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From the NYT:
National Front Faces Tougher Climb to Victory in France
By ADAM NOSSITER DEC. 11, 2015PARIS — After a week in which she and her far-right National Front party seemed ascendant, Marine Le Pen is heading into Sunday’s second round of French regional elections facing a new and more challenging political equation that will test the appeal of her nationalist, anti-immigrant message.
The National Front was the clear winner in the first round last week, stunning the governing Socialists as well as the mainstream conservative party, the Republicans, and raising expectations that Ms. Le Pen would emerge from the second round with victories in at least two regions. But the latest polling suggests that she could be in for a tough battle both in the northern region around Lille, where she is on the ballot herself, and in a southern region around Nice being contested by her niece Marion Marechal Le Pen.
The difference: The Socialist Party candidates, who finished third in the first round of both those races, withdrew this week in order to leave the field clear for the Republicans. Their logic is that it is better to unify the anti-National Front vote, despite the enmity between the Socialists and the Republicans, than to allow Ms. Le Pen to split the vote of the more traditional parties.
Blue might beat pink, but blue has harder time beating gray
It’s basic median voter theorem: in a two party race, it’s hard for the right to beat the center-right.
The National Front’s problem is that France has shifted rightwards in general, so there aren’t many NF versus Socialist head to head contests. Instead there are a lot of runoffs between the NF and Sarkozy’s center-right party, now called the Republicans.
Before the first round, Sarkozy rejected promising to throw the second round for the Socialists the way the Socialists have done for him. So that makes his party look better in the eyes of voters who find themselves attracted to both parties that are right of center, in that Sarkozay said he would have given the NF a fair chance to beat the Socialists if the Socialists had more often beaten Sarkozy’s Republicans for second place. Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission prophesying the center-right throwing the 2022 election to a new Muslim party to defeat the National Front may have actually helped the center-right in this election by discouraging them from being too obvious: the image of the center-right turning the Presidency over to the Muslims was too memorable.
Here’s something interesting:
The careful French [Le Pen] deploys, classically rooted, and the way she uses references to France’s cultural heritage — she invoked a famous 19th-century painting, Théodore Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” — are anything but populist. Instead, they evoke what she called “the millennial values which have created France,” a cultural legacy of centuries that the National Front insists is now threatened by what it calls “the migratory submersion.”
In France, a lucid prose style is patriotic. The French (e.g., Descartes and Pascal) invented the classic style of prose in the 17th Century, while the English were still writing convoluted prose. The French have been proud (rightfully) of this great leap forward in human communication capability ever since.
That reminds me of all the literary references in Houellebecq’s Submission to the 19th Century decadent novelist Huysmans and other classics. The other Houellebecq novel I read, The Elementary Particles, was more sci-fi. This one was more assertive of Houellebecq’s claim to be part of the grand tradition of French literature.
I sense a certain tag team aspect of what Le Pen and Houellebecq are up to.
I’ve read that Putin has the best cultivated Russian accent of a Moscow top dog at least since Lenin, and that that’s part of his appeal. You saw with the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics that Putin can take the cultural level upscale when he wants to.
That raises an interesting question about Trump. Obviously, he’s a master of going on live television and winging it in demotic English. But a lot of people assume he can’t give a formal, Presidential-sounding speech when the situation demands it. Can he?
But the Front’s opponents consider handing over to her even limited powers intolerable.
The National Front needs administrative experience. It’s not good for France to have a major party that hasn’t run anything.
Mr. Valls said on Friday that an ascendant Front could lead to “civil war” in France, and that its program was a “swindle.”
Perhaps it’s not terribly responsible for the Prime Minister to talk about civil war?
What was it Houellebecq called Valls, in his NYT op/ed, “a congenital moron”?
Speaking of Le Pen and Trump:
https://twitter.com/RosieGray/status/675371288601456640
Insecurities
feed
rise of
right-leaning
worries
fears
terrorism
rise
right wing
Damn. My liver isn't going to survive the rest of the year, never mind the rest of the 2016 electioneering.
http://www.english.rfi.fr/africa/20150829-marine-le-pen-calls-end-legal-immigration-france
I'm not worried about her comments.
From your Milton link, foreshadowing your own contribution by a century or four.
We’ve had enough of the hat lately; what’s been lacking is the cattle. Let’s get those back in the barn before we worry about having a big to do.
OT: Federal Judge Who Outlawed Racial Profiling is Victim of Black Mob Violence
I'd be interested to learn what taxes a 16-year-old black kid in Over-the-Rhine (talk about demographic transition) might pay.
Federal income tax on the minimum-wage job he might have, thanks to the relative lack of "Latinos" in his city? No, it's way below the threshold, and his mom's EITC will cover his FICA.
Property tax on his subsidized apartment?
Excise taxes on straw purchases of liquor, cigarettes, and perhaps guns?
Sales tax on Air Jordans and Little Debbies? (Does Ohio tax food and clothhing? My state doesn't.)
Sales tax on replacement batteries!
Stories like this I savor with a shot of good scotch.Replies: @ben tillman
Vive Jean-Marie LePen!
Perhaps it’s not terribly responsible for the Prime Minister to talk about civil war?
The Left is the same everywhere – party interests take precedence over national interests. Socialists will ally with the Republicans to block the Front because this allows them to sustain their ideals, they’ll launch a civil war to protect their socialist ideals rather than allow French national interests to win the day.
Speaking of Le Pen and Trump:
https://twitter.com/RosieGray/status/675371288601456640Replies: @TangoMan, @Olorin, @Steve Sailer, @JohnnyWalker123
She’s doing a Clinton triangulation move. “See, I’m more moderate than Trump – you can feel safe voting for me.” Her goal is to get elected, not be ideologically pure.
Also worth bearing in mind a few differences between France and the US: France has maybe 10x as many Muslims as a % of its population, it's more confident in the supremacy of its national culture, and its not as concerned about civil liberties in law enforcement.Replies: @Ad Victoriam
That Spaniard, Manuel Valls, knows full well that civil war – fought on racial lines – is more or less inevitable to occur on the territory occupied by European France, at some in determinant time in the future.
It is *inevitable* that France will end up as a majority black/brown Muslim dominated state.
Knowing the national character of the indigenous French, it is also very likely that the indigenous French will launch some kind of aggressive counterattack.
Valls knows this. The entirety of the French political class knows this. After all, they created and nurtured this situation for decades. They also know that they will likely be dead once it comes to pass.
Thus, they ‘can’t help’ but to let it slip sometimes. It’s all about Freudian projection and suppressed guilt and fear.
My guess is: The huge terrifying threat to the ruling class right now is that they've been running policies that aren't very popular, those policies are visibly causing problems, and so some challengers are threatening to take away power from the folks currently on top. That's why they're tossing around terms like civil war--they're really scared of that loss of power.Replies: @Anonymous, @SFG, @Bill B.
I wonder if she thinks Trump’s proposal was to ban the Muslims already there.
Also worth bearing in mind a few differences between France and the US: France has maybe 10x as many Muslims as a % of its population, it’s more confident in the supremacy of its national culture, and its not as concerned about civil liberties in law enforcement.
I don't disagree with any of that, but the less-than-civil-liberty-concerned police actions they have engaged in post-attack are like stitching the skin back together of a sucking gunshot wound to the chest. Sure, you've stopped the external bleeding, but there is still massive damage under the surface that is not going to magically go away. Their heads are still in the sand. Perhaps they'll be 'confident' in their culture right up to the time when it's taken away from them. I probably won't live long enough to see it, but I expect, with healthy diet and exercise, to watch the final death throes of Sweden.Replies: @AndrewR, @Dave Pinsen
This happened in Canada a few years back. The upstart Wildrose Party was poised to win the provincial election in Alberta, deposing the long-sitting “right-wing” Progressive Conservatives. The establishment pincer went into full action, with all other factions throwing their support behind their traditional enemies the PCs rather than allow the icky “crypto-Nazi” Wildrose win.
I’m posting from my phone right now otherwise I’d provide the link — just youtube “alberta can’t belive i’m voting PC” and you’ll see the Canadian version of the Coalition of the Fringes upholding the status-quo.
I am surprised Marine Le Pen is as successful as she is. Some time ago she gave an interview with the BBC in which they asked her what her repsonse was to those calling her a fascist and a racist. In her reply she denied these charges, said she wasn’t a racist. She ought to have just said what she stood for, “To those who say I am a racist, I say that I stand for the right of France to retain its French character, for…” Or whatever she stands for. Trump would have had better instincts. Don’t apologise. Don’t fight on the battlefield chosen by the enemy. How are these things not obvious? I hope Trump’s example will serve as a lesson.
I read Clear and Simple as the Truth. It didn’t do me any good. Or maybe I only read the first half; it was very boring.
Most French people d'un certain age on hearing Marine's statement of unracism/non-whatever-the-Evil-Thing of the moment will instantly have compared it to
"Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first." -Charles de Gaulle
Although we've not yet rewound all the way back to " Je vous ai compris !"
Odds
Virtually the entire French establishment — media, intelligentsia, the other parties — are arrayed against the FN. Talk about ‘negative’ campaigning — it’s nothing but, 24/7 — the BBC never runs an article about the FN where they fail to refer to the party as “far-right”, a term as loaded as they get.
You failed to highlight the best part — from the transcript of the 911 call:
“There’s three black men with guns at our house,” Dlott told a 911 operator after she escaped the home invasion and ran to her neighbor’s house one mile away.
And just in case the operator did not hear her the first time, Dlott said it again: “My husband and the dogs are still there. There are three black men with guns and masks at the house.”
French online magazine published a call – since removed – from a guy called Thierry Lecoquierre for right wing French women to be raped by “Blacks, Arabs, Gypsy people”.
Hopefully that will backfire and help the polling.
http://galliawatch.blogspot.com/2015/12/headbands-rape-and-civil-war.htmlReplies: @John Gruskos
But it was much worse than your description. He called for them to be raped and impregnated so they would have curly-headed children.
It was an overt incitement to genocide.
Speaking of Le Pen and Trump:
https://twitter.com/RosieGray/status/675371288601456640Replies: @TangoMan, @Olorin, @Steve Sailer, @JohnnyWalker123
PeakNewsPeak drinking game!
Insecurities
feed
rise of
right-leaning
worries
fears
terrorism
rise
right wing
Damn. My liver isn’t going to survive the rest of the year, never mind the rest of the 2016 electioneering.
In “Blue might beat pink, but blue has harder time beating gray”, it would help if blue were a bit bigger than the pink, or if you swapped the colors.
Very much not the case. During his nationally-televised speech to the Duma asking them to approve intervention in Ukraine, he said something along the lines of:
The Moscow police failed to arrest Mr. Putin for homosexual propaganda.
In these situations in the USA, sometimes elections are decided by whether a party that does not want to contest an election can actually remove itself from the ballot.
If the Socialists stay on the ballot in the two Le Pen regions, hard to believe they would not draw 3-5% or so.
Also worth bearing in mind a few differences between France and the US: France has maybe 10x as many Muslims as a % of its population, it's more confident in the supremacy of its national culture, and its not as concerned about civil liberties in law enforcement.Replies: @Ad Victoriam
“… and its not as concerned about civil liberties in law enforcement.”
I don’t disagree with any of that, but the less-than-civil-liberty-concerned police actions they have engaged in post-attack are like stitching the skin back together of a sucking gunshot wound to the chest. Sure, you’ve stopped the external bleeding, but there is still massive damage under the surface that is not going to magically go away. Their heads are still in the sand. Perhaps they’ll be ‘confident’ in their culture right up to the time when it’s taken away from them. I probably won’t live long enough to see it, but I expect, with healthy diet and exercise, to watch the final death throes of Sweden.
So the Left and Les Republicains are basically a Popular Front, united only in who they oppose. Sounds a lot like the “coalition of the fringes” that is often discussed here. It is inherently unstable, as France’s experience with a Popular Front in the 1930s shows.
Global Front
If you want to understand Houellebecq, don’t miss his oft-neglected “The Possibility of an Island.”
Much of his preoccupation seems to be with Western civilisation’s inability to perpetuate itself. If you can’t do that, you don’t have a civilization.
Perhaps a Muslim takeover is the thing that will put western civilization out of its misery, but if that’s not it, it’ll be something else.
My sense is that the civilizational "identity" of Europe is revealed by Houellebecq to be the Roman Empire--which can flourish in a pagan, Christian, and the projected Islamic form. It needs religion to sustain itself; but the religious underpinning is irrelevant doctrinally, so long as it promotes social cohesion and a "thick," believable moral environment.
A key political fact in the book (which I found tremendously enjoyable) is that while the Socialist alliance brings the Moslem Brotherhood to power, all of the latter's enthusiasts, and its most powerful actors, are associated with the French right. They seem to embrace Islam as the pathway--perhaps the last one left--to renewing French greatness, and perpetuating the big European idea envisioned by Augustus, Charles Martel, and now Ben Abbes.Replies: @Richard, @Anonymous
I'm posting from my phone right now otherwise I'd provide the link -- just youtube "alberta can't belive i'm voting PC" and you'll see the Canadian version of the Coalition of the Fringes upholding the status-quo.Replies: @Another Canadian, @ben tillman, @AndrewR
Yeah, but the NDP is running the place now so how’d that strategy work out in the end?
Much of his preoccupation seems to be with Western civilisation's inability to perpetuate itself. If you can't do that, you don't have a civilization.
Perhaps a Muslim takeover is the thing that will put western civilization out of its misery, but if that's not it, it'll be something else.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @ChrisZ
A question about Houellebecq: How good is he (in French)? Or is his artistic advantage that he’s a fairly explicit Man of the Right in an era when other male top writers (e.g., David Foster Wallace) were in the closet about being rightists?
FN has never been very good at politics, in addition to not having run anything. They have always reminded me of the American Paulist/Lew Rockwell/Libertarian types who seem to invest more in being weird for the sake of being weird than in learning how to be good at politics. My sense with FN is that the way to make them go away is let them win an election. Even running a small town would be enough to discredit them forever.
That’s what I find fascinating about Team Trump. They seem to be good at politics, despite their man’s grating style. Their manipulation of the free media has been as masterful as you will ever see in American politics. Progressives are the gold standard, but they own the megaphones.
Team Trump is using the tactics of the Progressives. David Horowitz has written a lot about how radicals have a different way of understanding the world. That even though he has left the movement, he still sees the world as a radical seed it. Whittaker Chambers wrote similarly about communism.
The Muslim business is a great example. Instead of trying to fit the events into his immigration proposals, Trump takes what’s there to shift the debate in his direction. If a nation is willing to debate a ban on Muslim immigration, it can debate bans on all other types of immigration so he spends some capital on getting the media to legitimize the debate.
It’s the same dynamic we saw with gay marriage, except that was orchestrated by the party and the media in a coordinated effort. Team Trump is doing this from outside the walls which is not something we have seen in our lifetimes.
He's not particularly charismatic. He does have a good read on largely neglected segment of the American public, and he is great showmanship and manipulating the media.
A part of me hopes there is some moral conviction there, too, but I wouldn't bet my life on it.
In these few months, Trump has exposed the rank-and-file Republican apparatchiks as complete amateurs. Not just in campaigning, but in opening up possibilities in politics (as you say).
It's infuriating to have such obvious confirmation that the leaders of the Republican party are so at sea. It ought to embarrass them; instead of complaining about Trump they should be apologizing to their loyal voters.
The Left is the same everywhere - party interests take precedence over national interests. Socialists will ally with the Republicans to block the Front because this allows them to sustain their ideals, they'll launch a civil war to protect their socialist ideals rather than allow French national interests to win the day.Replies: @Steve Sailer
“Civil war” is pretty, you know, severe …
I know little about France but I know the analogous situation here would end very, very poorly for the left.
If leftists started a civil war against Trump supporters, it wouldn't last all that long unless the police and military took the left's side, which is unlikely.
I'd be curious to know more about French gun laws and how gun ownership correlates with political orientation there. Also the likelihood that the police and military would take the side of FN's enemies if they started a civil war to destroy FN.
Speaking of Le Pen and Trump:
https://twitter.com/RosieGray/status/675371288601456640Replies: @TangoMan, @Olorin, @Steve Sailer, @JohnnyWalker123
“Paris is well worth a Mass,” as the Protestant Henri IV said in 1598 when converting to Catholicism so he could assume the throne of France.
I’m sure most iSteve readers have noticed the tendency of the media to select unflattering photographs of nationalist politicians, poor Nick Griffin has one glass eye so they always managed to find a picture in which his eyes are pointing in different directions, I don’t recall seeing a bad photo of Marine Le Pen, however. What’s up with that?
Steve please do a post about the Colorado ACLU board member who said that Trump supporters need to be murdered.
He resigned as board member but the CO ACLU issued the weakest possible “non-condoning” of his claim.
http://aclu-co.org/aclu-comment-personal-facebook-post-regional-volunteer-loring-wirbel/
I want nothing less than the director of the Colorado branch of the ACLU to resign for posting such a weak blog post “not condoning” what Wirbel said. The blog post used much harsher language to condemn Trump for his immigration remarks: “admonish”, “hateful” etc. http://aclu-co.org/aclu-comment/
I also want nothing less than the director of the national ACLU to issue an explicit statement claiming that what Wirbel said is far worse than anything Trump has ever even implied, let alone explicitly said.
I’d also like to put pressure on law enforcement to prosecute Wirbel to the fullest extent of the law.
I would love to see Trump talk about this and get his supporters to pressure the ACLU and law enforcement.
I heard about all this from Coulter, who as we all know has been the single most influential person on Trump’s campaign, so maybe he’ll talk about it anyway.
But I haven’t gotten this riled up in a while. Please post about it.
He may be sentient excrement, but he broke no law. The First Amendment works for this jerk, too. Its for everybody.
Leftists say these sorts of things all the time. This is nothing new. If we controlled the media, then we could get those people to resign or be fired. We don't. At least not yet.Replies: @AndrewR
Hopefully that will backfire and help the polling.Replies: @fnn, @Reg Cæsar, @ben tillman, @yaqub the mad scientist
More detail:
http://galliawatch.blogspot.com/2015/12/headbands-rape-and-civil-war.html
Jean Daniel, (né Jean Daniel Bensaid) (21 July 1920-) is an Algerian-born French-Jewish journalist and author. He is the founder and executive editor of Le Nouvel Observateur weekly.Replies: @Bill B., @Anonymous
Pretty well for the “can’t believe I’m voting PC”-ers.
This poem, from today’s Writers Almanac makes me wistful for what we may have had at one time in the past. Our strength and our weakness. Today particularly relevant to BLM.
Praising Manners
by Robert Bly
We should ask God
To help us toward manners. Inner gifts
Do not find their way
To creatures without just respect.
If a man or woman flails about, he not only
Smashes his house,
He burns the whole world down.
Your depression is connected to your insolence
And your refusal to praise. If a man or woman is
On the path, and refuses to praise — that man or woman
Steals from others every day — in fact is a shoplifter!
The sun became full of light when it got hold of itself.
Angels began shining when they achieved discipline.
The sun goes out whenever the cloud of not-praising comes near.
The moment that foolish angel felt insolent, he heard the door close
False flag patsies. But what’s the motivation? Oswald was a coup against JFK, 9/11 was to demonize Muslims for Israel’s benefit.
http://teapartyeconomist.com/2015/12/12/video-eyewitnesses-in-san-bernardino-three-tall-white-men/
Exactly. What's the motivation? To make people fear muslims and want to restrict them - the very thing the government and wealthy elites obviously do not want to happen.
Have you false-flaggers ever stopped to consider that perhaps the whole "false-flag" narrative is..................a false flag. A government directed psy-op designed to deflect public scrutiny away from muslim immigration, neutralize opposition to the government (you guys all mistrust the government, but you don't threaten it or interfere with it in the least). It might also serve to deflect public attention from a few rare instances that really are false-flag attacks conducted by the government, since you guys have so thoroughly poisoned the well by crying wolf every single time. Also, notice who these purported shadowy government operatives always are - white men. This further cements the idea in peoples heads that white men are sinister and dangerous, and that they have no compunction about slaughtering innocent women and children if they are paid, or ordered to do so. Amiri Bakara couldn't write a better story than that to defame whites.
You want to know who the patsy is? Maybe you are the patsy.
Steve, I followed your link to the Thomas and Turner book. It looks interesting. Have you read it and do you recommend it?
As an observation on prose style, I don’t usually notice the style you employ here on your blog. Some of your posts are more stylized than others, but the blog has always been an easy read. I think that means that you are doing it right.
But if you really want to be respectable, you need to add more PoMo punctuation puns.
If the Socialists stay on the ballot in the two Le Pen regions, hard to believe they would not draw 3-5% or so.Replies: @Diversity Heretic
In France there is no ballot in the sense that there is in the U.S. You ask for pieces of paper with the candidate’s names printed on them–more than the one for which you’re actually going to vote. Yyou deposit the paper with the candidates you want in the ballot box and keep the others. It’s a simple matter to withdraw from the election–your name simply isn’t available. I don’t think it’s possible to cast a blank ballot. The counting system is surprisingly labor intensive although the results are generally available fairly quickly.
Le Pen is National Left.
Nationalism on identity and borders, left on economic message.
Sarkozy is center-globalist, and Hollande is ultra-globalist.
The idea that Republicans are ‘center-right’ is totally false.
Just to be contrary, I didn’t see the BBC interview but I’ve seem many Marine interviews in the French media and she always handles them pretty much perfectly, often given answers along the lines you suggest.
“So the Left and Les Republicains are basically a Popular Front”
Global Front
My wife, French major and daughter of French-speaking father, always praises his sense of language.
That's what I find fascinating about Team Trump. They seem to be good at politics, despite their man's grating style. Their manipulation of the free media has been as masterful as you will ever see in American politics. Progressives are the gold standard, but they own the megaphones.
Team Trump is using the tactics of the Progressives. David Horowitz has written a lot about how radicals have a different way of understanding the world. That even though he has left the movement, he still sees the world as a radical seed it. Whittaker Chambers wrote similarly about communism.
The Muslim business is a great example. Instead of trying to fit the events into his immigration proposals, Trump takes what's there to shift the debate in his direction. If a nation is willing to debate a ban on Muslim immigration, it can debate bans on all other types of immigration so he spends some capital on getting the media to legitimize the debate.
It's the same dynamic we saw with gay marriage, except that was orchestrated by the party and the media in a coordinated effort. Team Trump is doing this from outside the walls which is not something we have seen in our lifetimes.Replies: @Blobby5, @polynikes, @ChrisZ, @5371, @John Gruskos
I believe Ron Paul is truly a principled man, was amazing to me how far he got. I have recently noticed how much Lew and the Rothbardians are in sync with the paleo-conservatives, especially on welfare and more surprisingly immigration (I thought they were open border types). They still disagree with Pat Buchanan on free trade and I side with Pat on protectionism, how can we possibly compete in a cheap labor and low regulated world?
Marine Le Pen said that about Trump’s proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the US not because she has an ulterior motive but because it’s an idiotic idea on the face of it. Trump’s rhetorical style is to make an idiotic or outrageous assertion and then make it seem plausible and even attractive as he fills in the details and allows for exceptions. That’s his sales technique. Marine Le Pen was responding to Trump’s opening pitch. If Trump had been in the room when she said that I’m sure he’d pipe up with “you didn’t let me finish!”.
Except that Marine Le Pen is not well-regarded among the hardcore nationalists of the FN, whether Poujadist or Legitimist (her niece Marion is however very well-regarded by the traditional party cadres), especially since she cooperated in ousting her father earlier this year. I argued to a friend, “She’s not a nationalist; she betrayed her father and she’ll betray her country. The third commandment comes before the fifth; in my mind what she did was worse than murder.”
And I assure you it all goes far, far beyond some latter-day Ligue Catholique faction plotting in the midst of a last gasp attempt to put the Guise family on the throne. The general consensus among people “like us” in France is that she takes us for granted, knowing the only other option is the former UMP which with its new name “Les Républicains” does not seduce any nostalgic of imperial or regal glory. Her line of thought has been described in the mainstream press as a “cynical Gaullist co-optation,” though that’s not quite correct: notwithstanding her praises for Charles de Gaulle himself and her policy proposals which on reflection could fit into theirs, she does not hide her contempt for his protégés and political descendants. (On this point I have to agree with her, albeit with some qualifications.)
Meanwhile, her right-hand man, the flamboyant Florian Philippot (well-surrounded I might add by the passive would-be pénétrés of the FNJ) is a former protégé of the socialist-sovereignist Jean-Pierre Chevènement (who is little more than a dinosaur of old inter-war Radical nostagia) willing to say or do anything to eat away at the left’s working class vote, admirably in one sense but without regard for the future cost of certain moves.
I definitely want Marion to win in PACA. I won’t be too upset if her aunt or Philippot lose in their respective fiefs.
I'm posting from my phone right now otherwise I'd provide the link -- just youtube "alberta can't belive i'm voting PC" and you'll see the Canadian version of the Coalition of the Fringes upholding the status-quo.Replies: @Another Canadian, @ben tillman, @AndrewR
Or the Canadian version of “Vote for the crook; it’s important!”
That's what I find fascinating about Team Trump. They seem to be good at politics, despite their man's grating style. Their manipulation of the free media has been as masterful as you will ever see in American politics. Progressives are the gold standard, but they own the megaphones.
Team Trump is using the tactics of the Progressives. David Horowitz has written a lot about how radicals have a different way of understanding the world. That even though he has left the movement, he still sees the world as a radical seed it. Whittaker Chambers wrote similarly about communism.
The Muslim business is a great example. Instead of trying to fit the events into his immigration proposals, Trump takes what's there to shift the debate in his direction. If a nation is willing to debate a ban on Muslim immigration, it can debate bans on all other types of immigration so he spends some capital on getting the media to legitimize the debate.
It's the same dynamic we saw with gay marriage, except that was orchestrated by the party and the media in a coordinated effort. Team Trump is doing this from outside the walls which is not something we have seen in our lifetimes.Replies: @Blobby5, @polynikes, @ChrisZ, @5371, @John Gruskos
This has been my read on Trump, as well.
He’s not particularly charismatic. He does have a good read on largely neglected segment of the American public, and he is great showmanship and manipulating the media.
A part of me hopes there is some moral conviction there, too, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it.
Compare and contrast these two clips, the opening of the 2012 London Olympics, and the opening of the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
vice
(I just went with the first two short clips that came up for me searching “opening ceremony year place Olympics.”)
OT: Netanyahu criticizes Trump’s calls for a temporary halt of Muslim immigrants even though Israel has permanent religious test for immigrants. No one would dare point this out since they havw already been called Goebbels for supporting Trump’s call.
Google'ing on it, I instantly found about 70 references in the mass media.
I don't know if Israel's policy of ethnic birthright-ism is any different than Ireland's (they use the EXACT SAME screening test)..... but I know that it's not a secret. In fact.... it's published.
so whoever Anonymous is - he's not exactly a junk-yard dog investigative journalist. He's all rip-n-read, all the time.
I’m not even mad. If I were on the jury at the trial of “the three black men” who allegedly broke into her house, I would vote to acquit no matter what.
snorlax: He can use language appropriate for the time and the place. (Yes, he said they’d track down the Beslan terrorists, “even in the pisser.”) But he does have a good solid Russian accent. Khruschev was a Ukrainian and his Russian sounded Ukrainian.
A southern accent, such as Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev all suffered from, by no means necessarily denotes a Ukrainian, however the latter be defined.
The famous phrase about the pisser dates from long before Beslan.Replies: @Glossy
That's what I find fascinating about Team Trump. They seem to be good at politics, despite their man's grating style. Their manipulation of the free media has been as masterful as you will ever see in American politics. Progressives are the gold standard, but they own the megaphones.
Team Trump is using the tactics of the Progressives. David Horowitz has written a lot about how radicals have a different way of understanding the world. That even though he has left the movement, he still sees the world as a radical seed it. Whittaker Chambers wrote similarly about communism.
The Muslim business is a great example. Instead of trying to fit the events into his immigration proposals, Trump takes what's there to shift the debate in his direction. If a nation is willing to debate a ban on Muslim immigration, it can debate bans on all other types of immigration so he spends some capital on getting the media to legitimize the debate.
It's the same dynamic we saw with gay marriage, except that was orchestrated by the party and the media in a coordinated effort. Team Trump is doing this from outside the walls which is not something we have seen in our lifetimes.Replies: @Blobby5, @polynikes, @ChrisZ, @5371, @John Gruskos
Perceptive as always, Z.
In these few months, Trump has exposed the rank-and-file Republican apparatchiks as complete amateurs. Not just in campaigning, but in opening up possibilities in politics (as you say).
It’s infuriating to have such obvious confirmation that the leaders of the Republican party are so at sea. It ought to embarrass them; instead of complaining about Trump they should be apologizing to their loyal voters.
Understandably annoying though it may be, a large part of public and particularly political discourse in That Europe takes the form of allusion and historical echoes.
Most French people d’un certain age on hearing Marine’s statement of unracism/non-whatever-the-Evil-Thing of the moment will instantly have compared it to
“Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.” -Charles de Gaulle
Although we’ve not yet rewound all the way back to ” Je vous ai compris !”
This is the Catholic country that introduces a raft of anti Catholic laws around 1900, and excluded practicing Catholics from army promotions. Then, after WW1 they encouraged mass immigration.
In the 1980’s LePen’s father was always about to take over, it you believed the journalists. Every institution in the country is against the FN. They cannot win. and if it looked likely the party would certainly be banned as unconstitutional, like the Vlaams Blok.
He’s bringing up civil war because he knows his people will start it in order to disempower the FN.
I know little about France but I know the analogous situation here would end very, very poorly for the left.
If leftists started a civil war against Trump supporters, it wouldn’t last all that long unless the police and military took the left’s side, which is unlikely.
I’d be curious to know more about French gun laws and how gun ownership correlates with political orientation there. Also the likelihood that the police and military would take the side of FN’s enemies if they started a civil war to destroy FN.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6NBHx80ovY
vice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFvJ6ftZDzQ
(I just went with the first two short clips that came up for me searching "opening ceremony year place Olympics.")Replies: @Cagey Beast
I’m really glad other people have picked up on this. Those two opening ceremonies really neatly capture the difference between the eastern and western parts of what we used to call Christendom and now has no name. London’s ceremony was a sort of secular black mass meant to make us delight in witnessing a self-hating and dying culture while Sochi’s depicts a nation that’s been through hell but is getting back up again and starting to find its stride.
I'm posting from my phone right now otherwise I'd provide the link -- just youtube "alberta can't belive i'm voting PC" and you'll see the Canadian version of the Coalition of the Fringes upholding the status-quo.Replies: @Another Canadian, @ben tillman, @AndrewR
Every population gets the government that the majority of its population deserves.
One of the funny things about Submission is that sometimes Houellebecq’s character tosses out rather extreme statements without further explanation. At one point he remarks, “I always thought this would end in civil war,” or something to that effect.
Much of his preoccupation seems to be with Western civilisation's inability to perpetuate itself. If you can't do that, you don't have a civilization.
Perhaps a Muslim takeover is the thing that will put western civilization out of its misery, but if that's not it, it'll be something else.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @ChrisZ
From my reading of “Submission,” I understand Houellebecq as suggesting that Islam (at least in the novel) does not really put an end to Western civ, but rather provides a more vigorous, confident religious underpinning for Europe, once the social power of Christianity has evaporated.
My sense is that the civilizational “identity” of Europe is revealed by Houellebecq to be the Roman Empire–which can flourish in a pagan, Christian, and the projected Islamic form. It needs religion to sustain itself; but the religious underpinning is irrelevant doctrinally, so long as it promotes social cohesion and a “thick,” believable moral environment.
A key political fact in the book (which I found tremendously enjoyable) is that while the Socialist alliance brings the Moslem Brotherhood to power, all of the latter’s enthusiasts, and its most powerful actors, are associated with the French right. They seem to embrace Islam as the pathway–perhaps the last one left–to renewing French greatness, and perpetuating the big European idea envisioned by Augustus, Charles Martel, and now Ben Abbes.
Off Topic:
http://thefederalist.com/2015/12/10/dhs-state-halted-investigation-into-islamist-group-linked-to-san-bernardino-terrorists/
Hopefully that will backfire and help the polling.Replies: @fnn, @Reg Cæsar, @ben tillman, @yaqub the mad scientist
The Socialist platform in a nutsack. Excuse me, nutshell.
She should have had her own gun. Didn’t she read More Guns, Less Scum by John R Dlott, Jr?
OT, but I wonder if the backlash against Trump’s call for a moratorium on Muslim immigration could lead to a less discriminatory call for a moratorium on all immigration? That would be a happy improvement.
*http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/12/aclu_board_member_calls_for_trump_supporters_to_be_shot_before_election_day_comments.html
It is *inevitable* that France will end up as a majority black/brown Muslim dominated state.
Knowing the national character of the indigenous French, it is also very likely that the indigenous French will launch some kind of aggressive counterattack.
Valls knows this. The entirety of the French political class knows this. After all, they created and nurtured this situation for decades. They also know that they will likely be dead once it comes to pass.
Thus, they 'can't help' but to let it slip sometimes. It's all about Freudian projection and suppressed guilt and fear.Replies: @NOTA
You are massively exaggerating the risk. There is a lot of ruin in a nation.
My guess is: The huge terrifying threat to the ruling class right now is that they’ve been running policies that aren’t very popular, those policies are visibly causing problems, and so some challengers are threatening to take away power from the folks currently on top. That’s why they’re tossing around terms like civil war–they’re really scared of that loss of power.
France *will * I repeat *will* be a majority black/brown Muslim dominated state sometime this century.
This is set in stone now and cannot be denied or undone.
Now, the national character of the French, the real French, has always had a certain truculence, arrogance, haughtiness against foreigners, and not to mention a fighting spirit.
Sorry, but I just cannot see them going down without a fight.
There'll be a decline in mean French IQ and it won't be a major contributor to culture in the future, but I think France will survive.
Well yes: Japan, Germany 1945 etc.
But that assumes 'the nation' survives to carry on the Burkean pact with the dead and the unborn. This has been the ultimate aim of statesmanship from time immemorial, although this notion has taken a severe battering recently.
Fill the nation with Somalis or Pakistanis and your nation becomes real estate.
I don't disagree with any of that, but the less-than-civil-liberty-concerned police actions they have engaged in post-attack are like stitching the skin back together of a sucking gunshot wound to the chest. Sure, you've stopped the external bleeding, but there is still massive damage under the surface that is not going to magically go away. Their heads are still in the sand. Perhaps they'll be 'confident' in their culture right up to the time when it's taken away from them. I probably won't live long enough to see it, but I expect, with healthy diet and exercise, to watch the final death throes of Sweden.Replies: @AndrewR, @Dave Pinsen
How old are you, if I may ask?
As a 31 year old I can reasonably expect to live another 60+ years given the longevity of my grandparents, my healthy lifestyle and expected advances in health care.
Assuming an immigration policy that remains the same as today’s into the indefinite future, and a higher birth rate among persons of non-indigenous ancestry compared to the indigenous population, I can see the end of France as we know it within 20 or 3o years, and almost certainly within my expected lifetime.
Remember, the indigenous population need not cease to constitute a majority of the population in order to become second-class citizens in their own country. Look at South Africa. Granted, the minority population there had a much higher median IQ than the majority population, but IQ is hardly everything.
Even with a significantly lower median IQ level, Muslims will be able to dominate much larger indigenous populations in countries where the indigenous populations have adopted a submissive attitude. And while one cannot predict the future with full confidence, as of 2015 nothing is more effective at inducing submission in the average Westerner than charges of “racism.” My pessimistic nature does not allow me to believe that this will change anytime soon.
“I pay taxes like they do.”
I’d be interested to learn what taxes a 16-year-old black kid in Over-the-Rhine (talk about demographic transition) might pay.
Federal income tax on the minimum-wage job he might have, thanks to the relative lack of “Latinos” in his city? No, it’s way below the threshold, and his mom’s EITC will cover his FICA.
Property tax on his subsidized apartment?
Excise taxes on straw purchases of liquor, cigarettes, and perhaps guns?
Sales tax on Air Jordans and Little Debbies? (Does Ohio tax food and clothhing? My state doesn’t.)
Sales tax on replacement batteries!
In France, a lucid prose style is patriotic. The French (e.g., Descartes and Pascal) invented the classic style of prose in the 17th Century, while the English were still writing convoluted prose. The French have been proud (rightfully) of this great leap forward in human communication capability ever since.
You’re right about this. Having grown up in Canada I’ve been able to compare the two styles of thought side by side and crashing into one another and I have to say the French come out the better. There’s a clarity and precision to French political argumentation, and a refusal to let the other guy define terms, that the Anglos lack. That’s not just true here in Canada but applies to the Anglosphere generally. In a lot of ways the whole “cuckservative” quagmire in the US came from a failure of mainstream Republicans to even see the argument on their own terms.
My guess is: The huge terrifying threat to the ruling class right now is that they've been running policies that aren't very popular, those policies are visibly causing problems, and so some challengers are threatening to take away power from the folks currently on top. That's why they're tossing around terms like civil war--they're really scared of that loss of power.Replies: @Anonymous, @SFG, @Bill B.
No.
France *will * I repeat *will* be a majority black/brown Muslim dominated state sometime this century.
This is set in stone now and cannot be denied or undone.
Now, the national character of the French, the real French, has always had a certain truculence, arrogance, haughtiness against foreigners, and not to mention a fighting spirit.
Sorry, but I just cannot see them going down without a fight.
Everyone knows that if you don’t support the right of every person in the US to immigrate to the United States, you are literally Hitler and should be opposed by any means necessary*
*http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/12/aclu_board_member_calls_for_trump_supporters_to_be_shot_before_election_day_comments.html
“That raises an interesting question about Trump. Obviously, he’s a master of going on live television and winging it in demotic English. But a lot of people assume he can’t give a formal, Presidential-sounding speech when the situation demands it. Can he?”
After two Bush presidencies, the question is moot. Does it really matter anymore? He did graduate from Wharton School of Business and he’s been pretty good at talking in public forums for at least a couple generations. One answer might be to youtube any or all speeches that Trump has given over the years at business forums/conventions and then decide.
If the question becomes “Well, can he at least stick to message and convincingly read from the teleprompter”? Come GOP convention time, that question also will be answered.
The National Front has been running a number of cities since the last elections, how has that turned out?
Hopefully that will backfire and help the polling.Replies: @fnn, @Reg Cæsar, @ben tillman, @yaqub the mad scientist
Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
But it was much worse than your description. He called for them to be raped and impregnated so they would have curly-headed children.
It was an overt incitement to genocide.
Is it really accurate to call the National Front (or UKIP) “far right?” Just about the only traditional right wing view these people have is that they want to control and limit immigration. But their primary purpose in wanting to do this is to raise the quality of life for lower-class citizens, and they tend to support state action to help these people, so long as they are citizens.
In Britain, UKIP got almost as many traditional Labor votes as it did defections from the Conservatives. France’s Socialists may tell it’s voters to support the Republicans, but whether they will do so is still unknown. The NF is actually far more aligned with their interests.
You've correctly identified the wildcard factor in tomorrow's run-off elections ie., how many Socialist (and Communist) French voters, will prefer the national-socialism* of the FN, to Republicans of Sarkozy. I suspect the answer will be "more than the Establishment had expected."
*Meant in the broadest possible sense; not intended to compare the FN to the NSDAP, which was obviously quite a different organization, in terms of its ideology.
And there we have it. A leftist openly admits that the desire for open borders isn’t due to compassion for the world’s poor masses. Rather, the leftist wants to see his enemies raped and killed by hostile ethnic aliens. The fact that said aliens will rape and kill the leftist and his own family and fellow travelers is an acceptable side effect of the medicine that treats his primary desire to destroy the non-leftists for whom his hatred glows brighter than his own sense of self-preservation.
The principle of the present French PM is obviously: Democracy is fine as long as we get most of the vote. If we don’t, we must resort to civil war.
No good deed goes unpunished.
I don’t remember the passage allegedly quoted, though. Nor do I believe little snorlax understands a word of Russian.
A southern accent, such as Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev all suffered from, by no means necessarily denotes a Ukrainian, however the latter be defined.
The famous phrase about the pisser dates from long before Beslan.
I'll translate it like this:
"We will pursue the terrorists everywhere. In an airport... if we, you'll have to excuse me, find them in a bathroom, then we'll whack them in a toilet if it comes to that. That's it, that issue is closed. "
I think that was said after the 1999 apartment bombings. It's the only case I'm aware of where Putin approached any sort of vulgarity in public.Replies: @AP
Well, it brought about this from Yeb: “We should have a temporary ban on refugees coming here until it’s clear that there aren’t any terrorists embedded.”
Not a giant leap maybe but a step forward…
I’ve not read the whole of Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” but have read enough excerpted portions to know that he speaks of the importance of hyperbole as a tactic in negotiations. It appears he actually knows of what he speaks.
That's what I find fascinating about Team Trump. They seem to be good at politics, despite their man's grating style. Their manipulation of the free media has been as masterful as you will ever see in American politics. Progressives are the gold standard, but they own the megaphones.
Team Trump is using the tactics of the Progressives. David Horowitz has written a lot about how radicals have a different way of understanding the world. That even though he has left the movement, he still sees the world as a radical seed it. Whittaker Chambers wrote similarly about communism.
The Muslim business is a great example. Instead of trying to fit the events into his immigration proposals, Trump takes what's there to shift the debate in his direction. If a nation is willing to debate a ban on Muslim immigration, it can debate bans on all other types of immigration so he spends some capital on getting the media to legitimize the debate.
It's the same dynamic we saw with gay marriage, except that was orchestrated by the party and the media in a coordinated effort. Team Trump is doing this from outside the walls which is not something we have seen in our lifetimes.Replies: @Blobby5, @polynikes, @ChrisZ, @5371, @John Gruskos
Remind me when “Paulist/Lew Rockwell/Libertarian types” get 30% at a national election, eh, sport?
Why do nationalists — National Front, Stormfront — use “front” in their names? It reinforces the idea they are composed of warmongers and brownshirted thugs. They need a name with warm, positive associations. Instead of National Front, maybe something like the Brie Society (La société de brie).
2. Stormfront is obviously trying to win over far-right people--you don't gain many people in the center with allusions to *Nazi Germany*. I mean, that's a term of abuse on the left and the right!
http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2015/12/09/israels-netanyahu-rejects-trump-comments-on-muslims
How Jews play the game.
To be fair, there’s also a Left Front (Front de Gauche) party in France. It’s run by the very crabby Jean-Luc Mélenchon and doesn’t do very well. Switzerland’s patriotic party, the SVP-UDC has a smiling cartoon sun as its logo, so it’s not all doom and gloom on the anti-globalist, pro-sovereignty side.
I don’t know, his daughter seems to be doing a better job.
1. I’m not French, so any French input is appreciated, but there’s no guarantee words have the same resonances in different cultures, even ones as close as France. The ‘Popular Front’ was communists and socialists against Nazis in France, so they might be trying for a right-wing mirror image that would encompass the center. But, je ne parlez pas francais.
2. Stormfront is obviously trying to win over far-right people–you don’t gain many people in the center with allusions to *Nazi Germany*. I mean, that’s a term of abuse on the left and the right!
My guess is: The huge terrifying threat to the ruling class right now is that they've been running policies that aren't very popular, those policies are visibly causing problems, and so some challengers are threatening to take away power from the folks currently on top. That's why they're tossing around terms like civil war--they're really scared of that loss of power.Replies: @Anonymous, @SFG, @Bill B.
Yeah…I’m basically hoping the hue and cry scares the French into closing borders and they’ll force all the immigrants to assimilate like we did 100 years ago.
There’ll be a decline in mean French IQ and it won’t be a major contributor to culture in the future, but I think France will survive.
Too extreme, though I agree, yes, it would be much easier to say ‘immigration is something we need more or less of at different times in history, now we need less of it’ than ‘Muslims are bad and we can’t let them in’.
Still, I assume Trump knows what he’s doing. I just hope it doesn’t end with half the treasury in his slush fund.
Consider the Birther stuff. It's silly to argue, in the absence of credible evidence, that Obama can't be President because he wasn't born in the US. But, as eccentric as it is, it's based on an explicit constitutional requirement for the presidency, so, as weird as the Birthers' premise is, their reasoning from that premise is not controversial.
A more accurate statement about Obama is that he is not a member of the American *nation* because of his assiduously cultivated hybrid identity of resentful minority/deracinated SWPL--the Henry Tudor of post-America, as Steve once said. But that hits the Left too close to home, so it's inadmissible even though it is highly plausible.
Likewise, we have to argue that Mexicans and Muslims are dangerous criminals and therefore must be kept out. Of course, this isn't true in the vast majority of cases, but it seems to be an effective line, judging by Trump's great success thus far.
I don't mean to minimize the reality of Muslim terrorism or Mexican underclass dysfunction in those cases where it exists, but the real reason we want to keep them out is because this is our country, and we want to preserve it for ourselves and our posterity.
Personally, I think this is a sane and normal point of view, but for some reason you can't actually say that in America, so patriots like Trump have to resort to sensationalistic claims about dangerous foreigners.
Whatever...I won't look a gift horse in the mouth, but eventually we'll have to express what our first principles are. We will have to talk about keeping America American rather than merely keeping America safe.Replies: @ABN, @WhatEvvs, @Seamus Padraig
Good question. My guess as to FN is that it was an attempt to coalesce several rightist groups. I think Stormfront is something different. Maybe as a storm that will come through to clear the air?
If there is a militaristic vibe to the language it is due to the nature of the people who are attracted to such things. If you look at the environment that necessitates such movements, it is that the political correctness has become orthodox dogma. People who would rail against that are naturally those are independent, not particuarly agreeable, testosterone-laden men. And there are a few homosexuals, for whatever reason. Maybe they have a thing for strong white men, as opposed to Asian boys?
You make mention of warmongers/brownshirted thugs, but in my experience it is the leftist groups who are the thugs. But maybe that is just an expression of who is in power. The left is in power, so it gives the so-called antifa a slap on the wrist. If the right was in power, it might be a different story. But maybe something also to that is that the far left attracts nutters with poor impulse control. There are some real hothouse flowers on the left who only exist because of several generations of welfare that has selectively bred a new species of parasite. No wonder they are such adamant lefties – if the welfare spigot was ever turned off their reaction would be like a vampire exposed to the light.
It seems to me that far rightists are more ordered, more naturally soldierly. They are white society’s natural immune system, incredibly frustrated because control of society has been usurped and they are not allowed to sort things out. If the command was given though, they would be capable of organized brutality. There is not a lot of love lost, I daresay that the far left views the far right as Nazis deserving of death, and there are certainly those on the far right who view the far left as traitors who ought to be put up against a wall and shot.
That's what I find fascinating about Team Trump. They seem to be good at politics, despite their man's grating style. Their manipulation of the free media has been as masterful as you will ever see in American politics. Progressives are the gold standard, but they own the megaphones.
Team Trump is using the tactics of the Progressives. David Horowitz has written a lot about how radicals have a different way of understanding the world. That even though he has left the movement, he still sees the world as a radical seed it. Whittaker Chambers wrote similarly about communism.
The Muslim business is a great example. Instead of trying to fit the events into his immigration proposals, Trump takes what's there to shift the debate in his direction. If a nation is willing to debate a ban on Muslim immigration, it can debate bans on all other types of immigration so he spends some capital on getting the media to legitimize the debate.
It's the same dynamic we saw with gay marriage, except that was orchestrated by the party and the media in a coordinated effort. Team Trump is doing this from outside the walls which is not something we have seen in our lifetimes.Replies: @Blobby5, @polynikes, @ChrisZ, @5371, @John Gruskos
Even the world’s premier globalist propaganda organ, The Economist, concedes that the 11 towns with National Front mayors are very well run – as are towns with minor party rightwing mayors, such as Orange under the leadership of Jacques Bompard.
It is impossible to look at Trump and not realize that ego is a huge motivating factor for him. If Trump were president, I think the very last thing he would want is to go down in the history books as some sort of loser president. Instead, he wants to be the president other presidents look at and think “Damn, how am I going to compete with that?”
Kind of like an Eisenhower. I think you probably are worried on the inside that Trump is like Hitler before the war (at some point before the war started, he’d probably have gone down in history as one of the greatest leaders of Germany ever, had he resigned or not taken Germany down that path). But it was not like Hitler pulled his punches, it was laid out there in Mein Kampf for everyone to see. So to that I would say, Trump wants to “Make America Great Again”. And when was America great? In the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, in fact probably prior to 1940 as well. But definitely in Trump’s memory.
As to the treasury going into Trump’s slush fund, I don’t see it happening. I could be wrong though. I thought GWB was going to be ok, but that was in my youth.
I'm afraid he's a completely venal sociopath who's going to loot the country for all it's worth. I think he picked the populist right because he knew it had no tribunes, and realized he had an opening.Replies: @Anonym
Pick-up artists call this move “agree and amplify.”
This is why a President Trump can best happen in a three “man” race.
GOP Establishment figure Larry Kudlow:
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/12/11/larry-kudlow-ive-changed-this-is-war-seal-the-borders-stop-the-visas/
Trump has obliterated the Overton Window.
I’ve noticed this strange phenomenon of dubious arguments for good policies being more acceptable/effective than good arguments.
Consider the Birther stuff. It’s silly to argue, in the absence of credible evidence, that Obama can’t be President because he wasn’t born in the US. But, as eccentric as it is, it’s based on an explicit constitutional requirement for the presidency, so, as weird as the Birthers’ premise is, their reasoning from that premise is not controversial.
A more accurate statement about Obama is that he is not a member of the American *nation* because of his assiduously cultivated hybrid identity of resentful minority/deracinated SWPL–the Henry Tudor of post-America, as Steve once said. But that hits the Left too close to home, so it’s inadmissible even though it is highly plausible.
Likewise, we have to argue that Mexicans and Muslims are dangerous criminals and therefore must be kept out. Of course, this isn’t true in the vast majority of cases, but it seems to be an effective line, judging by Trump’s great success thus far.
I don’t mean to minimize the reality of Muslim terrorism or Mexican underclass dysfunction in those cases where it exists, but the real reason we want to keep them out is because this is our country, and we want to preserve it for ourselves and our posterity.
Personally, I think this is a sane and normal point of view, but for some reason you can’t actually say that in America, so patriots like Trump have to resort to sensationalistic claims about dangerous foreigners.
Whatever…I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but eventually we’ll have to express what our first principles are. We will have to talk about keeping America American rather than merely keeping America safe.
Consider the Birther stuff. It's silly to argue, in the absence of credible evidence, that Obama can't be President because he wasn't born in the US. But, as eccentric as it is, it's based on an explicit constitutional requirement for the presidency, so, as weird as the Birthers' premise is, their reasoning from that premise is not controversial.
A more accurate statement about Obama is that he is not a member of the American *nation* because of his assiduously cultivated hybrid identity of resentful minority/deracinated SWPL--the Henry Tudor of post-America, as Steve once said. But that hits the Left too close to home, so it's inadmissible even though it is highly plausible.
Likewise, we have to argue that Mexicans and Muslims are dangerous criminals and therefore must be kept out. Of course, this isn't true in the vast majority of cases, but it seems to be an effective line, judging by Trump's great success thus far.
I don't mean to minimize the reality of Muslim terrorism or Mexican underclass dysfunction in those cases where it exists, but the real reason we want to keep them out is because this is our country, and we want to preserve it for ourselves and our posterity.
Personally, I think this is a sane and normal point of view, but for some reason you can't actually say that in America, so patriots like Trump have to resort to sensationalistic claims about dangerous foreigners.
Whatever...I won't look a gift horse in the mouth, but eventually we'll have to express what our first principles are. We will have to talk about keeping America American rather than merely keeping America safe.Replies: @ABN, @WhatEvvs, @Seamus Padraig
Oops, mistyped my handle.
I don't disagree with any of that, but the less-than-civil-liberty-concerned police actions they have engaged in post-attack are like stitching the skin back together of a sucking gunshot wound to the chest. Sure, you've stopped the external bleeding, but there is still massive damage under the surface that is not going to magically go away. Their heads are still in the sand. Perhaps they'll be 'confident' in their culture right up to the time when it's taken away from them. I probably won't live long enough to see it, but I expect, with healthy diet and exercise, to watch the final death throes of Sweden.Replies: @AndrewR, @Dave Pinsen
The point I was trying to make with those differences is that France is further along the Muslim curve than us, and so different policies apply. We can ameliorate most of our problems by closing our borders and cracking down on immigration scofflaws. France, on the other hand, has a lot more cracking down to do domestically.
http://galliawatch.blogspot.com/2015/12/headbands-rape-and-civil-war.htmlReplies: @John Gruskos
From Wikipedia:
Jean Daniel, (né Jean Daniel Bensaid) (21 July 1920-) is an Algerian-born French-Jewish journalist and author. He is the founder and executive editor of Le Nouvel Observateur weekly.
He should know better, like the admirable Eric Zemmour, he is of North African Jewish origins and has, or had, no illusions about Muslim societies:
From NYRB 2005:
"Jean Daniel, who turned eighty-five in early July, has a strong claim to being France’s most eminent journalist. The editorial director of Le Nouvel Observateur, the center-left weekly he founded in 1964, Daniel has played a role in French political society that has no equivalent in American letters, with the possible exception of Walter Lippmann...
"As a witness, he has offered not only illumination but a moral example as well. As a correspondent in Algiers for L’Express, he was a precocious supporter of Algerian independence; yet unlike Sartre and other French followers of the FLN, he never wrote in praise of anti-colonial violence or third-worldist ideology; as an Algerian-born Jew, he also understood that the aim of Algeria’s rebels was not to establish a revolutionary socialist republic but to resurrect the country’s long-repressed Arab and Muslim identity. "
“For that day, you know, we’re not friends, but at the end of the day we are going to be teammates to fight bigger and better battles somewhere down the road” — unnamed participant on either the Army or the Navy side of the big game today.
Trump is using the hard boiled everyman shtick he used to great success on The Apprentice. He is playing a role and playing it well, winning the hearts of the dwindling class of real white Americans who still love “baseball, apple pie, hot dogs, and Chevrolet.” It’s deliberately lowbrow. It’s what I like least about him, even though I recognize it for what it is. A kid at the New York Military Academy who spoke as Trump does in this campaign would have had the vulgarity beaten out of him long before being admitted to Fordham and later Wharton. I’ve wondered if before the general election we might see the real Trump seen by his family (all high achievers), friends, and off-camera business associates. But is the risk of alienating his base worth the gains he might make among better educated or cultured voters who don’t already understand his pretensions?
I’d love to be a fly on the wall at President Trump’s first private meeting with President Putin.
And Trump isn't vulgar unless you're some pearl or ascot clutching inbred dweeb. I know vulgar and he's not that, he's plain spoken. It's just a testament to how weak the well educated and cultured have become that such blunt talk gives them the vapors. Perhaps some fainting couches and shots of Thorazine are in order for the poor souls.
Hang around a bunch of construction workers or enlisted military types at lunch time and you'll learn vulgar but it's usually funny vulgar. Even then they aren't like that all the time. They can and do comport themselves like gentlemen when needed. After all these are the guys who maintain B-2 bombers and other cutting edge tech systems or keep the power plants running for the softies in Manhattan. They aren't dummies like those Ivy League types think they are.
The truly vulgar can only be found among the rich whose wealth shields them from their own folly.
In Britain, UKIP got almost as many traditional Labor votes as it did defections from the Conservatives. France's Socialists may tell it's voters to support the Republicans, but whether they will do so is still unknown. The NF is actually far more aligned with their interests.Replies: @Anonymous, @Kevin O'Keeffe
Actually, if you take ‘far right’ to mean the antithesis of the ‘far left’ ie Marxism – which is really the only definition that makes sense when we think of polarities of moral, economic and political thought, then the ‘devil take the hindmost’ philosophy espoused by ‘The Economist’ magazine is the best definition of ‘far right’.
No, he is famous for publicly using low-class or criminal slang. This appeals to working class Russians, but older Russians are sometimes scandalized by such speech, coming from a president.
FRENCH JOURNALIST: ...Don't you think that by trying to eradicate terrorism in Chechnya you are going to eradicate the civilian population of Chechnya?
VLADIMIR PUTIN: If you want to become an Islamic fundamentalist and be circumcised, come to Moscow. We have very good specialists. I can recommend one for the operation. He'll make sure nothing grows back.Replies: @Glossy, @epebble
All of the junta's leaders curse all the time. One of Poroshenlo's most famous pronouncements is that an associate of his is an "Orthodox bitch". Vicky, who made Porky president, is most famous for saying "F the EU". Kolomoysky, who was extremely important to the junta in its formative period, used more curse words than regular words during his public appearances. I remember the foreign minister of the Ukriane, a supposed diplomat, chanting formerly-unprintable words in public. All of these people are proud of their baseness.
It's a fight between civilization and its lack, and you see this in the smallest things.
If Putin really did have a criminal mindset, that would have just made him a little less off-putting to the junta's supporters. If he stuck to his policies, but was magically made to accept Kolomoysky's or the Svoboda party's cultural norms, the hatred that the junta's supporters feel for him would go down a bit. I really do think that the straight-arrow officer-and-a-gentleman aspect of his personality bothers these people by itself, separately from and in addition to his politics.Replies: @Glossy, @5371, @AP
Le Pen senior was well known as a creature of the security services. He never wanted to win. He wanted the money instead. He was the nationalist version of Jimmy Swaggart. Not so his daughter.
As for never running anything, the ENArchs run everything. No one outside them can run anything.
This is not a prose style and it wasn’t invented by Descartes and Pascal. Nor was it some advance in human communication. What you’re trying to refer to is not a style of prose, but French’s rigid word order, which is a grammatical feature, not a prose style.
Highly inflected languages like Latin from which French is derived have a very flexible word order, and French assumed a rigid word order in the 16th and 17th century. This made written French more like English, which is less inflected and depends more on regular word order. French’s rigid word order makes it easier to read, but that doesn’t mean its prose is very lucid, which is why for example French philosophy has such a reputation for being obfuscatory. English prose tends to be more lucid.
No one can chronicle their own decline and ruin better than the French.
Well, if they did that they wouldn’t be “far-right,” would they? If they knew how to win elections they’d just be “right.”
“I’d also like to put pressure on law enforcement to prosecute Wirbel to the fullest extent of the law. ”
He may be sentient excrement, but he broke no law. The First Amendment works for this jerk, too. Its for everybody.
I actually don’t expect Trump to suddenly go after Jews once he gets elected. (Or is he going to insist his daughter divorce her husband? It’ll look awful to family-values types.) You are right about Hitler and Mein Kampf; I don’t think Trump is Hitler. I don’t even think Trump has any interest in being Hitler; after all, Hitler lost.
I’m afraid he’s a completely venal sociopath who’s going to loot the country for all it’s worth. I think he picked the populist right because he knew it had no tribunes, and realized he had an opening.
My gut feeling is that Trump wants the power partly because he likes power, but also because he sees the opportunity to build an edifice to his own greatness. It's what he does. If he succeeds in converting the USA back into the sort of nation that launched the Apollo program, he will be among the greatest presidents ever. The USA can survive a bad presidency. But with Johnson signing Hart-Celler Act and nothing done about it, it was the beginning of the end. And it will take a monumentally great man to reverse the rot.
My guess is that Trump will run the USA like it's his own country. He wants to make the USA into a great country (again), with a big fat gaudy Trump stamp all over it (hopefully only figuratively), and get the credit for it. Money only goes so far in life. Billionaire RE developers are a dime a dozen. To be remembered in history as a great leader, the kind that comes around once in a hundred years or so... you can't buy that, you can only earn it. Ego. Ego if channelled in a good direction is a good thing, kind of like the best of the best heart surgeons. They save a lot of lives, and they have huge egos even if they hide it.
Consider in a kind of analogous way how Stalin ruled to increase power of the USSR, but without the mass murders, the gulags, and the communism. Stalin wasn't about gaining wealth for his family at the expense of the USSR empire.
One thing that Trump gets right is that the average person needs to work, and the country has strategic industries/employers - a country cannot be run by Economist type principles. I think this is from genuine love of country, not seeing an opportunity. But again, I could be wrong. It would be interesting to read a critical history of Trump.Replies: @map, @Harry Baldwin
http://teapartyeconomist.com/2015/12/12/video-eyewitnesses-in-san-bernardino-three-tall-white-men/Replies: @Mr. Anon, @This Is Our Home
“False flag patsies. But what’s the motivation? Oswald was a coup against JFK, 9/11 was to demonize Muslims for Israel’s benefit.”
Exactly. What’s the motivation? To make people fear muslims and want to restrict them – the very thing the government and wealthy elites obviously do not want to happen.
Have you false-flaggers ever stopped to consider that perhaps the whole “false-flag” narrative is………………a false flag. A government directed psy-op designed to deflect public scrutiny away from muslim immigration, neutralize opposition to the government (you guys all mistrust the government, but you don’t threaten it or interfere with it in the least). It might also serve to deflect public attention from a few rare instances that really are false-flag attacks conducted by the government, since you guys have so thoroughly poisoned the well by crying wolf every single time. Also, notice who these purported shadowy government operatives always are – white men. This further cements the idea in peoples heads that white men are sinister and dangerous, and that they have no compunction about slaughtering innocent women and children if they are paid, or ordered to do so. Amiri Bakara couldn’t write a better story than that to defame whites.
You want to know who the patsy is? Maybe you are the patsy.
In Britain, UKIP got almost as many traditional Labor votes as it did defections from the Conservatives. France's Socialists may tell it's voters to support the Republicans, but whether they will do so is still unknown. The NF is actually far more aligned with their interests.Replies: @Anonymous, @Kevin O'Keeffe
“France’s Socialists may tell it’s voters to support the Republicans, but whether they will do so is still unknown. The NF is actually far more aligned with their interests.”
You’ve correctly identified the wildcard factor in tomorrow’s run-off elections ie., how many Socialist (and Communist) French voters, will prefer the national-socialism* of the FN, to Republicans of Sarkozy. I suspect the answer will be “more than the Establishment had expected.”
*Meant in the broadest possible sense; not intended to compare the FN to the NSDAP, which was obviously quite a different organization, in terms of its ideology.
It is ironic that you mention the French as the historical champions of clear prose because 20th century French intellectuals and continental philosophers in general were notoriously known for their obfuscation. (Derrida is the infamous one).
Here’s what the great American philosophy john Searle had to say about french prose.
It's been said before that France's 'voice' in the world noticeably declined from about half a century ago when these clowns elbowed their way to the front of stage.
Steve mentioned Putin’s pronunciation here. I think it’s interesting that Putin is the first non-provincial to rule Russia since the last czar. St. Petersburgers are not provincials in any sense – culturally Russia has had two capitals for more than 300 years now. Lenin was evil, but very smart and well-read. He was physically a provincial, yet he didn’t sound like one.
http://www.egaliteetreconciliation.fr/Putain-de-Saint-Foucault-35892.htmlThe radio interview was done on the Catholic conservative station Radio Courtoisie while the website argues against Foucault from a "paléomarxiste" position, "... the same people who today, logically, vote for Marine Le Pen". So Foucault's legacy is getting nailed from both the Old Left and Old Right.
In a blue vs pink contest grey will side with pink. In a pink vs grey contest blue sides with grey.
I like how she explicitly called out the perpetrators as “masked black men” – twice, just in case the 911 operator didn’t get it the first time. Also how she told the dispatcher that she is a federal judge and called for federal marshalls to be sent to her house, er, I mean chateau – apparently her “house” is the most expensive property in the Cincinatti area.
Assuming they are Liberals, not so well.
This sounds made up. Do you have a reference? A link, anything?
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/03/putin_s_crimea_revenge_ever_since_the_u_s_bombed_kosovo_in_1999_putin_has.2.htmlIt's the iSteve-famous Masha Gessen, but I very much doubt she'd lie about something which is so easily checked. I remember hearing about it from a male guest on NPR, talking about how Putin often uses crude language and prison slang. Commenter AP above, whom I believe is from the former USSR, says the same thing.Replies: @Glossy, @Glossy, @5371, @Seamus Padraig, @ben tillman
Sarkozy Le Pew will win.
A southern accent, such as Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev all suffered from, by no means necessarily denotes a Ukrainian, however the latter be defined.
The famous phrase about the pisser dates from long before Beslan.Replies: @Glossy
The famous phrase about the pisser has made it into wikiquotes.
I’ll translate it like this:
“We will pursue the terrorists everywhere. In an airport… if we, you’ll have to excuse me, find them in a bathroom, then we’ll whack them in a toilet if it comes to that. That’s it, that issue is closed. ”
I think that was said after the 1999 apartment bombings. It’s the only case I’m aware of where Putin approached any sort of vulgarity in public.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1446241/Putins-language-is-becoming-the-talk-of-the-vulgar.htmlReplies: @Glossy
Oh, I’ve been wondering the same thing.
A lot of people seem to be impressed by that fact that Trump can wing it in front of audiences and cameras. I’m actually not all that impressed, having done the same thing myself. Some people just have a knack and a comfort and a speedy mind for public speaking. Unfortunately, most of our political leaders do not have that, which is a funny, absurd fact.
I tire of hearing Trump do the same beer-drinker saloon schtick over and over again. Even I can do better on my feet. I in fact have.
Why does the only candidate who espouses my views talk like the people who wouldn’t understand in intellectual conversation with me if their lives depended on it? Why does he talk like people I have to simplify my thoughts for? Oh, I get it: they are voters and he has to speak to them.
The man has got to step it up a few notches for the rest of us, if he in fact can. And he’d damn well better prepare a good inaugural address out of respect for the nation and the office.
Some of them do have the knack but hold themselves back out of fear of saying the 'wrong' thing.
With Trump, it's the bigness of personality, charisma, and shamelessness that comes across as candor and even, oddly enough, humility, i.e. "I know I'm not perfect and made mistakes, but hey, that's me, and I make no excuses or apologies for it."
The thing is most politicians, had they said what Trump did, would have been finished.
He is Teflon Don cuz of his smoothness. The Wolf of Washington is the Trump stump.
He has what the kid in SEPARATE PEACE did.
He could do the wrong thing and still be loved by the teachers.
Some do good but are still disliked. Some do bad but are still liked.
Just how it is.
https://youtu.be/wdq7YxGhMhs?t=17m26sReplies: @nglaer
Hopefully that will backfire and help the polling.Replies: @fnn, @Reg Cæsar, @ben tillman, @yaqub the mad scientist
Looks like this fellow is a physician who calls himself Dr. Cock (Coq). Apparently, his blogposts include now deleted titles like “Teens : Demonstrate for pornographic education” and “Can one still touch little girls?” These SJW’s who turn out to be pervs seem to be coming out of the woodwork more and more.
Non sequitur. You lay out the conditions where historically we a coup d’état: Emergency Measures are deemed necessary because the populace has elected someone beyond the pale. Civil unrest followers the unconstitutional (perhaps merely unsporting) blocking of the elected leader. The military is brought in to quell the unrest. A popular colonel cashiers the corrupt generals who are propping up the unpopular regime and reluctantly agrees to administer the Emergency.
imagining that such events only happen in other countries, such as the past, is a species of the End of History fallacy.
Should read ‘we see a coup d’etat’.
Mr. Sailer, in case you haven’t seen this yet, Larry Kudlow has switched sides on the idea of Open Borders. His rationale comes off as a little hysterical-sounding, but I cannot say I disagree with him. Also, I never knew he was a Jewish convert to Catholicism, something occasioned by his overcoming a cocaine addiction.
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/12/11/larry-kudlow-ive-changed-this-is-war-seal-the-borders-stop-the-visas/
They pulled a dirty one on Andrew Jackson too.
But he came back and won.
A lot of people seem to be impressed by that fact that Trump can wing it in front of audiences and cameras. I'm actually not all that impressed, having done the same thing myself. Some people just have a knack and a comfort and a speedy mind for public speaking. Unfortunately, most of our political leaders do not have that, which is a funny, absurd fact.
I tire of hearing Trump do the same beer-drinker saloon schtick over and over again. Even I can do better on my feet. I in fact have.
Why does the only candidate who espouses my views talk like the people who wouldn't understand in intellectual conversation with me if their lives depended on it? Why does he talk like people I have to simplify my thoughts for? Oh, I get it: they are voters and he has to speak to them.
The man has got to step it up a few notches for the rest of us, if he in fact can. And he'd damn well better prepare a good inaugural address out of respect for the nation and the office.Replies: @Anon, @S. Anonyia
“Some people just have a knack and a comfort and a speedy mind for public speaking. Unfortunately, most of our political leaders do not have that, which is a funny, absurd fact.”
Some of them do have the knack but hold themselves back out of fear of saying the ‘wrong’ thing.
With Trump, it’s the bigness of personality, charisma, and shamelessness that comes across as candor and even, oddly enough, humility, i.e. “I know I’m not perfect and made mistakes, but hey, that’s me, and I make no excuses or apologies for it.”
The thing is most politicians, had they said what Trump did, would have been finished.
He is Teflon Don cuz of his smoothness. The Wolf of Washington is the Trump stump.
He has what the kid in SEPARATE PEACE did.
He could do the wrong thing and still be loved by the teachers.
Some do good but are still disliked. Some do bad but are still liked.
Just how it is.
Which is irrelevant to the sentiment expressed in my post
As pyrrhus says, the FN won a bunch of municipal elections in the Spring of 2014.
I listened to French radio reporting on the night of the results and they made a huge fuss over the FN winning in a town that had previously voted solidly socialist in every election all the way back to the first ever socialist candidate.
There is no guarantee that Parti Socialiste voters will switch to the Republicans if their favoured candidate pulls out.
No. It’s not responsible to mention civil war at such an unsettled time. If he’s called on it by media – anywhere – I’ll collapse.
Ron Paul was far too much of an ideologue for his own good. Listening to him was always frustrating to me because he never seemed to want to talk about anything besides monetary policy and nonintervention. Whenever he was asked about something like gay marriage or abortion or immigration he’d usually mutter something about welfare or state’s rights and then try to steer the conversation back to his two pet issues. It was painful every time.
Larry Kudlow, an extreme open borders enthusiast, has just called for exactly that. Amazing.
I still think Trump is not going to be the nominee, but he sure has opened up many cans of worms.
A lot of people seem to be impressed by that fact that Trump can wing it in front of audiences and cameras. I'm actually not all that impressed, having done the same thing myself. Some people just have a knack and a comfort and a speedy mind for public speaking. Unfortunately, most of our political leaders do not have that, which is a funny, absurd fact.
I tire of hearing Trump do the same beer-drinker saloon schtick over and over again. Even I can do better on my feet. I in fact have.
Why does the only candidate who espouses my views talk like the people who wouldn't understand in intellectual conversation with me if their lives depended on it? Why does he talk like people I have to simplify my thoughts for? Oh, I get it: they are voters and he has to speak to them.
The man has got to step it up a few notches for the rest of us, if he in fact can. And he'd damn well better prepare a good inaugural address out of respect for the nation and the office.Replies: @Anon, @S. Anonyia
I agree. I like Trump, but his version of “winging it” is not that impressive beyond 5-10 minutes. He repeats himself too often. I’m a measly public high school teacher and can pretty easily come up with more interesting and informative things to say when speaking to an audience. If I talked like Trump I’d probably lose credibility with the students. I don’t think I would be able to hold their attention, which is hard enough because few of the kids even want to be there in the first place. I know an audience of thousands is different than a classroom, but someone of Trump’s stature should be quicker and more elaborate with his words.
The powers that be portray their opponents as stupid and uncultured. And unfortunately among whites conventional views do correlate with intelligence and classiness to some extent. Upscale people are more disciplined, conformist and obedient than riff-raff.
To beat the stereotype a right-wing leader has to be a man of culture, which Trump sadly isn’t. If he wins, then supporting him will have been worth it anyway. Policy change is the main goal. If he loses, he will just reinforce the stereotype of conservatives being uncouth.
Consider the Birther stuff. It's silly to argue, in the absence of credible evidence, that Obama can't be President because he wasn't born in the US. But, as eccentric as it is, it's based on an explicit constitutional requirement for the presidency, so, as weird as the Birthers' premise is, their reasoning from that premise is not controversial.
A more accurate statement about Obama is that he is not a member of the American *nation* because of his assiduously cultivated hybrid identity of resentful minority/deracinated SWPL--the Henry Tudor of post-America, as Steve once said. But that hits the Left too close to home, so it's inadmissible even though it is highly plausible.
Likewise, we have to argue that Mexicans and Muslims are dangerous criminals and therefore must be kept out. Of course, this isn't true in the vast majority of cases, but it seems to be an effective line, judging by Trump's great success thus far.
I don't mean to minimize the reality of Muslim terrorism or Mexican underclass dysfunction in those cases where it exists, but the real reason we want to keep them out is because this is our country, and we want to preserve it for ourselves and our posterity.
Personally, I think this is a sane and normal point of view, but for some reason you can't actually say that in America, so patriots like Trump have to resort to sensationalistic claims about dangerous foreigners.
Whatever...I won't look a gift horse in the mouth, but eventually we'll have to express what our first principles are. We will have to talk about keeping America American rather than merely keeping America safe.Replies: @ABN, @WhatEvvs, @Seamus Padraig
Can you explain why or how Ted Cruz can run for the presidency? He was born in Canada his father at the time was not an American citizen.
I want a pony.
Leftists say these sorts of things all the time. This is nothing new. If we controlled the media, then we could get those people to resign or be fired. We don’t. At least not yet.
Yup
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/03/putin_s_crimea_revenge_ever_since_the_u_s_bombed_kosovo_in_1999_putin_has.2.html
It’s the iSteve-famous Masha Gessen, but I very much doubt she’d lie about something which is so easily checked. I remember hearing about it from a male guest on NPR, talking about how Putin often uses crude language and prison slang. Commenter AP above, whom I believe is from the former USSR, says the same thing.
But at a deeper level, how could we ever objectively judge something like vulgarity anyway? One man's vulgarity is just another man's authenticity. A lot depends on context; the rest depends on the man.Replies: @AP
Pas d’ennemis a gauche.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall at President Trump's first private meeting with President Putin.Replies: @Hibernian, @rod1963
High acheivers, including inheritors, are not all Thurston Howells. I say that as a non-fan of Mr. Trunp.
I get the impression that guys like Foucault were much bigger in the US than in France. They were the French intellectual equivalent of those mediocre American jazz musicians who become big stars in Finland or South Korea. There’s a French Wikipedia page on: “la French Theory”. Run it through the online translator of your choice:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Theory
There’s also this recent article and radio interview with an author who tears into Foucault and his legacy:
http://www.egaliteetreconciliation.fr/Putain-de-Saint-Foucault-35892.html
The radio interview was done on the Catholic conservative station Radio Courtoisie while the website argues against Foucault from a “paléomarxiste” position, “… the same people who today, logically, vote for Marine Le Pen”. So Foucault’s legacy is getting nailed from both the Old Left and Old Right.
Leave it to Sailer to praise something called “French prose” for Contributing To Civilization, while ignoring the actual history of France after the 1700s. I suppose if you like riots, show trials, guillotines, partisan vendettas, class war, proto-communism, anarchists, corny chauvinistic speeches, Victor Hugo melodrama, Napoleonic totalitarianism, belle-lettristic masturbation from Foucault, haute-borgeouis black nationalism from Fanon, and 68er freak-flag blather, then French Prose is dandy. They’re the nation of intellecksherulls who literally invented the Social Justice Warrior. I bet Steve really admires BHL’s creased pant leg too.
Saudi Princeling gets Trumped.
http://dcwhispers.com/trump-tells-house-of-saud-to-pound-sand/#Q04osIrFghOqxyLS.99
I'm afraid he's a completely venal sociopath who's going to loot the country for all it's worth. I think he picked the populist right because he knew it had no tribunes, and realized he had an opening.Replies: @Anonym
Maybe you are right about Trump being a venal sociopath bent on looting the country for all it’s worth. If so, you called it. I do wonder about the U-turn he took on Muslims. Maybe he just hasn’t studied them.
My gut feeling is that Trump wants the power partly because he likes power, but also because he sees the opportunity to build an edifice to his own greatness. It’s what he does. If he succeeds in converting the USA back into the sort of nation that launched the Apollo program, he will be among the greatest presidents ever. The USA can survive a bad presidency. But with Johnson signing Hart-Celler Act and nothing done about it, it was the beginning of the end. And it will take a monumentally great man to reverse the rot.
My guess is that Trump will run the USA like it’s his own country. He wants to make the USA into a great country (again), with a big fat gaudy Trump stamp all over it (hopefully only figuratively), and get the credit for it. Money only goes so far in life. Billionaire RE developers are a dime a dozen. To be remembered in history as a great leader, the kind that comes around once in a hundred years or so… you can’t buy that, you can only earn it. Ego. Ego if channelled in a good direction is a good thing, kind of like the best of the best heart surgeons. They save a lot of lives, and they have huge egos even if they hide it.
Consider in a kind of analogous way how Stalin ruled to increase power of the USSR, but without the mass murders, the gulags, and the communism. Stalin wasn’t about gaining wealth for his family at the expense of the USSR empire.
One thing that Trump gets right is that the average person needs to work, and the country has strategic industries/employers – a country cannot be run by Economist type principles. I think this is from genuine love of country, not seeing an opportunity. But again, I could be wrong. It would be interesting to read a critical history of Trump.
But how many more bad presidencies in a row can we survive? And are we surviving? Someone on this thread quoted Adam Smith's line, "There is much ruin in a nation," but it's not like the ruin has only just started. It's been going on for decades. We may be near the end of the ruination we can survive.Replies: @David, @Anonym
I'll translate it like this:
"We will pursue the terrorists everywhere. In an airport... if we, you'll have to excuse me, find them in a bathroom, then we'll whack them in a toilet if it comes to that. That's it, that issue is closed. "
I think that was said after the 1999 apartment bombings. It's the only case I'm aware of where Putin approached any sort of vulgarity in public.Replies: @AP
Are the quotes in this article wildly mistranslated?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1446241/Putins-language-is-becoming-the-talk-of-the-vulgar.html
Fair enough.
I like this oldie but goodie from Putin:
FRENCH JOURNALIST: …Don’t you think that by trying to eradicate terrorism in Chechnya you are going to eradicate the civilian population of Chechnya?
VLADIMIR PUTIN: If you want to become an Islamic fundamentalist and be circumcised, come to Moscow. We have very good specialists. I can recommend one for the operation. He’ll make sure nothing grows back.
[Bush talks for a few more paragraphs]
PRESIDENT PUTIN: We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, I will tell you quite honestly. (Laughter.)
PRESIDENT BUSH: Just wait.
Source: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/07/20060715-1.html
Some interesting data: http://www.circinfo.net/rates_of_circumcision.html
Compared to the junta’s leaders Putin is an altar boy. There are regular fistfights in Ukraine’s “parliament”. Someone beat up an old woman there recently. Forget fist fights – a major leader of the Maidan movement recently kicked a man in the head with a foot at a public meeting. I remember another “parliament” member who beat up the head of a TV station on camera. The oligarchs who run the junta are literally gangsters. It’s the only way they know how to solve problems.
All of the junta’s leaders curse all the time. One of Poroshenlo’s most famous pronouncements is that an associate of his is an “Orthodox bitch”. Vicky, who made Porky president, is most famous for saying “F the EU”. Kolomoysky, who was extremely important to the junta in its formative period, used more curse words than regular words during his public appearances. I remember the foreign minister of the Ukriane, a supposed diplomat, chanting formerly-unprintable words in public. All of these people are proud of their baseness.
It’s a fight between civilization and its lack, and you see this in the smallest things.
If Putin really did have a criminal mindset, that would have just made him a little less off-putting to the junta’s supporters. If he stuck to his policies, but was magically made to accept Kolomoysky’s or the Svoboda party’s cultural norms, the hatred that the junta’s supporters feel for him would go down a bit. I really do think that the straight-arrow officer-and-a-gentleman aspect of his personality bothers these people by itself, separately from and in addition to his politics.
Should we review HIV rates, abortion rates, murder rates, education, quality of life, divorce rates, etc. between these two opposing regions struggling for dominance within Ukraine?*
You view Russia (whose own statistics across these measures, while not nearly as bad as those of Donbas, are worse than those of its western neighbors) as a defender of western civilization (which is somewhat dubious, when considering Russia's own social problems) so you are willing to overlook local anomalies for the sake of your global struggle. However it looks like the Ukrainian people don't want to sacrifice civilization in their own neighborhood for the sake of Putin's global struggle against the morally corrupt West.
*Another commenter, Peter, once wrote this accurate description of the opposing regions in the Ukraine conflict. Which region represents "civilization"?
"The Western Ukrainians are like Poles. Even despite decades of outright Soviet neglect and outright antagonism the level of culture in a place like Lwow (Lviv) far outstrips anything in Donetsk. I’ve spent significant time in both cities. Lwow felt like a Western city occupied by a foreign power. The people are fantastic, in a true conservative sense. They value their history, their land, their crafts, and they are a self-sufficient people. Donetsk is completely Soviet – deracinated, crappy industries, corrupt and crime ridden, and full of people who would emigrate to the West in a heart beat if they could. Even before the fighting Donetsk was a basket case like every other Russian and East Ukrainian city. If you want to get laid, go to Donetsk. The women have no morals, prostituting yourself is just what women do. In Lwow people still get married and value families. That alone explains why so many in the “manosphere” side with East Ukraine."
They’d have to find one first. And niece Marion… even the National Enquirer and its ilk couldn’t make her look bad– and that’s their specialty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Boy_%28character%29#/media/File:Bat_Boy.PNG
All of the junta's leaders curse all the time. One of Poroshenlo's most famous pronouncements is that an associate of his is an "Orthodox bitch". Vicky, who made Porky president, is most famous for saying "F the EU". Kolomoysky, who was extremely important to the junta in its formative period, used more curse words than regular words during his public appearances. I remember the foreign minister of the Ukriane, a supposed diplomat, chanting formerly-unprintable words in public. All of these people are proud of their baseness.
It's a fight between civilization and its lack, and you see this in the smallest things.
If Putin really did have a criminal mindset, that would have just made him a little less off-putting to the junta's supporters. If he stuck to his policies, but was magically made to accept Kolomoysky's or the Svoboda party's cultural norms, the hatred that the junta's supporters feel for him would go down a bit. I really do think that the straight-arrow officer-and-a-gentleman aspect of his personality bothers these people by itself, separately from and in addition to his politics.Replies: @Glossy, @5371, @AP
Basically, Putin ended the horror of the 1990s in Russia. No one ever ended it in the Ukraine. And the junta’s rule is 1990s squared. The criminal, gangsterish mindset, public coarseness in high places are some of the visible aspects of “the 90s” (in the general, abstracted sense) in the former USSR.
Cross-cultural comparison: in the recent regional election in France the FN did worst in Brittany and Corsica. Why? Those places have little nationalisms of their own. That makes them perfect targets for divide and rule.
A group of people are trying to save France and to save a major piece of Western Civ with it. But some in Corsica hate the French, always have. So they’re receptive to an anti-FN message. That gives an opening for divide-and-rule. And in this way the people of Corsica and Brittany are adding their own tiny, little contribution to wrecking Western civilization. And human civilization in general. AP, are you reading this? Does this remind you of anything?
http://teapartyeconomist.com/2015/12/12/video-eyewitnesses-in-san-bernardino-three-tall-white-men/Replies: @Mr. Anon, @This Is Our Home
You’re the perfect patsy for the multicultural movement. Any event that invalidates it you assume is a false flag. You are the silliest type of idiot.
Indeed. The false-flaggers think of themselves as in opposition to the "New World Order". But they are a self-anesthetizing opposition. Their beliefs only help the powers-that-be, and further their aims. It's funny, actually. The false-flaggers are always going on about the "sheeple", who are distracted by bread-and-circuses, without realizing that they themselves are the sheeple; they themselves are the bread-and-circuses.
The web seems to agree that Putin speaks Russian with a good accent:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n02/perry-anderson/russias-managed-democracy
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/tmt/265573.html
https://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20140107205853AA6PVoj
http://www.justrussian.com/blog/learning-russian-accents
Several of those quotes are left-handed compliments from unfriendly sources as well.
I sometimes wonder if these people are either stupid or crazy? If someone like Trump or Le Pen wins the Presidency, then what will they have to suffer? Merry Christmas signs at the stores? More jobs for the people? Hearing people speak in a language they can understand? Oh the Horror.
What if they get what they want and Muslims or other non-Whites take over? Rolling blackouts anyone? Beheading homosexuals perhaps? Women stay home and have babies? With Muslim rule the women shut up or they are beaten, have no more rights than domesticated animals, and are barred from school or learning to read. That’s a great plan Baldrick, but we’re not gonna do that OK?
FRENCH JOURNALIST: ...Don't you think that by trying to eradicate terrorism in Chechnya you are going to eradicate the civilian population of Chechnya?
VLADIMIR PUTIN: If you want to become an Islamic fundamentalist and be circumcised, come to Moscow. We have very good specialists. I can recommend one for the operation. He'll make sure nothing grows back.Replies: @Glossy, @epebble
PRESIDENT BUSH: I thought the discussion was a good discussion. It’s not the first time that Vladimir and I discussed our governing philosophies. I have shared with him my desires for our country, and he shared with me his desires for his. And I talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world like Iraq where there’s a free press and free religion, and I told him that a lot of people in our country would hope that Russia would do the same thing.
[Bush talks for a few more paragraphs]
PRESIDENT PUTIN: We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, I will tell you quite honestly. (Laughter.)
PRESIDENT BUSH: Just wait.
Source: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/07/20060715-1.html
OT – Here’s a very interesting video of a Canadian Parliamentary Committee on Immigration hearing where a Canadian (he states that he’s an unhyphenated Canadian) academic who is Muslim is giving testimony about the dangers of immigration and multiculturalism in Canada, the first 10 minutes are his testimony, followed by a Q&A. In the Q&A is the amazing sight of white MPs who don’t like his message and cling to their ideals.
At the 22 minute mark, or so, it is noted that this academic has taken the position that Muslim immigration to Canada should be stopped.
Later it is noted that Trudeau (father of the current Zoolander) came to regret the policy he launched. Here’s independent confirmation of that fact:
So it appears that their present PM takes after his fruit-loop mom, Margaret, than Pierre.
There is a lot of material to mine here for America’s debate following Trump’s proposal.
Just so, huh? Its idiocy (if any) requires significant further argument. There’s nothing at all wrong with the idea on its face.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall at President Trump's first private meeting with President Putin.Replies: @Hibernian, @rod1963
So it’s “low brow” to appeal to Americans who keep this country working? Wow.
And Trump isn’t vulgar unless you’re some pearl or ascot clutching inbred dweeb. I know vulgar and he’s not that, he’s plain spoken. It’s just a testament to how weak the well educated and cultured have become that such blunt talk gives them the vapors. Perhaps some fainting couches and shots of Thorazine are in order for the poor souls.
Hang around a bunch of construction workers or enlisted military types at lunch time and you’ll learn vulgar but it’s usually funny vulgar. Even then they aren’t like that all the time. They can and do comport themselves like gentlemen when needed. After all these are the guys who maintain B-2 bombers and other cutting edge tech systems or keep the power plants running for the softies in Manhattan. They aren’t dummies like those Ivy League types think they are.
The truly vulgar can only be found among the rich whose wealth shields them from their own folly.
The indigenous population was about 10% of the population of South Africa when Apartheid ended, so I don’t understand how the example is supposed to illustrate your point.
A better example would be the USA, or the UK, where the indigenes — while still a majority — are clearly deprived of the privileges and immunities of citizens first class.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/03/putin_s_crimea_revenge_ever_since_the_u_s_bombed_kosovo_in_1999_putin_has.2.htmlIt's the iSteve-famous Masha Gessen, but I very much doubt she'd lie about something which is so easily checked. I remember hearing about it from a male guest on NPR, talking about how Putin often uses crude language and prison slang. Commenter AP above, whom I believe is from the former USSR, says the same thing.Replies: @Glossy, @Glossy, @5371, @Seamus Padraig, @ben tillman
Nagnut’ means “to bend”. “Vsekh nagnuli” means “they bent everyone”. I admit that Masha Gessen must know much more about anal sex and low-life slang than I do, but to me “nagnut’” doesn’t sound sexual. They bent them to their will – that’s how I understand that.
The classicists of the 17tb century were not the romantics of the Revolution. See “Rousseau and Romamticism” by Irving Babbitt.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1446241/Putins-language-is-becoming-the-talk-of-the-vulgar.htmlReplies: @Glossy
What a silly question. Of course. It’s a major British newspaper “reporting” on Putin, what did you expect?
The very first quote in the Telegraph article is “You must always obey the law, not just when they’ve got you by the balls”. The original Putin quote was “by a certain place”, not “by the balls”. There’s a difference in tone.
“Надо исполнять закон всегда, а не только тогда, когда схватили за одно место.”
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin
This is where I stopped reading the Telegraph article, but I’d expect it to contain lots of such half-truths. It would be par for the course. There is a Cold War going on and British journalism is what it is.
“You’re the perfect patsy for the multicultural movement. Any event that invalidates it you assume is a false flag. You are the silliest type of idiot.”
Indeed. The false-flaggers think of themselves as in opposition to the “New World Order”. But they are a self-anesthetizing opposition. Their beliefs only help the powers-that-be, and further their aims. It’s funny, actually. The false-flaggers are always going on about the “sheeple”, who are distracted by bread-and-circuses, without realizing that they themselves are the sheeple; they themselves are the bread-and-circuses.
What if they get what they want and Muslims or other non-Whites take over? Rolling blackouts anyone? Beheading homosexuals perhaps? Women stay home and have babies? With Muslim rule the women shut up or they are beaten, have no more rights than domesticated animals, and are barred from school or learning to read. That's a great plan Baldrick, but we're not gonna do that OK?Replies: @Mr. Anon, @ricpic
“That’s a great plan Baldrick, but we’re not gonna do that OK?”
Not just a great plan………………..a cunning plan!”
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/03/putin_s_crimea_revenge_ever_since_the_u_s_bombed_kosovo_in_1999_putin_has.2.htmlIt's the iSteve-famous Masha Gessen, but I very much doubt she'd lie about something which is so easily checked. I remember hearing about it from a male guest on NPR, talking about how Putin often uses crude language and prison slang. Commenter AP above, whom I believe is from the former USSR, says the same thing.Replies: @Glossy, @Glossy, @5371, @Seamus Padraig, @ben tillman
My original reply to this hasn’t been approved yet. In case Steve finds it inappropriate, I’m writing up a tamer version:
“Vsekh nagnuli” means “they bent everyone”. I’m a native Russian speaker and that doesn’t sound sexual to me. I’m interpreting that as “they bent them all to their will”.
The commenter AP has an ethnic ax to grind against Putin. He’s West Ukrainian. Masha Gessen is grinding a different ethnic ax – she’s Jewish. I’m Jewish myself, but I’m a nerdy weirdo, so I sometimes look at things in weird ways.
In general though, all politics is tribal and if you want the truth, you always have to mentally correct for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimierz_%C5%9Awitalski
Jean Daniel, (né Jean Daniel Bensaid) (21 July 1920-) is an Algerian-born French-Jewish journalist and author. He is the founder and executive editor of Le Nouvel Observateur weekly.Replies: @Bill B., @Anonymous
Perhaps he is too old to bother disguising his ideological, anti-goy sentiments?
He should know better, like the admirable Eric Zemmour, he is of North African Jewish origins and has, or had, no illusions about Muslim societies:
From NYRB 2005:
“Jean Daniel, who turned eighty-five in early July, has a strong claim to being France’s most eminent journalist. The editorial director of Le Nouvel Observateur, the center-left weekly he founded in 1964, Daniel has played a role in French political society that has no equivalent in American letters, with the possible exception of Walter Lippmann…
“As a witness, he has offered not only illumination but a moral example as well. As a correspondent in Algiers for L’Express, he was a precocious supporter of Algerian independence; yet unlike Sartre and other French followers of the FLN, he never wrote in praise of anti-colonial violence or third-worldist ideology; as an Algerian-born Jew, he also understood that the aim of Algeria’s rebels was not to establish a revolutionary socialist republic but to resurrect the country’s long-repressed Arab and Muslim identity. ”
Apparently her 79-year-old husband got thrown down a flight of steps by the yutes. Reading up on him, Stanley M. Chesney, one learns that he is a “Lifetime Member” of the NAACP and stopped practicing law after he was disbarred for helping himself to most of the proceeds of a class-action settlement.
Stories like this I savor with a shot of good scotch.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/03/putin_s_crimea_revenge_ever_since_the_u_s_bombed_kosovo_in_1999_putin_has.2.htmlIt's the iSteve-famous Masha Gessen, but I very much doubt she'd lie about something which is so easily checked. I remember hearing about it from a male guest on NPR, talking about how Putin often uses crude language and prison slang. Commenter AP above, whom I believe is from the former USSR, says the same thing.Replies: @Glossy, @Glossy, @5371, @Seamus Padraig, @ben tillman
“Vsekh nagnuli” means “they bent everyone over” not “they fucked everyone in the ass.” It’s not crude language or prison slang. Putin’s enemies have been lying to you again, and you’ve been swallowing. (See how it’s done?)
All of the junta's leaders curse all the time. One of Poroshenlo's most famous pronouncements is that an associate of his is an "Orthodox bitch". Vicky, who made Porky president, is most famous for saying "F the EU". Kolomoysky, who was extremely important to the junta in its formative period, used more curse words than regular words during his public appearances. I remember the foreign minister of the Ukriane, a supposed diplomat, chanting formerly-unprintable words in public. All of these people are proud of their baseness.
It's a fight between civilization and its lack, and you see this in the smallest things.
If Putin really did have a criminal mindset, that would have just made him a little less off-putting to the junta's supporters. If he stuck to his policies, but was magically made to accept Kolomoysky's or the Svoboda party's cultural norms, the hatred that the junta's supporters feel for him would go down a bit. I really do think that the straight-arrow officer-and-a-gentleman aspect of his personality bothers these people by itself, separately from and in addition to his politics.Replies: @Glossy, @5371, @AP
What, can’t you appreciate the refinement and elevation of the svidomites’ favourite slogan, “Putin khuilo”?? It positively reeks of class!
Well put. The London ceremony was so technically good that most observers were able to pretend that the deeply leftist subtext was mere pop history.
My gut feeling is that Trump wants the power partly because he likes power, but also because he sees the opportunity to build an edifice to his own greatness. It's what he does. If he succeeds in converting the USA back into the sort of nation that launched the Apollo program, he will be among the greatest presidents ever. The USA can survive a bad presidency. But with Johnson signing Hart-Celler Act and nothing done about it, it was the beginning of the end. And it will take a monumentally great man to reverse the rot.
My guess is that Trump will run the USA like it's his own country. He wants to make the USA into a great country (again), with a big fat gaudy Trump stamp all over it (hopefully only figuratively), and get the credit for it. Money only goes so far in life. Billionaire RE developers are a dime a dozen. To be remembered in history as a great leader, the kind that comes around once in a hundred years or so... you can't buy that, you can only earn it. Ego. Ego if channelled in a good direction is a good thing, kind of like the best of the best heart surgeons. They save a lot of lives, and they have huge egos even if they hide it.
Consider in a kind of analogous way how Stalin ruled to increase power of the USSR, but without the mass murders, the gulags, and the communism. Stalin wasn't about gaining wealth for his family at the expense of the USSR empire.
One thing that Trump gets right is that the average person needs to work, and the country has strategic industries/employers - a country cannot be run by Economist type principles. I think this is from genuine love of country, not seeing an opportunity. But again, I could be wrong. It would be interesting to read a critical history of Trump.Replies: @map, @Harry Baldwin
I agree with this. In addition, I imagine that Trump wants to wage war with the other Oligarchs that run the country. He has found a method to do that and it is working.
My guess is: The huge terrifying threat to the ruling class right now is that they've been running policies that aren't very popular, those policies are visibly causing problems, and so some challengers are threatening to take away power from the folks currently on top. That's why they're tossing around terms like civil war--they're really scared of that loss of power.Replies: @Anonymous, @SFG, @Bill B.
“There is a lot of ruin in a nation.”
Well yes: Japan, Germany 1945 etc.
But that assumes ‘the nation’ survives to carry on the Burkean pact with the dead and the unborn. This has been the ultimate aim of statesmanship from time immemorial, although this notion has taken a severe battering recently.
Fill the nation with Somalis or Pakistanis and your nation becomes real estate.
Lenin was evil, but very smart and well-read. He was physically a provincial, yet he didn’t sound like one.
Lenin was from a well-educated minor aristocratic family, so not fair to call him “physically provincial”. He also had a speech defect – he couldn’t pronouce the letter “r” correctly – that most Russians associated with a Yiddish accent, so many people assumed Lenin was Jewish.
“Aristocratic” is a ridiculous thing to say – his father had risen from plebeian origins to a rank in the civilian bureaucracy equivalent to colonel, which carried with it automatic hereditary noble status.
I’ve read that Putin has the best cultivated Russian accent of a Moscow top dog at least since Lenin, and that that’s part of his appeal.
Putin generally speaks like a normal educated Soviet Russian. He does a good job in one on one interview coming across as thoughtful. Truly “cultivated” Petersburg accents were discouraged after the Revolution and have pretty much died out. It is kind of amazing that Putin is the only ruler of Russia since the early 1920s who can speak bog standard Russian, and it tells you something about how boorish the Soviet Union was.
Consider the Birther stuff. It's silly to argue, in the absence of credible evidence, that Obama can't be President because he wasn't born in the US. But, as eccentric as it is, it's based on an explicit constitutional requirement for the presidency, so, as weird as the Birthers' premise is, their reasoning from that premise is not controversial.
A more accurate statement about Obama is that he is not a member of the American *nation* because of his assiduously cultivated hybrid identity of resentful minority/deracinated SWPL--the Henry Tudor of post-America, as Steve once said. But that hits the Left too close to home, so it's inadmissible even though it is highly plausible.
Likewise, we have to argue that Mexicans and Muslims are dangerous criminals and therefore must be kept out. Of course, this isn't true in the vast majority of cases, but it seems to be an effective line, judging by Trump's great success thus far.
I don't mean to minimize the reality of Muslim terrorism or Mexican underclass dysfunction in those cases where it exists, but the real reason we want to keep them out is because this is our country, and we want to preserve it for ourselves and our posterity.
Personally, I think this is a sane and normal point of view, but for some reason you can't actually say that in America, so patriots like Trump have to resort to sensationalistic claims about dangerous foreigners.
Whatever...I won't look a gift horse in the mouth, but eventually we'll have to express what our first principles are. We will have to talk about keeping America American rather than merely keeping America safe.Replies: @ABN, @WhatEvvs, @Seamus Padraig
Some very interesting and important thoughts in your post. Here’s one that jumped out at me:
The question is, do you really believe that advancing sensationalistic claims actually helps our cause? I mean, outside Tea Party circles, how many people were really won over by Birtherism? On another subject, wouldn’t it be more effective to argue against immigration–and not just illegal immigration–on economic grounds, rather than advancing specious claims about Mexicans or Moslems? Falling wages and rising rents affect virtually everybody, not just Tea Party types. I would imagine that such an argument would have broader appeal to the electorate, beyond the usual Republican base.
You can do that till your blue in the face and maybe get invited on NPR once in a while. (If you do it really well, like the Center for Immigration Studies). But ethnic demagoguery brings the subject out to popular mainstream conversation.
We saw the same thing in Australia. A "conservative" government cracked down on illegal immigration but they continue to flood the country with legal immigrants.
That is absolutely not my understanding of apartheid demographics. I imagine most other people would doubt your claim as well. Please cite your sources.
Leftists say these sorts of things all the time. This is nothing new. If we controlled the media, then we could get those people to resign or be fired. We don't. At least not yet.Replies: @AndrewR
Aren’t you a ray of sunshine?
It’s 2015. More people use the internet than read the newspaper or watch TV news. The only thing keeping us from being a more powerful force is the grumpy apathy of people like you.
And no, leftists in prestigious positions do not openly say things like this often. At all.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/03/putin_s_crimea_revenge_ever_since_the_u_s_bombed_kosovo_in_1999_putin_has.2.htmlIt's the iSteve-famous Masha Gessen, but I very much doubt she'd lie about something which is so easily checked. I remember hearing about it from a male guest on NPR, talking about how Putin often uses crude language and prison slang. Commenter AP above, whom I believe is from the former USSR, says the same thing.Replies: @Glossy, @Glossy, @5371, @Seamus Padraig, @ben tillman
Masha Gessen lies for a living, even about matters that are not merely subjective to begin with. Don’t know anything about your anonymous NPR source, but I have been following ‘AP’ here at Unz for a while now, and he is, by his own admission, a pro-Maidan Ukrainian nationalist. It won’t surprise you to learn that he never has anything positive to say about Putin or Russia, so there’s no way he could be considered an objective source either.
But at a deeper level, how could we ever objectively judge something like vulgarity anyway? One man’s vulgarity is just another man’s authenticity. A lot depends on context; the rest depends on the man.
If there is a militaristic vibe to the language it is due to the nature of the people who are attracted to such things. If you look at the environment that necessitates such movements, it is that the political correctness has become orthodox dogma. People who would rail against that are naturally those are independent, not particuarly agreeable, testosterone-laden men. And there are a few homosexuals, for whatever reason. Maybe they have a thing for strong white men, as opposed to Asian boys?
You make mention of warmongers/brownshirted thugs, but in my experience it is the leftist groups who are the thugs. But maybe that is just an expression of who is in power. The left is in power, so it gives the so-called antifa a slap on the wrist. If the right was in power, it might be a different story. But maybe something also to that is that the far left attracts nutters with poor impulse control. There are some real hothouse flowers on the left who only exist because of several generations of welfare that has selectively bred a new species of parasite. No wonder they are such adamant lefties - if the welfare spigot was ever turned off their reaction would be like a vampire exposed to the light.
It seems to me that far rightists are more ordered, more naturally soldierly. They are white society's natural immune system, incredibly frustrated because control of society has been usurped and they are not allowed to sort things out. If the command was given though, they would be capable of organized brutality. There is not a lot of love lost, I daresay that the far left views the far right as Nazis deserving of death, and there are certainly those on the far right who view the far left as traitors who ought to be put up against a wall and shot.Replies: @Harry Baldwin
And there are a few homosexuals, for whatever reason. Maybe they have a thing for strong white men, as opposed to Asian boys?
That’s unfair. There are plenty of homosexuals who sincerely believe in conservatism. Florence King, a paleocon who used to write a column for National Review, was a lesbian who said that before the gay rights movement most homosexuals considered themselves conservative.
There were plenty of English homosexuals who liked the aesthetics of traditionalism. They loved the ritual side of the Catholic Church and they loved High Church Anglicanism. They loved the whole Oxbridge thing. They also liked art and the theatre and all that sort of thing. I imagine there were equivalents in other countries.
They veered sharply leftwards when being leftist became more fun. They like to follow the fashion.
Quite a few would have been attracted to fascism/Nazism in the 30s because fascism had style. Can you imagine male homosexuals not loving those wonderfully sharp uniforms? SS uniforms were so butch!
The Front National will not win a single region. Even if one of their lists manages to come out top the other parties will just choose to combine their lists and therefore take the all important first place that automatically gives you a 25 percent representation bonus.
The remaining 75 percent is then split between the party lists according to the proportion of their vote.
The whole system was specifically designed to keep them out and it will work unless Front National support rises above 50 percent.
Also, does anyone sense that the gigantic success of the Paris climate talks is actually just trumpeted nonsense to make the political establishment look good? I mean, I can’t find any actual details of any successes.
1) actual CO2 emissions: total failure, between them i think India and China are now at 80%+ plus of the total emissions and they're not going to stop because they know the scare is a scam
2) NWO: making up a global threat to scare people into the NWO has mostly failed
3) wealth transfer: a lot of the push on global warming has come from 3rd world charities using global warming as a vehicle to get the developed world to pay out more. There seems to be some talk of very large yearly payments on that score but as you say it's hard to say yet if it is just promises or actual cash.
My gut feeling is that Trump wants the power partly because he likes power, but also because he sees the opportunity to build an edifice to his own greatness. It's what he does. If he succeeds in converting the USA back into the sort of nation that launched the Apollo program, he will be among the greatest presidents ever. The USA can survive a bad presidency. But with Johnson signing Hart-Celler Act and nothing done about it, it was the beginning of the end. And it will take a monumentally great man to reverse the rot.
My guess is that Trump will run the USA like it's his own country. He wants to make the USA into a great country (again), with a big fat gaudy Trump stamp all over it (hopefully only figuratively), and get the credit for it. Money only goes so far in life. Billionaire RE developers are a dime a dozen. To be remembered in history as a great leader, the kind that comes around once in a hundred years or so... you can't buy that, you can only earn it. Ego. Ego if channelled in a good direction is a good thing, kind of like the best of the best heart surgeons. They save a lot of lives, and they have huge egos even if they hide it.
Consider in a kind of analogous way how Stalin ruled to increase power of the USSR, but without the mass murders, the gulags, and the communism. Stalin wasn't about gaining wealth for his family at the expense of the USSR empire.
One thing that Trump gets right is that the average person needs to work, and the country has strategic industries/employers - a country cannot be run by Economist type principles. I think this is from genuine love of country, not seeing an opportunity. But again, I could be wrong. It would be interesting to read a critical history of Trump.Replies: @map, @Harry Baldwin
The USA can survive a bad presidency.
But how many more bad presidencies in a row can we survive? And are we surviving? Someone on this thread quoted Adam Smith’s line, “There is much ruin in a nation,” but it’s not like the ruin has only just started. It’s been going on for decades. We may be near the end of the ruination we can survive.
Ha! The National Enquirer could always pull out the old airbrush and give it a try. I can imagine the headline now: ‘Bat girl wins French election!’
But how many more bad presidencies in a row can we survive? And are we surviving? Someone on this thread quoted Adam Smith's line, "There is much ruin in a nation," but it's not like the ruin has only just started. It's been going on for decades. We may be near the end of the ruination we can survive.Replies: @David, @Anonym
Agreed. Plus, when Adam Smith said Nation he meant, “A large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular state or territory.” What we have is now the very opposite of that.
It’s too late for these elections, obviously, but shouldn’t the FN train some percentage of its voters to vote PS in the first round of the presidential, to ensure a FN-PS matchup?
Ma femme says one of the things Marine has going for her is integrity, and this would destroy it. A plausible argument. Don’t these new fangled computers make this kind of thing more plausible than thirty years ago?
Highly inflected languages like Latin from which French is derived have a very flexible word order, and French assumed a rigid word order in the 16th and 17th century. This made written French more like English, which is less inflected and depends more on regular word order. French's rigid word order makes it easier to read, but that doesn't mean its prose is very lucid, which is why for example French philosophy has such a reputation for being obfuscatory. English prose tends to be more lucid.Replies: @Jonathan Silber
The French have been proud (rightfully) of this great leap forward in human communication capability ever since.
No one can chronicle their own decline and ruin better than the French.
What is it with France and Canada? Their so-called rightist parties seem to change names with every election.
They should choose a catchy name and stick with it. How about the Party of Reaction? It would draw the nostalgia vote.
Here's what the great American philosophy john Searle had to say about french prose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvwhEIhv3N0Replies: @Bill B.
Great find.
It’s been said before that France’s ‘voice’ in the world noticeably declined from about half a century ago when these clowns elbowed their way to the front of stage.
Stories like this I savor with a shot of good scotch.Replies: @ben tillman
Chesley, not Chesney, but what a scumbag! But an obscenely wealthy scumbag. He engaged in the worst sort of parasitic lawyering based on political connections and ethnic nepotism rather than any legal skill or merit. Notably, the Wikipedia article omits his ethnic background depite the fact that he served, for example, as president of the Jewish National Fund.
He really should have gotten a little more coverage in the original media reports. After reviewing his lengthy catalogue of depravity, surely it was Chesley's political contributions to Democrats and general wheeling and dealing that got his wife onto the bench in the first place. Where she has done a LOT of damage, maybe even as much as he has.
As an observation on prose style, I don't usually notice the style you employ here on your blog. Some of your posts are more stylized than others, but the blog has always been an easy read. I think that means that you are doing it right.
But if you really want to be respectable, you need to add more PoMo punctuation puns.Replies: @a Newsreader
It occurred to me to search your archives to see if you had mentioned this book before, and I found this post. Very interesting.
My understanding of it comes from Ilana Mercer’s book on South Africa. South Africa was mostly marginal for humans, especially of the pastoral variety that predominated when the Whites first came. It took labor and know-how of the kind the Dutch had to make it so productive. So, when Riebeck landed his first ships, in the early XVIIth century, there were just a few Hottentots and San Bushmen around who had been displaced by the Bantu hordes that have spread throughout Africa over the past 1000 years like the Goths, vandals etc in Europe before. The Europeans expanded and they finally met the next African tribe 130 years later, the tip of the Bantu wave. They had only been in that area for 100 years longer than the Europeans had been in the Cape region. This is how the Boer Republics were formed, by being allowed by Black chieftains to settle the unused gaps between tribal territories. As late as the XVIIth century’s close, the Whites and the Blacks had equal numbers, although a fertility discrepancy was starting to form and many Blacks kept coming or being brought to work the land and the mines. Even today, SA is the biggest destination for immigration among all African countries, which leads to a lot of unreported racism and rioting from the indigenous Blacks. So, in a sense, it was the Euros who were the most indigenous to South Africa, although today’s South Africa is a mix of various Dutch settlements, Boer Republics and British colonial areas so that pronouncement would not hold for the whole of SA’s territory, especially the part closest to Botswana, which was part of the land of the Tswana.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/03/putin_s_crimea_revenge_ever_since_the_u_s_bombed_kosovo_in_1999_putin_has.2.htmlIt's the iSteve-famous Masha Gessen, but I very much doubt she'd lie about something which is so easily checked. I remember hearing about it from a male guest on NPR, talking about how Putin often uses crude language and prison slang. Commenter AP above, whom I believe is from the former USSR, says the same thing.Replies: @Glossy, @Glossy, @5371, @Seamus Padraig, @ben tillman
It’s not easily checked. Americans don’t speak Russian.
On another thought, how well does Putin understand English, let alone speak it? Anyone know?Replies: @Glossy
Yeah I know that part of the world has had a very interesting history over the last few centuries. I was specifically speaking of the Apartheid era. It was a small number of purebred Europeans ruling over equal numbers of mixed race and Indian people, all of whom together were still vastly outnumbered by Bantus.
There were 4 million Whites out of a population of 40 million when Apartheid ended. There is nothing controversial about these numbers.
On another subject, wouldn’t it be more effective to argue against immigration–and not just illegal immigration–on economic grounds, rather than advancing specious claims about Mexicans or Moslems?
You can do that till your blue in the face and maybe get invited on NPR once in a while. (If you do it really well, like the Center for Immigration Studies). But ethnic demagoguery brings the subject out to popular mainstream conversation.
Speaking of Le Pen and Trump:
https://twitter.com/RosieGray/status/675371288601456640Replies: @TangoMan, @Olorin, @Steve Sailer, @JohnnyWalker123
Le Pen is as good as it gets on immigration.
http://www.english.rfi.fr/africa/20150829-marine-le-pen-calls-end-legal-immigration-france
I’m not worried about her comments.
Use of crude language by famous politicians isn’t anything new. Hillary Clinton was alleged to do the very same thing.
On another thought, how well does Putin understand English, let alone speak it? Anyone know?
“Honor thy Father and Mother” is the 4th Commandment, not the 3rd.
As I understand it, the people of Corsica are genetically very different from the people of France and possibly fall on the other side of the Hajnal line.
They probably also still cling to their ancient language(s).
My sense is that the civilizational "identity" of Europe is revealed by Houellebecq to be the Roman Empire--which can flourish in a pagan, Christian, and the projected Islamic form. It needs religion to sustain itself; but the religious underpinning is irrelevant doctrinally, so long as it promotes social cohesion and a "thick," believable moral environment.
A key political fact in the book (which I found tremendously enjoyable) is that while the Socialist alliance brings the Moslem Brotherhood to power, all of the latter's enthusiasts, and its most powerful actors, are associated with the French right. They seem to embrace Islam as the pathway--perhaps the last one left--to renewing French greatness, and perpetuating the big European idea envisioned by Augustus, Charles Martel, and now Ben Abbes.Replies: @Richard, @Anonymous
Houllebecq was only playing with ideas in a “Modest Proposal” kind of way, I’m sure. Egypt, the Levant, and Turkey were once as much a part of Roman and Western civilization as France ever was, indeed they were more typically the intellectual and political leaders of it, but Islamization of those regions did not lead to any kind of reinvigoration of the Roman soul. What is Roman, for example, about the Islamic prohibition against the artistic depiction of God or Muhammad? That’s one point of doctrine that makes much of European civilization impossible to imagine.
That’s a hoot.
FRENCH JOURNALIST: ...Don't you think that by trying to eradicate terrorism in Chechnya you are going to eradicate the civilian population of Chechnya?
VLADIMIR PUTIN: If you want to become an Islamic fundamentalist and be circumcised, come to Moscow. We have very good specialists. I can recommend one for the operation. He'll make sure nothing grows back.Replies: @Glossy, @epebble
OT: So, I guess he is saying most non-Muslim Russians are uncircumcised?
Some interesting data: http://www.circinfo.net/rates_of_circumcision.html
Probably not. You will still be called out as a racist. For example, people tried to use environmentalism arguments against immigration by arguing that mass immigration increases our population, turns people from low-carbon producers into high-carbon producing Americans, and stresses our natural resources. All of which are quite straightforward and should have readily appealed to enviromentalists.
However, the other side sensed this and cut it off at the pass by labeling such arguments as ‘the greening of hate‘.
I am sure if you couched your arguments in purely economic terms someone would accuse you of something similar.
The reason why immigration has to be viewed in racial/ethnic terms is because that is exactly what it is. People on our side rightly see that we are being culturally displaced. And those promoting it correctly see that we are being replaced and that our nations are becoming less resistant to their political goals.
If the people immigrating nto our lands were culturally and ethnically related to us, we’d support it and the other side would object. That’s probably why the open borders side isn’t calling for the mass migration of Afrikaners into the US. You can’t separate the immigration debate from the composition of the immigrants. It is the driving force.
Apparently the FN lost everywhere. It’s a bit depressing.
2) the Right has the much larger *currently safe* part of the Rightand the two factors that are changing are1) the immigrant vote is increasing
2) the currently safe areas are shrinkingbut it does seem like the media lying about the true situation means civil war will come before the tipping point is reached.I think France and the UK would be heading into the coming nightmare at the same time but Enoch Powell managed to slow it down for a few years in the UK which was just enough for France to go into it sooner.As a result of that I expect Ukip to have similar numbers in the UK within a few years: 30-40% almost everywhere but only a few seats because they're either 2nd to the prosperous Right in the remaining prosperous areas or 2nd to the immigrant vote in the less prosperous areas.Although France heading into the nightmare first might act as a catalyst to speed the process up in the UK.Replies: @al gore rhythms, @dfordoom
That is depressing. I suppose I feel no sorrow any more for the French. The same goes for the Greeks.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. The FN’s progress is obvious, and its opponents discredit themselves more and more all the time.
What if they get what they want and Muslims or other non-Whites take over? Rolling blackouts anyone? Beheading homosexuals perhaps? Women stay home and have babies? With Muslim rule the women shut up or they are beaten, have no more rights than domesticated animals, and are barred from school or learning to read. That's a great plan Baldrick, but we're not gonna do that OK?Replies: @Mr. Anon, @ricpic
If the French don’t turn massively to LePen in the aftermath of the Paris slaughter then the situation really is as bad as has been advertised and the French are doomed. It stuns that their turning to an avowed French patriot at this moment is in doubt. Is it possible that the French populace still harbors illusions about possible rapprochement with Islam?!
Apparently those numbers are controversial with you given how you have directly contradicted yourself.
Jean Daniel, (né Jean Daniel Bensaid) (21 July 1920-) is an Algerian-born French-Jewish journalist and author. He is the founder and executive editor of Le Nouvel Observateur weekly.Replies: @Bill B., @Anonymous
The guy who posted the screed encouraging rape of right wing French women was Thierry Lecoquierre.
Jean Daniel shares responsibility for this outrage, just as NYDN owner Mortimer Zuckerman shares responsibility for Linda Stasi's recent outrageous column.
Noticing the misdeeds of the media barons and big donors is the first step towards ending the misdeeds of the media barons and big donors.
If you were insinuating that whites are indigenous to SA, that may be somewhat accurate if what Romanian says is true (although I wouldn’t trust one thing Mercer says). But you didn’t explain that and since (as I have no doubt you’re aware of) it’s not reasonable to expect a random non South African to know anything about pre apartheid history besides “Anglos and Dutch formed colonies in that region sometime in the last few hundred years”, by not defining your terms, you apparently deliberately chose to needlessly complicate this conversation. Good job. I’ll have to add you to my list of people to avoid engaging. Have a blessed week.
And your perspective on South African history bears no resemblance to what the average person "knows" about that history. The typical indoctrinated doofus thinks that Europeans showed up and subjugated an existing Black population, not that they formed colonies.
58-42 for Marine and 55-45 for Marion means they’re almost at the tipping point.
If you consider the composition:
1) the Left now relies entirely on the immigrant vote and the *currently safe* SJWs
2) the Right has the much larger *currently safe* part of the Right
and the two factors that are changing are
1) the immigrant vote is increasing
2) the currently safe areas are shrinking
but it does seem like the media lying about the true situation means civil war will come before the tipping point is reached.
I think France and the UK would be heading into the coming nightmare at the same time but Enoch Powell managed to slow it down for a few years in the UK which was just enough for France to go into it sooner.
As a result of that I expect Ukip to have similar numbers in the UK within a few years: 30-40% almost everywhere but only a few seats because they’re either 2nd to the prosperous Right in the remaining prosperous areas or 2nd to the immigrant vote in the less prosperous areas.
Although France heading into the nightmare first might act as a catalyst to speed the process up in the UK.
There is not the slightest chance of any nationalist party anywhere in the West gaining real political power. Anyone who believes that democracy (or what we laughingly call democracy in the West) is going to save us is living in a dream world.
My advice is to start learning Russian. Eastern Europe (or parts of it) might survive as an intact European civilisation. For western Europe the future is the Ottoman Empire 2.0. That would be the most hopeful outcome. Or it will be like the Balkans in the late 19th/early 20th century. That would be less hopeful.Replies: @anon
It’s a moral argument.
Or rather the moral component of the argument outweighs the practical component with a critical percentage of voters.
Those voters feel bad saying no to decent people even if those people are terrible for the economy (until they have nowhere left to run when they will switch to full on genocidal and burn the planet down).
Those same voters won’t feel bad saying no to immoral people even if those people were great for the economy.
(where “moral” and “decent” are defined by common assent and vary from place to place)
My sense is that the civilizational "identity" of Europe is revealed by Houellebecq to be the Roman Empire--which can flourish in a pagan, Christian, and the projected Islamic form. It needs religion to sustain itself; but the religious underpinning is irrelevant doctrinally, so long as it promotes social cohesion and a "thick," believable moral environment.
A key political fact in the book (which I found tremendously enjoyable) is that while the Socialist alliance brings the Moslem Brotherhood to power, all of the latter's enthusiasts, and its most powerful actors, are associated with the French right. They seem to embrace Islam as the pathway--perhaps the last one left--to renewing French greatness, and perpetuating the big European idea envisioned by Augustus, Charles Martel, and now Ben Abbes.Replies: @Richard, @Anonymous
It’s literature, thus inherently subjective. Anyone can read anything into it that he wants, and only the author could explicate his true intended meaning for us if he so desired. That said, if Houellebecq has gone over to the Soral view as you suggest, he is way too optimistic about the future of France under the Muslims. Yes, the Muslim conquerors would “decapitate the Left” as one of this site’s regular comments likes to say, but they would also bring with them a whole host of social dysfunction woven into the culture of the Middle East and into the Middle Eastern practice of Islam. Remember that the only prosperous Middle Eastern Muslim states sit on oceans of oil. The others are basket cases, and the oil states aren’t necessarily much better. Would a polygynous Muslim France also develop the destructive clannishness that permeates Middle Eastern Muslim society (read HBD Chick about father’s brother’s daughter pattern of inbreeding common in the Middle East)? Would the conquerors establish themselves as a superior caste as Arabs have done in other places they conquered? If so, would the ethnic French “new Muslims” have similar access to high quality wives as the Arab conquerors? Would the Muslims destroy the French artistic heritage, e.g. the sculpted human figures on churches and the paintings and sculpures in the great museums?
Also watch for the panicky media spin.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35088276
55-45 isn’t a rout.
If you really see a major difference between “minor aristocrat” and “hereditary nobility” in the context of this discussion then I will take your point.
Yes, Paleo Retiree recommended it to me. Pinker cites it frequently in his “Sense of Style” advice book.
I just noticed you imply that the majority population of the US is equally “indigenous” as the majority population of the UK. Your disingenuousness appears boundless.
Medical doctor Thierry Leconquirre used Jean Daniel’s publication as a platform for his obscene, hysterical screed.
Jean Daniel shares responsibility for this outrage, just as NYDN owner Mortimer Zuckerman shares responsibility for Linda Stasi’s recent outrageous column.
Noticing the misdeeds of the media barons and big donors is the first step towards ending the misdeeds of the media barons and big donors.
Oops, bad place for a typo there, thanks Ben. No, he’s not likely related to Kenny Chesney :^) .
He really should have gotten a little more coverage in the original media reports. After reviewing his lengthy catalogue of depravity, surely it was Chesley’s political contributions to Democrats and general wheeling and dealing that got his wife onto the bench in the first place. Where she has done a LOT of damage, maybe even as much as he has.
But how many more bad presidencies in a row can we survive? And are we surviving? Someone on this thread quoted Adam Smith's line, "There is much ruin in a nation," but it's not like the ruin has only just started. It's been going on for decades. We may be near the end of the ruination we can survive.Replies: @David, @Anonym
I agree. That’s why I mentioned how monumentally great a president would need to be to reverse course. It’s not easy.
On another thought, how well does Putin understand English, let alone speak it? Anyone know?Replies: @Glossy
Putin speaks English badly. He seems to understand it better. He’s fluent in German because he was trained to be an intelligence officer in Germany. He converses with German politicians in German, sometimes for hours on end.
It’s a total failure in terms of its publicly stated goal but there’s the two unstated ones as well.
1) actual CO2 emissions: total failure, between them i think India and China are now at 80%+ plus of the total emissions and they’re not going to stop because they know the scare is a scam
2) NWO: making up a global threat to scare people into the NWO has mostly failed
3) wealth transfer: a lot of the push on global warming has come from 3rd world charities using global warming as a vehicle to get the developed world to pay out more. There seems to be some talk of very large yearly payments on that score but as you say it’s hard to say yet if it is just promises or actual cash.
2) the Right has the much larger *currently safe* part of the Rightand the two factors that are changing are1) the immigrant vote is increasing
2) the currently safe areas are shrinkingbut it does seem like the media lying about the true situation means civil war will come before the tipping point is reached.I think France and the UK would be heading into the coming nightmare at the same time but Enoch Powell managed to slow it down for a few years in the UK which was just enough for France to go into it sooner.As a result of that I expect Ukip to have similar numbers in the UK within a few years: 30-40% almost everywhere but only a few seats because they're either 2nd to the prosperous Right in the remaining prosperous areas or 2nd to the immigrant vote in the less prosperous areas.Although France heading into the nightmare first might act as a catalyst to speed the process up in the UK.Replies: @al gore rhythms, @dfordoom
In the event of civil war in France would you expect the Western Powers to stay out of it though? Wouldn’t the USA/Britain give French France the same treatment Serbia got over Kosovo?
No, the fuse for fighting Serbia had been burning for years. Plus France has nuclear weapons. Any kind of war in France would be quick, depending on the army, I would imagine
Part of the French population will react the same way as the Unionist population in northern Ireland and form their own paramilitaries.
As long as the native paramilitaries don't get too strong and the state's response to the insurgency is limited to treating it as a criminal problem then it will be tolerated but anything more than that will get the Serbian treatment.
This phase could go on a long time before the numbers are right for it to break into open civil war.
Wouldn’t the USA/Britain give French France the same treatment Serbia got over Kosovo?
No, the fuse for fighting Serbia had been burning for years. Plus France has nuclear weapons. Any kind of war in France would be quick, depending on the army, I would imagine
Some of them do have the knack but hold themselves back out of fear of saying the 'wrong' thing.
With Trump, it's the bigness of personality, charisma, and shamelessness that comes across as candor and even, oddly enough, humility, i.e. "I know I'm not perfect and made mistakes, but hey, that's me, and I make no excuses or apologies for it."
The thing is most politicians, had they said what Trump did, would have been finished.
He is Teflon Don cuz of his smoothness. The Wolf of Washington is the Trump stump.
He has what the kid in SEPARATE PEACE did.
He could do the wrong thing and still be loved by the teachers.
Some do good but are still disliked. Some do bad but are still liked.
Just how it is.
https://youtu.be/wdq7YxGhMhs?t=17m26sReplies: @nglaer
That version of A Separate Peace is much better than the 70’s one, where Phineas was played by my PEA classmate John Heyl, who, to be honest, was a less good athlete than I was.
When I say civil war I think it will start as an internal insurgency, a bit like northern Ireland, with car bombs and snipers aiming to create explicit no-go areas and demand sharia for Muslim enclaves rather than all-out war.
Part of the French population will react the same way as the Unionist population in northern Ireland and form their own paramilitaries.
As long as the native paramilitaries don’t get too strong and the state’s response to the insurgency is limited to treating it as a criminal problem then it will be tolerated but anything more than that will get the Serbian treatment.
This phase could go on a long time before the numbers are right for it to break into open civil war.
Right, sorry. Was whittling off info too fast. Either way it IS ahead of the fifth (concerning murder).
Do you think Trump actually wants to end mass immigration?
We saw the same thing in Australia. A “conservative” government cracked down on illegal immigration but they continue to flood the country with legal immigrants.
Depends how you define conservative.
There were plenty of English homosexuals who liked the aesthetics of traditionalism. They loved the ritual side of the Catholic Church and they loved High Church Anglicanism. They loved the whole Oxbridge thing. They also liked art and the theatre and all that sort of thing. I imagine there were equivalents in other countries.
They veered sharply leftwards when being leftist became more fun. They like to follow the fashion.
Quite a few would have been attracted to fascism/Nazism in the 30s because fascism had style. Can you imagine male homosexuals not loving those wonderfully sharp uniforms? SS uniforms were so butch!
And in the incredibly unlikely event that ever happened does anyone imagine the US would not immediately begin destabilising an FN government? The US would impose sanctions. They would destroy the French economy.
2) the Right has the much larger *currently safe* part of the Rightand the two factors that are changing are1) the immigrant vote is increasing
2) the currently safe areas are shrinkingbut it does seem like the media lying about the true situation means civil war will come before the tipping point is reached.I think France and the UK would be heading into the coming nightmare at the same time but Enoch Powell managed to slow it down for a few years in the UK which was just enough for France to go into it sooner.As a result of that I expect Ukip to have similar numbers in the UK within a few years: 30-40% almost everywhere but only a few seats because they're either 2nd to the prosperous Right in the remaining prosperous areas or 2nd to the immigrant vote in the less prosperous areas.Although France heading into the nightmare first might act as a catalyst to speed the process up in the UK.Replies: @al gore rhythms, @dfordoom
I would expect that UKIP will fail to win a single seat in the next British election. They’re finished. They know they have no chance and they will self-destruct from despair.
There is not the slightest chance of any nationalist party anywhere in the West gaining real political power. Anyone who believes that democracy (or what we laughingly call democracy in the West) is going to save us is living in a dream world.
My advice is to start learning Russian. Eastern Europe (or parts of it) might survive as an intact European civilisation. For western Europe the future is the Ottoman Empire 2.0. That would be the most hopeful outcome. Or it will be like the Balkans in the late 19th/early 20th century. That would be less hopeful.
I agree that Yugoslavia is the most likely end result and when it comes political parties like the FN will act as the skeleton for the next phase.
Far-right party in France fails in bid to capture regional office
However…
>>> No one would dare point this out
Google’ing on it, I instantly found about 70 references in the mass media.
I don’t know if Israel’s policy of ethnic birthright-ism is any different than Ireland’s (they use the EXACT SAME screening test)….. but I know that it’s not a secret. In fact…. it’s published.
so whoever Anonymous is – he’s not exactly a junk-yard dog investigative journalist. He’s all rip-n-read, all the time.
The regional elections are made up of sub-regions, in some of which the FN got 50%+.
There is not the slightest chance of any nationalist party anywhere in the West gaining real political power. Anyone who believes that democracy (or what we laughingly call democracy in the West) is going to save us is living in a dream world.
My advice is to start learning Russian. Eastern Europe (or parts of it) might survive as an intact European civilisation. For western Europe the future is the Ottoman Empire 2.0. That would be the most hopeful outcome. Or it will be like the Balkans in the late 19th/early 20th century. That would be less hopeful.Replies: @anon
For you maybe.
I agree that Yugoslavia is the most likely end result and when it comes political parties like the FN will act as the skeleton for the next phase.
Nobody cares more about what the past looked like than male homosexuals.
I’d say that’s an absolute certainty.
When Obama was running in 2008, he said that every American should learn a second language.
But Obama himself does not speak a second language.
Of course most Europeans are not really that linguistically gifted. They typically just speak their own language and English, because English is becoming the default language of the EU.
But at a deeper level, how could we ever objectively judge something like vulgarity anyway? One man's vulgarity is just another man's authenticity. A lot depends on context; the rest depends on the man.Replies: @AP
Pro-Maidan, sure. Nationalist? No, unless this term is very loosely defined. I am anti-Soviet.
Not true. I’ve defended Russia against claims that it was hopelessly backward mess prior to the Communists “fixing” it.
Thanks for providing the original. The implied meaning is still quite crude, even if not explicit.
Obama speaks Indonesian. Probably fairly well, but he doesn’t like to advertise it.
Of course most Europeans are not really that linguistically gifted. They typically just speak their own language and English, because English is becoming the default language of the EU.
Actually my family is from both western and central Ukraine. I was quite close to my grandfather who grew up in a village a couple hours from Kiev and who lived in Kharkiv in the 1930s. My western Ukrainian family were mostly Ukrainians but also Polish and ethnic German. My other grandfather’s uncle was this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimierz_%C5%9Awitalski
All of the junta's leaders curse all the time. One of Poroshenlo's most famous pronouncements is that an associate of his is an "Orthodox bitch". Vicky, who made Porky president, is most famous for saying "F the EU". Kolomoysky, who was extremely important to the junta in its formative period, used more curse words than regular words during his public appearances. I remember the foreign minister of the Ukriane, a supposed diplomat, chanting formerly-unprintable words in public. All of these people are proud of their baseness.
It's a fight between civilization and its lack, and you see this in the smallest things.
If Putin really did have a criminal mindset, that would have just made him a little less off-putting to the junta's supporters. If he stuck to his policies, but was magically made to accept Kolomoysky's or the Svoboda party's cultural norms, the hatred that the junta's supporters feel for him would go down a bit. I really do think that the straight-arrow officer-and-a-gentleman aspect of his personality bothers these people by itself, separately from and in addition to his politics.Replies: @Glossy, @5371, @AP
The examples of pro-Westerners swearing seems (other than in the case of Kolomoysky) to have been in private conversations. Are you suggesting that Putin does not swear in private?
Well, in the case of Ukraine means a fight between Galicia and the center, against Donbas.
Should we review HIV rates, abortion rates, murder rates, education, quality of life, divorce rates, etc. between these two opposing regions struggling for dominance within Ukraine?*
You view Russia (whose own statistics across these measures, while not nearly as bad as those of Donbas, are worse than those of its western neighbors) as a defender of western civilization (which is somewhat dubious, when considering Russia’s own social problems) so you are willing to overlook local anomalies for the sake of your global struggle. However it looks like the Ukrainian people don’t want to sacrifice civilization in their own neighborhood for the sake of Putin’s global struggle against the morally corrupt West.
*Another commenter, Peter, once wrote this accurate description of the opposing regions in the Ukraine conflict. Which region represents “civilization”?
“The Western Ukrainians are like Poles. Even despite decades of outright Soviet neglect and outright antagonism the level of culture in a place like Lwow (Lviv) far outstrips anything in Donetsk. I’ve spent significant time in both cities. Lwow felt like a Western city occupied by a foreign power. The people are fantastic, in a true conservative sense. They value their history, their land, their crafts, and they are a self-sufficient people. Donetsk is completely Soviet – deracinated, crappy industries, corrupt and crime ridden, and full of people who would emigrate to the West in a heart beat if they could. Even before the fighting Donetsk was a basket case like every other Russian and East Ukrainian city. If you want to get laid, go to Donetsk. The women have no morals, prostituting yourself is just what women do. In Lwow people still get married and value families. That alone explains why so many in the “manosphere” side with East Ukraine.”
On the other hand, lots of 20th and 21st century French authors have cultivated a style that might best be described as willfully obscure. Cf people like Lacan, Bathes, Derrida, etc.
I still get flashbacks from my time in grad school struggling to decipher Lacan’s Ecrits…..
It’s a fact.
There’s no disingenuousness at all If you want to reserve the term “indigenous” for the Indians in an American context, that’s fine, but my usage of the term is more in line with the spirit of your point, which seemed to use “indigenous” to mean “native”. We’re talking about a population being eclipsed politically before it becomes a numerical minority. As for South Africa, you are simply ignorant of the country’s history. That’s not my fault.
If, as you admit, you don’t know anything about South African history, why are you making arguments based on knowledge of South African history? And why are you blaming me for taking you seriously? Apparently, if I had presumed you were ignorant of the history but familiar with demographics in the 1990’s that would have been okay, but it’s some sort of huge offense if I presume you know the history but are mistaken about the 1990’s demographic profile. That’s very odd.
And your perspective on South African history bears no resemblance to what the average person “knows” about that history. The typical indoctrinated doofus thinks that Europeans showed up and subjugated an existing Black population, not that they formed colonies.