint at Dunkirk, the half-heartedness of Germany’s attempts at subduing Britain, Rudolf Hess’s “peace mission”, everything Canaris did, etc, etc. Plans changed when the Russians turned the tide at Stalingrad: the Allies realised they were going to have to invade western Europe themselves, to stop the Russians taking it all; their friends in Germany tried to remove Hitler ahead of schedule, but failed and/or were betrayed by the Allies, who decided not to make peace with Germany as they’d promised. This makes as much sense to me as anything I’ve read from legit historians.)

Cool, that either means I’m right or I’m a useful idiot

I’m really starting to think they’re losing on purpose at this point

When one group uses by any means necessary, and the other group says that certain means are off limits, who will win?

Ask Gandhi

One lesson to be learned from this, at least for billionaires, is that it’s not enough to fund media – you must also fund education. You can spend all the money you like on your non-partisan truth-seeking media outfit, and tell the people you’ve hired what you expect of them, but it’ll all be for naught if they didn’t get a non-partisan truth-seeking education. They’re gonna stick to the ideas of right and wrong, and fair, and true, that they learned at school. “Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.”

(Yes, you could do a better job of hiring than simply taking in people with the right credentials and reputation – except that you’re a billionaire with no media experience, so you must rely on someone else’s expertise, and how do you gauge that except via credentials and reputation?)

As George Orwell pointed out in his essay on Gandhi, the reason that Gandhi was successful was precisely because his opponents were morally restrained.

This is precisely why I mentioned him. People here are getting caught up worrying about bloodthirsty communists like Bill Ayers, and Antifa, and so on, but they are nothing by themselves: their success is ultimately contingent on the support of millions of ordinary, well-meaning, morally restrained Americans. The path suggested by the commenter I replied to would do nothing but horrify these people, to the ultimate benefit of the commenter’s enemies.

What I mean by “support”: most of the morally restrained Americans I mentioned do not support bloodthirsty communists directly. In fact, they likely reject them. But those communists have the benefit of the support of the media, most politicians, big business, high finance, the universities, the intelligence agencies, the civil service, etc, etc, and they in turn have the support of the aforesaid morally restrained people.

You are not in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Communist China or Communist Cuba. You’re in liberal America.

lol, I fucking knew some smartarse would come in with the “well hacckshhually Gandhi blah blah blah”

Question: when you take your morning shit, does it lower your IQ?

(It’s a “shit-for-brains” joke)

Every time I try to be pithy on the internet, it backfires. There’s always a couple of people quite determined to miss the point. Can’t you people just insert all the other names of successful nonviolent political campaigners and deduce my point therefrom? If you need it spelling out further, see my other comment

Conspiracy theory types have been pointing out oddities in Minnesota since at least George Floyd’s death, and probably way before. So maybe it’s just a very corrupt state. (Ron Unz might have a hypothesis here.)

Never take a prediction I make seriously again, just come for the data we present!

It’s relying on data that led you astray in the first place. No survey can possibly capture all relevant factors; you’ll always be flying blind. (To say nothing of incompetence, poor methodology, and outright lies on the part of pollsters.)

My advice is to remain skeptical in both directions: demand explanations for dubious-sounding data, but also don’t assume that there couldn’t be innocent explanations.

Since there definitely is at least some fraud, my advice is to presume fraud in all cases, and thereby maximally expose fraud; even in cases where mistakes eventually prove innocent, electoral officials will at least be motivated not to make such mistakes next time.

Write, call, protest, etc. Get your local politician, of either party, on record decrying vote fraud. Advertiser boycotts to target media companies that abet it. Etc, etc.

Boss, does this really pass the smell test to you? Trump does better in every demographic except white men? In a context of rampant vote fraud and massively erroneous polling?

Adept vote concoction is a traditional folk art practiced mostly in big cities with a Catholic political heritage

What could he mean by this

Seen on Reddit:

– Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises, New York Times, Oct. 6, 2012
– Building Confidence in U.S. Elections, Commission on Federal Election Reform, Sep. 2005
– Purity of Elections in the UK: Causes for Concern, Stuart Wilks-Heeg of the University of Liverpool on behalf of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, 2008
– UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 2 NOVEMBER 2004 ELECTIONS OSCE/ODIHR NEEDS ASSESSMENT MISSION REPORT, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, 7-10 September 2004
– UNITED STATES OF AMERICA GENERAL ELECTIONS OSCE/ODIHR Limited Election Observation Mission Report, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, 6 November 2012
– UNITED STATES OF AMERICA GENERAL ELECTIONS OSCE/ODIHR Election Observation Mission Final Report, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, 8 November 2016
– Handbook for European Union Election Observation, 2nd ed., European Commission, February 2008
– Out of Country Voting, ACE Project Electoral Knowledge Network
– Election Observation Handbook, 6th ed., Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, 2010
– Mail-in ballots were part of a plot to deny Lincoln reelection in 1864, Washington Post, Aug. 22, 2020

Haven’t actually read any of these but apparently they all say mail-in ballots more fraudey than regular ones, provide examples

“If you back down now, we’ll make you regret it. Please back down.”

The polls were wrong, ballots were obviously stuffed en masse, the demographic breakdown of the vote is nonsensical, and there’s about to be lawsuits galore, maybe even audits.

Why would we be pegging our hot takes to the data, especially at this time?

Which of these religious groups can be found in large concentrations in districts controlled by Democratic political machines?

It’s never Catholics and athiests, is it?

Saw Tariq Nasheed on youtube earlier complaining that Bill Gates was going to use black people as guinea pigs for his vaccine – and now this…

The PNA reported the incident to local police and tried to trace the origin of the email, but to no avail.

Mmhmm

If mass mail-in balloting is now a feature of our electoral landscape–and given the inherent advantages it provides Democrats, it probably is–one upside is that it serves as another nail in the coffin of Koch Brothers conservatism. If every person in the country gets a ballot, Trump Republicanism retains an outside chance. Romney Republicanism, though, has not a hope in hell.

Are we still thinking the election’s been decided already? :p

If Trump wins, mail-in ballots might get the kibosh. He’s gonna have to do something to reform elections, and it may as well be that. France gets by well enough with a proxy voting system for absentee voters, apparently. (Proxy voting still offers scope for fraud, so perhaps dirty politicians won’t even object too much!)

But even supposing widespread postal voting continues, I think it would benefit the Romney GOP. There’s a flaw in your logic: Romney’s politics are unpopular, therefore he’d fail under postal voting, unlike Biden. But Biden did fail. He “won” on a platform of giving AIDS to schoolchildren and war with Russia, or something like that – was that really popular?

Barack Obama had to pretend like he wasn’t very much in favour of gay orgies marriage; Biden didn’t. That’s not just the changing social landscape at work: that’s a political campaign that doesn’t have to take a centrist position and doesn’t have to care about swing voters because they’re going to rely on fraud. (Wasn’t Biden campaigning in blue states right up til the end? Didn’t he pick a Californian for VP? Have you checked out Biden’s Twitter in the last few days of the campaign? Is that a guy reaching out to fence sitters, or bolstering his base?)

Point being, postal voting doesn’t enfranchise more voters – it disenfranchises the existing ones – it facilitates vote fraud, and vote fraud facilitates the “victory” of unpopular candidates, as we just saw with Biden. In a hypothetical future of mass mail voting, then, Romney has a better path to victory than ever before: as long as he cuts the right deals with the people who fake the vote and the people who gaslight the public, he can be a shoo-in, and almost forego the formality of a campaign entirely. (Although red meat for the base is probably a good idea, since the political machine that delivers the votes needs cogs, as it were.)

Indeed, we basically saw this happening already with Biden: didn’t all the neoconservatives and so on flee the Republican party and endorse Biden?