"Well, ackshull-eee..."

Pat Buchanan, in cataloging the vortex of demagogy that is the still-young 2020 Democratic campaign for the presidency:

At the end of a week where he withdrew his nominee to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement and saw the departure of his Secretary of Homeland Security, Trump, referring to the 175,000 migrants apprehended crossing the U.S. border in February and March, protested repeatedly, “Our country is full.”

Echoes of Hitler’s Germany, said The Washington Post:

“Adolf Hitler promised ‘living space’ for Germans as the basis of an expansionist project, which historians said distinguishes the Third Reich from today’s xenophobic governments. Still, experts found parallels.

The Post is stumbling on the real distinction between our time and their cherished 1930's: the complete and alarming reverse of demographic pressure.

Western colonialism resulted from expanding populations. Colonization going back to the Greeks has been impelled by expanding populations. Germany's problem was neither new nor unique--and they didn't have such as the British Empire to draw off surplus men and energy.

Demographics still drive colonization. Only now the Western populations contract while the former colonized world expands. Africa above all needs living space. Globalist anti-nationalists promise it to them and profit when they deliver.

Various colonies arise and expand, snapping up the good ol' gibs and lebensraum.

Honk honk.

Late Night Nostalgia

I've long been a fan of electronic music. One of the first dj/producer auteurs to capture my fancy was Jack Dangers, who records with a rotating collective of fellow artists under the unfortunate name Meat Beat Manifesto.
The name is not a reference to masturbation (at least directly) but to militant veganism and animal rights. A Brit based in San Francisco, Dangers was a practical parody of the progressive.
And the music was infused with his philosophy; I recall a track sampling the sounds of the slaughterhouse.

Despite this the music never comes across as strident. Dangers could be just that in interviews--you could picture even the typical music journalist interviewer rolling his eyes. I recall reading an interview with another artist associated with him and very much of the same progressive stripe, which was the opposite--he came across reasonable and relaxed. Unlike his music, which was embarrassingly forthright.

But Jack was just too good somehow for his politics to ruin his music, even when the music was political.

I was practically a Reagan conservative twenty years ago when I heard this track, Asbestos Lead Asbestos, but even then and still now I see it as a powerful image of an exploited working class toiling away in the midst of decadence, and of the elite disdain for the working class that is such an exigent feature of the present:

I can't hear you. [sample]
What in the hell happened?[sample]
Information. [sample]
What's wrong? [sample]
Well he might say yes but he might mean no.
Asbestos Lead Asbestos
Sell him the coffee table - go boy, go.
Asbestos Lead Asbestos
It's chip board quality, easy installment scheme.
Lead Asbestos
And Dave lives above the roundabout, nobody told him different.
He blows out dust behind the caravan.
Asbestos Lead Asbestos
If they're lucky they'll get pearly white teeth...
Times are hard and the kids ain't learning a thing.
Asbestos Lead Asbestos
Except stealing and fighting.
Asbestos Lead Asbestos 
So they offer him a salary...
National health and a pension scheme...
So he can lie in his bed while he bleeds to death...
So we hand them rich women coffee party handouts
Fill it for the sick, 'cause someone's gotta' eat it...
And it won't be us because we're the smart ones....
Mode of every public school we live on the west side.
Lead Asbestos
Equal opportunity, except if our pedigree dogs don't like the smell of your children...
They're stealing and fighting, but we live on the west side.

"Someone's got to eat it [contaminated food] and it won't be us because we're the smart ones" strikes home more than ever.

 

His stuff went off in a jazz-influenced direction and he lost me.

Here's a good example of his use of non-musical sampling (lots of stuff from documentaries and television--the stridently anti-TV Dangers spent hours in front of the television ready to record). Much of what he does are polemics against modernity in the nature of Ted Kazynski.



His 1999 album Satyricon presented a portrait of fin de seicle decline like the fragmentary Latin satire that is its namesake (the Satyr of the given title doesn't refer to its satirical quality, I think, but to the decadence it documents), and remains, to my mind, one of the best albums of all time.

Non-musical sampling appears to be a lost or at least played-out aspect of music, but the "found sounds" and other samples here give the record a profound depth, humor and satirical quality.

It was all about global warming, fascism and standard progressive bugaboos, but the work transcends its own content by virtue of the vague nature of sampling. Jack wanted to connect his environmental and anti-fascist concerns, probably still does, but the reality is globalism (capitalism) and authoritarianism are in fact going hand-in-hand, and do trace back to what he, in his political simplicity and artistic romanticism, called out by another name.

Time  has come round and overtaken even the author, and that speaks well of him.

My personal theory (or maybe I read it from someone else) is that a work of art takes on its own life once released, and meaning is not set in authorial intent. That doesn't mean a work that escapes, so to speak, its author any less an accomplishment--maybe it's all the more an achievement. The artist has unearthed things beyond immediate understanding and the trite context of the present, evoking principal forms and eternal truths.



Dangers did a lot of production work for well-known (but to my mind lesser) artists such as Nine Inch Nails and Public Enemy. His track Prime Audio Soup was featured in the first Matrix film and the first track above was on the Blair Witch soundtrack.

Goodnight.

Chillstream, 12/9/18: So Much Losing

My YouTube channel.

Media v Media

Google's Perspective algorithm is a tool for censoring "toxic" speech based on word combinations that isn't effective enough for censorship proponents. (Who come mostly from media. Oliver Darcy's efforts on CNN were crucial to the campaign to ban Alex Jones. They should just give him the Pulitzer. Come on, msm, you know you want to.) Cable news, formerly more prestigious outlets such as the Atlantic, and of course the Huffpo-sphere all contribute to the campaign prodding the social media companies toward ever more de-platforming and censorship. Tech media provides creative technical advise.

The near future of censorship will focus on individuals and their ability to associate. Taking out Jones isn't just about silencing him, but also about taking out a node of transmission, by which the curious find their way to more serious and ultimately, to the Narrative, damaging content. From the severely progressive site Rantt

Google’s new Perspective algorithm is a good start, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle we can’t solve with the data points from a single comment, even with the most well trained recurrent neural networks. Ultimately, we need to teach computers to follow a conversation and make an informed opinion of a person’s character, something that can’t be done by a single neural net heavily reliant on parsing language.

It's not the character of the content but the content of your character

Understanding how to do it may be one of the most important technical issues we tackle, or lose the web to armies of trolls, bots, and people really into goose-stepping to a strongman’s tune.

Social media executives, down with the cause but retaining sympathy for the bottom line, are pressured from within as well. Their ranks are rotten with progressives clamoring for more censorship, like cops who resent not being able to bust heads:

Tech companies succeed or fail based on the talent of their developers, which gives those workers the leverage to shape the company culture. So when your engineers tell you there's a problem, you listen. That was clear again this week when Twitter engineers took to the site to push back against CEO Jack Dorsey's comments about why notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is still on the platform when other tech companies have banished him. 

Dorsey responded to his engineers publicly, thanking them for their thoughts and pledging to do better... 

The pressure on Twitter to ban Jones from its platform grew exponentially this week, though, after other major companies like Apple, Facebook, and YouTube started taking action against him for violating their terms of service. On Tuesday, Dorsey tweeted, “We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday. We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does. And we’ll continue to promote a healthy conversational environment by ensuring tweets aren’t artificially amplified.” 

Dorsey further explained that Twitter couldn’t ban Jones based on “succumbing to outside pressure,” and he called on journalists to continue to fact-check him. This didn’t go over well with journalists—many pointed out that we spend a lot of time fact-checking nonsense, but that it’s not our job to keep a viral disinformation incubator healthy;

spit take 

it’s our job to report facts. The defense also fell flat with some current and former Twitter employees. “There is no honor in resisting ‘outside pressure’ just to pat ourselves on the back for being ‘impartial,’" 

Jack, the call is coming from inside the house...! 

Twitter engineer Marina Zhao tweeted. "I agree with @ekp that Twitter does not exist in a vacuum, and it is wrong to ignore the serious real-world harm, and to equate that with political viewpoints.” @ekp is Ellen Pao, formerly of Twitter and Reddit, who had earlier replied to Dorsey, “We tried treating @reddit as a silo, and it was a huge mistake. People got harassed cross-platform. Also if your site is the only one that allows this hate and harassment, it will get overrun and collapse.”

In the end taking Jones out might be the best thing for the right. The left is defusing a bomb that's already gone off, and if Jones disappears entirely, he takes with him a reputation for crazy that is no longer applied to the right. And in all likelihood the deplatforming of Jones will work as intended.

Here's Motherboard:

“We’ve been running a research project over last year, and when someone relatively famous gets no platformed by Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, there's an initial flashpoint, where some of their audience will move with them” Joan Donovan, Data and Society’s platform accountability research lead, told me on the phone, “but generally the falloff is pretty significant and they don’t gain the same amplification power they had prior to the moment they were taken off these bigger platforms.”

The sad fact is someone like Jones has nothing other than his platform--his voice. Emphasis added:

Deplatforming works “best” when the people being deplatformed don’t have any power to begin with. Nor are we talking about people from marginalized communities who have self-censored or left social media because of far right harassment and hate campaigns (and could, in theory, come back with more proactive moderation by large platforms.)

I say the author's self conscious, he'd say thorough, but following "we're crushing the powerless" with "but not the real powerless" is comic gold. Thank you, social justice man. Who, whom all the way down.

Once they've purged the net to the extent possible, expect to be hounded right into the dark web weeds:

Nonetheless, the concern among academics is that, as hate moves to the darker corners of the internet, that some of their old followers may move with them and become further radicalized. “The good that comes with deplatforming is, their main goal was to redpill or get people within mainstream communities more in line with their beliefs, so we need to get them off those platforms,” Robyn Caplan, a PhD student at Rutgers University and Data and Society affiliate, told me on the phone. “But now we’ve put them down into their holes where they were before, and they could strengthen their beliefs and become more extreme.” The question is whether it’s more harmful to society to have many millions of people exposed to kinda hateful content or to have a much smaller number of ultra-radicalized true believers.

The work of social justice never ends, or, it ends at the barrel of a gun.

Tuesday's World

A news round-up.

Roxanne Barr says she might to move to Israel

Former sitcom star Roseanne Barr is vowing to quit the United States and move to Israel, according to reports. Barr made her proclamation on another appearance on Rabbi Shmuley’s podcast where she said she is headed to the Holy Land, according to TMZ. 

“I have an opportunity to go to Israel for a few months and study with my favorite teachers over there,” Barr said, “and that’s where I’m going to go and probably move somewhere there and study with my favorite teachers.”

In Breitbart-speak this constitutes a "vow" to move, as if out of pique like those vowing to abandon Trump's United States. But of course Barr has run afoul of the Resistance, and dared notice (publicly, for I don't think she's alone) Valerie Jarret sort of looks like the chimpanzee female lead in whatever godawful Planet of the Apes iteration we're on now. Her defense--probably honest--would've made a great joke in a stand-up act back when we still were allowed a sense of humor: I didn't even know she was black!

Those celebrities who abandoned their vow to abandon the States are making up for it by forcing others to bail. One celebrity's good as another.

Barr also said that she made a “fatal mistake” in apologizing for the controversial tweet about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett. Many felt the tweet was racist and the subsequent controversy ended in Barr’s firing from her hit sitcom. 

Barr's isolation for supporting Trump in Hollywood must be so total the thought of an aggressive campaign fighting back--as she would if the right was calling for her head--is unthinkable. The Jews of Hollywood call her Hitler, the Jews of Israel shrug.

Barr said that liberals never accept apologizes [sic], but use them as weapons to destroy opponents.

A truism at this point.

*

Outside of Portland in Beaverton Oregon Nike's campus-style headquarters sprawl over 213 acres, at last count (Microsoft's massive Seattle-area campus is 500 acres). Avenues are named after celebrity sponsors who haven't fallen out of favor yet for raping women or supporting Trump. Company security patrols the wooded bike lane surrounding the facility.

 This empire is putting forth Collin Kaepernick as the face of its thirtieth anniversary "Just Do It" campaign. The reaction was, as they say, swift. Swifter than the flagging quarterback, who lost his starting spot before he found his moral outrage.

Nike’s stock price fell more than two percent in early trading Tuesday. It was the worst performing stock in the Dow Jones industrial average, helping to drag the average to a fall for the first part of the day. While some investors are likely nervous that the company’s decision to prominently feature Kaepernick could inspire a boycott, the stock price of main competitor Adidas was also down more than two percent. The broader stock market downturn was being blamed on worries about tense negotiations over Nafta.

The N.F.L. has struggled to contain the on-field protests, which have also included raised fists and other gestures, which league officials have blamed for dragging down the league. Television ratings have declined and certain segments of the fan base have reacted angrily. President Trump has made the N.F.L. a target for not firing players who refuse to stand for the national anthem.

Kaepernick has had a deal with Nike since 2011, but it's unclear when he was picked for the Just Do It campaign. Seems at some point during the height of the controversy Nike decided to sign him for the ad. Not only is Kaepernick unique in being an unsigned player-sponsor, he's the first to be picked entirely for political activism, not despite it.

Football faces the same demographic dilemma as the white population the NFL takes for granted, as participation fades at the high school level, under demographic-driven pressure from soccer. Not Nike's problem. The NFL, no doubt wishing Kaepernick and his ridiculous afro would just go away, gets to open the new season with the kneeling controversy brandishing its own top-flight ad campaign. Chaos portends destruction, and this devil is delighted.

*

When the various social media platforms coordinated their deplatforming of Alex Jones, I thought it represented a new level of repression and a possible point of attack for those opposed to it. The Socials represent an information cartel if they're colluding to restrict access, and the common response, that a platform is a private enterprise and a consumer can go elsewhere, is rendered even more meaningless.

Still, there isn't enough coordination for TechCrunch, or at least the latest staff writer-with-a-foreign-name lecturing us on freedoms that never even occurred to people in his own cultural heritage (a new and growing cliche) to explain our principles to us:

What they now need to do is take the next step and start to coordinate policies so that those who wish to propagate hate speech can no longer game policies across platforms. Waiting for controversies like Infowars to become a full-fledged PR nightmare before taking concrete action will only increase calls for regulation. Proactively pooling resources when it comes to hate speech policies and establishing industry-wide standards will provide a defensible reason to resist direct government regulation. 

The social media giants can also build public trust by helping startups get up to speed on the latest approaches to content moderation. While any industry consortium around coordinating hate speech is certain to be dominated by the largest tech companies, they can ensure that policies are easy to access and widely distributed. 

Coordination between fierce competitors may sound counterintuitive. But the common problem of hate speech and the gaming of online platforms by those trying to propagate it call for an industry-wide response. Precedent exists for tech titans coordinating when faced with a common threat. Just last year, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube formalized their “Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism” – a partnership to curb the threat of terrorist content online. Fighting hate speech is no less laudable a goal.

The author laments Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects platforms from lawsuits for content, limiting the pressure that can be put on the Socials. "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

The act was of course stripped of its substance regarding the regulation of obscenity by the Supreme Court on free speech grounds. Now that there's an established, monopolistic information cartel (and your internet porn is safe from interruption) the left and the powerful are having second thoughts about the provision.

Section 230 strikes me as the means by which this cartel might be compelled through law or litigation to provide open and free access. That protection from liability for content should come with a commensurate prohibition from engaging in political censorship. Of course, no one admits they're engaging in political censorship; that's what the ever-adaptable concept "hate" is for.

Sunday

On Luke Ford today with Collin Liddell and Matt Forney.

Robert Stark and Matt P of Stark Truth TV join in to talk about their documentary (((Supply))) featuring Luke:

Chillstream

Aimless chat with Kaiter Enless, Babylonian Hebrew, ecce lux and Brundlefly.

In with the Incel Crowd

I'm not surprised by the lack of sympathy for incels. It's to be expected.

It isn't like sexual failure is a moral failing now--it's worse than that, because it's evolutionary failure, the ultimate failure. The same logic behind nice guys finishing last is behind our disdain of them. Avoiding association with the evolutionary loser is an evolutionary strategy itself.

As so much politics is about contrasting one's group as the winners against the other's losers, and much or most of what defines a loser now is sexual failure, which is evolutionary failure, politics at least mimics evolutionary competition between groups and provides great cover for coherent ethnic groups to wage evolutionary warfare under the guise of politics. Even, amazingly, under the guise of liberation and political progress, as "oppressed" minorities. An awful lot has flowed from white westerners unilaterally (and loudly) disarming in the age-old evolutionary struggle between groups. They say it's all good--but they would say that, because "it" triumphs; see my earlier comments about disdain for nice guys in the evolutionary struggle.

Sexual morality, until recently, was largely about providing some shelter from the evolutionary torrent for the nice guys. That newly released torrent is now sweeping them away in the sexually liberated West. This has the power to shape us into a new people, is shaping us into a  new people, determined by biology on the steroids of a degenerate culture. From certain criteria--say those we observed before through traditional mores--the new traits we acquire will be dysgenic. Overall it can be expected to be highly miscegenational.

To assign the incel's bitterness to psychological pathology is absurd. Nothing could be more clear, coherent and natural than the rage of someone selected, by evolution and society, to die off. As the rest of the world appears to be screwing its brains out. Acceptance is only achieved by checking out and self-alienating.

In Toronto recently a man drove a van onto a sidewalk full of women and killed ten people after declaring himself a "soldier" on behalf of incels. He would seem to be an extreme case and was described as developmentally challenged. In photos he has the under-bite and hapless stare normally associated with mental retardation, but was smart enough to be a software developer and may have had Asperger's.

He succeeded at least in forcing incels into the news cycle, and media outlets into revealing their biases in their hot-take analyses.

Conventional thinking can only appreciate the incel problem as one of sex and individual rights.
But maybe it's more fair to say it's a problem of reproduction and group decline.

For the left it's viewed as a question women's rights, which will not be abridged either by sex redistribution schemes or a return to sexual morality. Any legitimate grievance must be civil rights based. Judging incels by that standard they are seen not only as unworthy but as appropriating sacred civil rights language. The Guardian:

They borrow a lot of language from the equality/civil rights agenda – society “treats single men like trash, and it has to stop. The people in power, women, can change this, but they refuse to. They have blood on their hands,” read one post the morning after the Toronto attack. Basically, their virginity is a discrimination or apartheid issue, and only a state-distributed girlfriend programme, outlawing multiple partners, can rectify this grand injustice. Yet at the same time, they hate victims, snowflakes, liberals, those who campaign for any actual equality.

The right arrives at the same place by way of libertarianism. There is a sexual market with winners and losers, not to be disturbed by the bleatings of those losers. The Federalist:

Those ideas, unusual though they are, fit into a pattern of statist rhetoric followed by many other groups who, failing to achieve their aims in life, seek to use state power to force the result they desire. Their reaction against the results of the Sexual Revolution is little different from communists’ reaction to the Industrial Revolution, but the methods by which they would achieve their aims—state coercion and, now, terror—are identical. Incels are merely statists of sex.

The misery of the incel is the measure of our personal liberty, apparently.

Wahabbism is a Social Construct

Jeffrey Golberg interviews Saudi Arabian crown prince and ruler Mohammed bin Salman in the Atlantic

The prince, in my conversation with him, divided the Middle East into two warring camps: what he called the “triangle of evil,” consisting of Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Sunni terror groups; and an alliance of self-described moderate states that includes Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Oman. About his bête noir, the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Prince Mohammed said, “I believe the Iranian supreme leader makes Hitler look good. Hitler didn’t do what the supreme leader is trying to do. Hitler tried to conquer Europe. … The supreme leader is trying to conquer the world.”

 The triangle of evil intersects the axis of evil at Iran, which appears to be the juncture of Israeli and Saudi Arabian interests. Where the prince places the Muslim Brotherhood and Sunni terrorists George W Bush placed Iraq as their state sponsor, ignoring at the time Saudi Arabia could far more easily be described as just that.

The thirty two year-old MbS, as he's known, appears to be out to modernize Saudi Arabia as rapidly as he can get away with, in conjunction with a grand plan to move beyond an oil economy called Vision 2030. Combined with an abandonment of the Palestinians and an all-but-open alliance with Israel against the Shia represented by Iran, he comes as if ready-made for the global order. Liberalizing Saudi Arabia is to be open for business.

And that's Saudi Arabia's business, of course, but when the West is filling up with young male Sunnis who aren't bound for glory in their new homes, I worry any terrorist campaign against his government will operate out of and engulf Europe.

The prince cites the 1979 Iranian Revolution as the birth of Islamic extremism. This is a recent theme, tracing the seizure of the Grand Mosque by similarly radicalized Sunnis and the subsequent conservative period in which Saudi Arabia remains, including its appeasement and sponsorship of radical Islam all back to today's enemy, Iran.

Israel, the US and Saudi Arabia are now allied against Iran, and we're the only one among our "axis" or "triangle" (of stupid?) that hasn't a discernible national interest in countering Iran, outside of our alliance with the other two.

Goldberg asks the prince about Saudi Arabia's support for Wahabbism and the same Sunni extremism he cites in his triangle, and the prince shows a distinctly Western facility for evasion-by-definition:

Goldberg: Isn’t it true, though, that after 1979, but before 1979 as well, the more conservative factions in Saudi Arabia were taking oil money and using it to export a more intolerant, extremist version of Islam, Wahhabist ideology, which could be understood as a kind of companion ideology to Muslim Brotherhood thinking? 

MbS: First of all, this Wahhabism—please define it for us. We’re not familiar with it. We don’t know about it. 

Goldberg: What do you mean you don’t know about it? 

MbS: What is Wahhabism? 

Goldberg: You’re the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. You know what Wahhabism is. 

MbS: No one can define this Wahhabism. 

Goldberg: It’s a movement founded by Ibn abd al-Wahhab in the 1700s, very fundamentalist in nature, an austere Salafist-style interpretation— 

MbS: No one can define Wahhabism. There is no Wahhabism. We don’t believe we have Wahhabism. We believe we have, in Saudi Arabia, Sunni and Shiite. We believe we have within Sunni Islam four schools of thought, and we have the ulema [the religious authorities] and the Board of Fatwas [which issues religious rulings]. Yes, in Saudi Arabia it’s clear that our laws are coming from Islam and the Quran, but we have the four schools—Hanbali, Hanafi, Shafi’i, Maliki—and they argue about interpretation.

No drink of alcohol, no taste of bacon could Westernize him more than this mode of argument. The society of global bugmen have a Prince.

Six Degrees of Literally Hitler

So far the clampdown on right wing speech continues to expand, with virtually no resistance from elected officials, including the president.

Not only are platforms shutting down political content, the old-fashioned means of chilling speech through public shaming has become more aggressive. Guilt by association gets more invasive and tenuous at the same time guilt gets easier to acquire and alternative right wing views spread. The Narrative holds.

Guilt by association lands easier and harder when the association is "literally Hitler". Consciously or not the left now places a lot of energy on first identifying someone as beyond respectability, and then going out and picking off anyone who can be associated with him.

Thus, Vox calls out National Review for not applying the ideological scarlet letter to an article by the notorious Jason Richwine whose unearthed "Immigration and IQ" dissertation (PDF) got him fired from the Heritage Foundation:

On Monday night, the conservative magazine National Review published an article coming to the spirited defense of a University of Pennsylvania law professor who proclaimed that she had “rarely, rarely” seen a black student finish in the top half of her class. 

But the defense not only dramatically misrepresented what took place at Penn; it also neglected to include the author’s ties to that very same law professor, to the alt-right, and to his own racist views and past work for a website formerly run by white nationalist Richard Spencer.

Amy Wax testified to her personal experience teaching law:

During her remarks, Wax said, “Here’s a very inconvenient fact ... I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half. I can think of one or two students who scored in the top half of my required first-year course.” In his response, Ruger said that Wax’s views about black graduation rates at Penn were not factual.

We have a curious situation. Professor Wax is something like an accidental whistle blower. Ruger's response was comic: it's not true that few blacks graduate high because some do. Some reporters seem genuinely incapable of seeing the fallacy, but many must be silently accepting it. So a transparent fraud plays out with a wink. Note the mushy construct above: Wax's "views" (not her first-hand experience) aren't true or not, but "not factual". Graduation rates remain closely held, the first-hand account of a professor is refuted with what is almost certainly a lie and the professor is demoted for snitching.

Vox recounts the case against Richwine and, since we're talking about National Review, segues into, who else, John Derbyshire and his brilliant re-casting of the black slander that is known as "the Talk" about how to deal with dangerous white policemen.

Of course, there was a time when such views and background might have gotten one summarily removed from National Review (a publication for which I have written), which has long positioned itself as a leading conservative publication and was outspoken in its criticism of the white nationalist alt-right during the 2016 election.

In fact, that time was in 2012.

That’s when longtime National Review contributor John Derbyshire (a writer with a long, long history of racism who had even openly described himself as a “mild and tolerant” racist back in 2003) wrote a piece for the far-right outlet Taki’s Magazine titled “The Talk: Non-Black Version,” which one writer described as “kind of unbelievably racist.” In it, Derbyshire argued, among other things, that intelligent black Americans are “something of a luxury good, like antique furniture or corporate jets.”
That’s because, he wrote:

The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”

Somehow the Narrative holds, despite the point-and-sputter method's reliance on quoting verbatim ideas that sound eminently reasonable. Of course Vox is recounting an episode wherein National Review toed the line when editor Rich Lowry quickly cut loose Richwine. Not enough. With each new firing a new baseline is set; you're certainly not going to go out and hire someone now who's further right of someone you just fired, are you? Thus "progress" ratchets along.

Six years later, similar views are being espoused by another National Review contributor, who has previously written for a site dedicating to promoting the views of the alt-right and whose views were too extreme for the very conservative Heritage Foundation.

So Rich Lowry is called upon to be conistent:

I’ve reached out to Lowry, National Review’s editor-in-chief, and National Review Online editor Charles C.W. Cooke for comment and will update if I receive a response.

Social justice on the line, Mr Lowry.

Hillary's Legacy Meme

Via InfoWars, this is genius.
I just wish they'd included Hillary riding a nuke like a rodeo cowboy, a la Slim Pickens:


"Hey, what about Hillary?"
 Probably a copyright issue.

Vlad the Buzzkiller

Vladimir Putin lays into Megyn Kelly regarding foreign meddling in elections. Vlad puts on quite a show. Earlier, when Megyn is opening with the Russian hackers accusation, he's grunting and snorting like a bull in the chute. At some point you can see Ms Kelly gulp as he gores msm hypocrisy.

Frame Games on JournoYid

Vox Pox

Vox is laying off:

“Layoff talk started a month ago. Company is worried about future growth patterns — which is just jargon for the fact they over-hired in video even when they claimed they weren’t doing that exact thing during the big pivot of ’15-16,” the [anonymous Vox] staffer said.

Up until recently I watched few videos online, and few from such as Vox. The few I've seen haven't impressed me. I recall one vox-plaining "scientific racism". You haven't been affronted until a millennial girl explains to you who Blumenbach was in up-talk.

Mainstream outlets continue to struggle to capture a share of the increasing interest in online video that may or not be there, at least in the way they imagine--seeing the soy boy editor deliver the platitudes in person maybe isn't so compelling after all. The kind of eyeball herding they seek requires the viral or visceral

Overall, we are cautious about the long-term dynamics for video news in particular. Although there has been a significant growth in online video, much of this has been in social networks and around softer news and lifestyle content (or premium drama and sports on demand), not news. 

Video that adds drama and immediacy is now valued and expected by consumers on news websites, but only up to a point and in certain circumstances, with both young and old still valuing the control and flexibility of text. Although we are likely to see considerable innovation in both formats and production over the next few years, it is hard to see video replacing text in terms of the range of stories and the depth of comment and analysis traditionally generated by publishers. The high commercial returns currently available around video are unlikely to last if, as expected, more investment and more automated systems lead to a substantial increase in the supply of content, thus driving down advertising rates.

The smaller but more dynamic market for commentary and analysis feels like it belongs to the alt right naturally as a semi-Samizdat. Unfortunately for the alt right, what's driving video are digital formats, as offered by Google and Facebook. It seems only a matter of time before they Shut It Down.

Morning in Moscow

Russia Insider comes at the Jewish Question like an icebreaker:

Obviously, this is a ridiculous way to run a publication whose object is to get to the truth, so I am writing this to explain why, from now on, the pages of Russia Insider will be open to articles which fairly and honestly address the influence of Jewish elites, including pointing out when it is malevolent, which it often is, and try to understand it and explain it, with malice towards none.

What government or faction funds Russia Insider? According to the publication:

Russia Insider is a grassroots phenomenon, and sometimes resembles a political movement as much as it does a publication. We exist solely because of small donations from readers. We get no funding from major donors, not to mention governments, foundations, or other organized groups. It is all private individuals. Our single largest donation over the past year was $5000, and the median gift is $30. We raised about $80,000 last year. This gives us the freedom to pretty much say what we want, something that can be said of very few publications, even in the alternative media space, most of whom are beholden to large donors.

Buzzfeed reported on the site's launch in 2014:

Russia Insider, which went live at the beginning of September but only started attracting notice this past week with a video featuring a Russian grandma cajoling Obama to leave Russia alone, is an "effort by a group of expats here in Moscow," said Charles Bausman, an expatriate who has been living in Russia since the early 1990s. Before founding Russia Insider, Bausman worked in private equity at a firm called AVG Capital Partners, which invests in large agribusiness projects. 

"We felt that there was a demand among the reading public for a view of news about Russia that wasn't so critical of Russia," Bausman said. "Since that coincides with what we believe, we started this website." 

Bausman, whose last experience in journalism was as a junior producer in NBC's Moscow bureau after college, says that the website has no relation to and is not funded by the Russian government. 

"I know that that they might be very interested in doing that but we're not interested in that," Bausman said. The site, he said, is "a very amateur operation supported by a bunch of people doing this in their free time." Bausman is seeking to crowdfund the operation or attract investors.

Russia Insider may or may not be financed by the Russian government after all, but ultimately that doesn't matter. I find it more interesting that Russia Insider, in raising the Jewish question, is either what it says it is, a global grassroots speaking truth to Jewish power, or the Russian government forced to conceal its defense against Jewish power, demonstrating its remarkable extent.

Any argument can be taken on its merits, author-less, and understood separately from its exponent's intention or bias. While the source is always relevant, whether someone works for Putin or the US government impinges not at all on the objective merits of an argument, or reporting for that matter.

We are blessed and cursed to live in interesting times.

But we won't take the Norwegians

Via Steve Sailer's comments I found this gem:

If you vote the right way on Israel no level of chaos can make you a "shit hole country", sir!

What's really funny about this is Bill implies the Haitian government's cynical support is indicative of a greater national and individual character (which is of course measured in support for Israel).

Meanwhile, transplanting enough Jamaicans (who don't really sit around thinking about Israel to be honest) into Bill's (and Bill's relatives') environment is a sure-fire way to turn it into--I believe the term is "shit hole", whereas Norwegians (who are more likely to have some awareness and support for their government's opposition to Israel) would make fine, if dull, neighbors.

Branded

Justin Timberlake is rebranding as a white man, according to somebody in something called The Outline:

A powerline stretches across a backdrop of golden fields. A stem of grain cuts through the sun shining in an empty forest. Justin Timberlake is cold and alone in the woods, staring at something we can’t see. Now he is kneeling in a snowy field, lost in thought and then a second later arms stretched up toward the heavens. Now he is walking fully-clothed through a quiet stream. He is gazing out at some snowy mountains. Next he is on a cliff gazing out over an autumnal wilderness scene. Something is weighing on Justin Timberlake’s mind, but what could it be?

We don’t know yet, but what we do know is Justin Timberlake is now very deep. The trailer for Timberlake’s new album Man of the Woods presents the former NSYNC heartthrob looking pensive in various natural settings, hitting every note of the “white man finding himself in the empty West” trope that has long been part of America’s romantic fictional past (and Levi’s commercials). In case the shots of Timberlake running through empty fields that cut to a shot of a band of horses running through snowy mountains aren’t enough, his wife Jessica Biel and his producer Pharrell are there to hammer the point home in a voiceover. “It feels like mountains, trees, campfires, like Wild West, but now,” says Biel. “It just feels so earthy,” says Pharrell shortly before a black and white shot of him in a studio pronouncing something, presumably a song from the album, as “a smash.

Here's the video

 

Well it's certainly chock full of implicit white concepts, which the Outline lists in order of offense. Objectively, the imagery of the stage show and the outdoors co-exist clumsily. Nothing evokes a wheat field less than a lit stage, and vice versa.

Timberlake is from Tennessee, and has always been appropriating an urban aesthetic. White stars have resorted to country and whiter genres later in their career in the past, after having appropriated an urban aesthetic in a fashion to which conventional culture is increasingly hostile. Timberlake might be one of the last of a type: the white performer of black popular music. Timberlake's career pivot can also be seen as bailing out of an increasingly untenable persona, politically and socially.

Appropriation will eventually be stamped out. But branding as a white person isn't really allowed either. As the Outline article ends, Timberlake will "...only have to live with himself for pandering to a whiter America."
Pandering to a more chromatic America will be greatly restricted for whites--who will, in all likelihood, become less interesting to diverse American audiences, though I expect white characters will retain a certain interest despite it all because, when it's all said and done, whites are frankly more interesting than the vibrant.

I think of us as being in the appropriation phase of civil rights, where the seizure of material and cultural wealth is systematized (and blurred--barring white men from Star Wars or whatever is both). There are aspects to it. There's the campaign for "inclusion" such as forcing diversity on such as Star Wars. There's also a regulatory function developing. From Slate via Steve Sailer:

Is My Novel Offensive?

How “sensitivity readers” are changing the publishing ecosystem—and raising new questions about what makes a great book.

By Katy Waldman

… When she began to craft her second novel, The Upside of Unrequited, about twin sisters navigating the shoals of high school romance, she was determined not to make the same mistake. And so before her manuscript went to print, she reached out to a group of “sensitivity readers.” These advising angels—part fact-checkers, part cultural ambassadors—are new additions to the book publishing ecosystem. Either hired by individual authors or by publishing houses, sensitivity readers are members of a minority group tasked specifically with examining manuscripts for hurtful, inaccurate, or inappropriate depictions of that group.

The monetization of such regulatory functions is a promising growth industry within the civil rights racket. As Sailer says of his "voluntary auxiliary thought police"--who've been at it a while--they increasingly want to "go pro". The lack of real and meaningful work out there and the likely chaotic nature of the average volunteer thought cop must only magnify their desire.
Interesting times ahead.

Just Sayin' you can't Just Say That

Is this for real?

Donald Trump retweeted three video clips of anti-white Muslim aggression, without comment. Instantly the news cycle was convulsed. Trump's tweets course through the neural pathways of the system like dopamine.

The outrage seized on the source, a British woman facing jail for speaking against Muslim immigration. Guilt by association always helps to distract from substance. And of what is she guilty? Stuff like the offending tweets, I imagine.

As for the substance of those tweets, there's always the obscurantist option

  

Glenn Greenwald might be slipping into millennial-speak when he issues the nonsensical phrase "random Muslims", but it helps his argument still. He means presumably random acts by Muslims, but there's nothing random about patterns. These videos are documentary proof of a pattern. They only reach us through the interference of Glenn and his ilk.

(I'm reminded of something I witnessed a few years back. A newly assigned New York Times reporter working in Palestine wrote of her impressions of Palestinians mourning for those killed by Israeli troops. The funerals were outpourings of intense lamentations, but after and beyond that the deaths were taken with a stoicism this western, Jewish woman did not recognize.
The implications were clear, if not to her. A cyber-posse rode out, Glenn and others, I think all Jewish, and she was publicly chastised for the racism of suggesting even a cultural difference between Jews and Palestinians. She quickly pleaded ignorance and apologized. Her impressions were mistaken, coercion made clear to her now.
After this satisfactory conclusion Greenwald observed approvingly "this is how it's supposed to work." What "it" is exactly he didn't say, but I don't think it's journalism.)

It is surreal: the Anglo-descended president of the United States roundly denounced by the West's respectable class for documenting foreigners attacking and humiliating westerners in their home countries. With the vast pozzed middle acquiescing or supporting them. One British luminary promised Trump would be met with massive protests if he dared visit, and he's to be believed. A vast, motley horde is at the globalists' command.

"Delete your account" British pols literally demanded, without the customary humor. Indeed, ashen is the only way I can describe the pallor of one horrified luminary who suggested Trump be charged with hate crimes. The elite appears terrified. Trump's actions are unfathomable.

Trump's re-tweets constitute a revolutionary act.

 As much as it's rustled the gilded jimmies of our degenerate elite, it may--it has to, one thinks--be giving hope to indigenous British caught between a hostile government and hostile Muslims.

Trump's intrusion into British domestic politics subverts and betrays the global elite, talking past them to the white populations they loathe and fear. It's astounding that it's happening, and that it needs to in the first place.

The progressive order is global, and by its very nature. Opposition tends to be local, by its very nature. Beyond the harried and harassed of the alt right there is no global opposition. Trump may have changed all that. Just the--forgive the phrase--raised consciousness of it could be transformative.

What a global alt right would look like is anyone's guess. But just the idea of it, widely held, has the potential to accelerate a showdown with the global elite that seems better coming sooner rather than later.

Ross Douthat called Candidate Trump a "traitor to his class" for his economic nationalism. Now he's a traitor to his time, the Current Year. As for the Brit-pol suggesting Trump could be charged under the same laws as the woman he retweeted, the law is the law. The president isn't above the law in his home. Why should he be above Britain's laws? US citizens have been denied visas for political views. Why not the president?

Leonid Bershidsky is a Jewish Russian expatriate journalist who writes opinion for Bloomberg. Here he makes a show of leaving Russia in 2014, citing Putin's press restrictions and the annexation of Crimea. He's spent a career in Russian media for a western audience, working for such as the Moscow Times.

The New York Times' profile of Tony Hovater, "the Nazi Next Door", went down harsh, from the hard left to the normie middle. Mr Bershidsky offers a chaser:

Tony Hovater, the Ohio man whose profile in The New York Times caused much indignation last weekend, would have been in jail or at least under close police surveillance if he lived in Germany. In the U.S., Hovater is free to keep posting swastika-filled pictures on Facebook — but the writer and editors who published a piece about him that was bleakly neutral in tone face ferocious anger for "normalizing" the Nazi sympathizer. 

A certain part of U.S. society's desire to set rules has been frustrated by the election of Donald Trump as president — though, in fact, it was frustrated even earlier, by years of Republican majorities in Congress. That frustration is manifesting itself as vocal outrage campaigns on the same social networks that have enabled Trump supporters to organize and white supremacists to find like-minded people in other parts of the country. But rather than bring change, the outrage will deepen rifts.

Everyone who's anyone is angry the Nazi in the story is so nice and harmless--but they would be untroubled in Europe, where he would be thrown in jail for dissent no matter how decent. Bershidsky has the profile of the soulless international bug man, and this piece on its face is a common enough type: an author implicitly suggesting a radical solution in ostensible neutrality. But he goes so far I'm tempted to think it a disguised satire or something. If Bershidsky was alt right, a conspiracy theory of his working for the Deep State to make the movement look ridiculous.

After 1945, Germany chose to pass laws that made most radical right propaganda, as well as Nazi symbols, illegal. These laws are still in force. The Constitutional Protection Office watches people who tend to cut it too close. A tourist who throws a Nazi salute in jest can get arrested. It's not just swastikas that are banned — schools routinely forbid the wearing the clothes of certain brands that are associated with the neo-Nazi movement. Hate speech against groups of people, including races, is a crime. A vast majority of Germans approves of these rules. Those who don't — such as members of the far-right NPD party or the most radical elements within the milder Alternative for Germany party — keep quiet about it or run legal risks. Other countries without Germany's history of Nazi rule — such as Sweden and Switzerland — have also legislated against Nazi symbols.

The standard social-media outrage campaign that quickly brought the NYT to heel is nonetheless waged over media that allows "Trump supporters to organize" and frees "white supremacists" from their isolation. The implied argument here is that social media may have to be sacrificed to social justice. The Left isn't winning there, but, as the author realizes, the Left was winning before social media's democratic revolution messed up the program. Social media is a front and fight the powerful don't need because they run everything outside of it.

I expect nostalgia to kick in eventually, for those simpler times.

A citizen who doesn't break the law is protected by society as a whole, however immoral his actions. It isn't writing about Hovater that "normalizes" his behavior; it's the lack of legal consequences when he embraces Nazi symbolism. Trump's election, Hovater told New York Times writer Richard Fausset, helped drive that home. He now brushes off attacks with "Yeah, so?"

That's a mess of a paragraph. I'm not sure how Trump's election freed Hovater from thinking about criminal sanction. It's social sanction that has been lifted, slightly, for those with less to risk. What he seems to be getting at here is that social sanction doesn't cut it anymore, so criminal sanction may be our only recourse. That and not criminalizing a thing is "normalizing" it.

All the outrage campaigns against "normalizing" white nationalism and sexual harassment, two sins of which Trump has been accused, might seem like a call for legislative change. But there is no serious movement for German-style hate speech laws or Nazi symbol bans making their way through Congress. There are no proposals to match this year's German law that requires social networks to remove hate speech or face steep fines.

But there's no support for that here. The noise of these daily controversies is just that for the most part. So far the Left hasn't had to give up its own freedom of expression to silence opposition for the most part, having the socials under their control and applying unashamedly biased policies. But that only goes so far. The Left is losing the Battle of Social Media and may have to call a bomb strike on their own position.

They might not have had to do that if Hillary Clinton had won.

“Research shows that the dynamic that leads to outrage is not the same as that which effects change,” says Ronny Patz, a nongovernmental organization researcher at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University. “When such waves, such scandals come into focus, it helps when there’s already a process afoot that matches the outrage.” He means a legislative process, and he's right. In response to the criticism of Fausset's piece, The New York Times felt compelled to issue a deftly worded nonapology and to remove from the piece a link to a website selling swastika armbands. But it's a long way from this kind of damage control to real, lasting change.  

Such change would require going through the normal political process: drafting legislation, pushing it through Congress and getting it signed by the president, or overriding his veto. In the U.S., of course, the Supreme Court could also legislate outside this process, as it effectively did with gay marriage — something that wouldn't work in European countries, where referendums and parliamentary majorities have made the decision. 

We have here a chilling vision of what might have been. Hillary Clinton and her Supreme Court instituting controls on speech and media, with a punitive vengeance for our defiance in bringing forth Trump.

Conformity is Good, Apathy is Great

The New Yorker has published an interesting and dangerously close to fair profile of Mike Enoch of The Right Stuff broadcast.
Enoch:

"If you’re a liberal, you’ve never thought twice, you’ve never reconsidered, you’ve absorbed what you were taught in the government schools and by the TV.”

A liberal now is simply someone who has stopped thinking about certain things. For him a set of settled questions form the basis of his quasi-religion. All we know about sex and race we learned by 1973, at which point the collective liberal brain was freeze-dried while taking in an episode of All in the Family.

This is normal. We aren't biologically conditioned to a life of perpetual questioning of social and religious convention. A society made up entirely of conformists would become stagnant and implode; one made up entirely of individual free-thinkers would become chaotic and explode.

 The average person and society both need the hard ground of unquestioned and broadly accepted fundamental beliefs concerning the nature of life and Man. It would be madness if every single individual was a moral free agent to his last, a skeptic of all to the end.

An apolitical and conformist population is a virtuous one--if they are given a sane social order in which to conform. If you have what we have now that virtue of the mass is turned against itself, just as that individual liberal, eager if oblivious conformist, is a victim of his own blind, dumb virtue.

The Waiting

One more foul emanation of enforced diversity: that morbid interval after an act of mass violence, as we two increasingly divided sides of our split nation wait to learn the identity of the culprit and where the narrative impact will land. Diversity not only divides by placing entire communities of strangers in our midst, it divides us--what's left of "us"--by forcing us to take a stand regarding them.

Still, almost no one who's chosen sides already will be swayed either way. Whoever loses the coin toss feels it as a narrative setback, a blow to morale and a lost opportunity, but rarely if ever as a challenge to his assumptions. We continue, out of habit as much as anything else, as if there's still a fight for the acquiescence of the great distracted middle of apolitical citizens, the "normies". But as our political polarization continues and the atrocities pile up--both direct results of diversity--that middle becomes both smaller and increasingly numbed to the arguments. To the extent they consider it at all they assume they live equidistant between two extremes that can be reconciled, if only the zealous on both sides would calm down, by some splitting of the difference. That things might be the Manichean struggle between good and evil that we out here on the battle lines see defies common sense--and it should, but common sense is insufficient for understanding a deliberately distorted reality.

In this circumstance it takes a greater shock to move anyone in the middle either way. But with the Establishment's control of the Megaphone there is a profound disparity in the directional effect of those shocks. Not all crimes are equal; not all victims equally wronged. Through amplification of supposed right wing extremism and suppression of even the most heinous acts of, for two instances, Muslim terrorists and black criminals, we've long been in a situation where a drunken white's "racist" rant somewhere goes viral and becomes an occasion for white self-flagellation everywhere, while the vast majority of Americans don't know about such as the Bataclan massacre, and criminally rare is he who knows of its appalling nature. And as the terrorist attacks pile up and grow in brutality, the perceptual chasm widens, because it's been decreed beforehand that an equivalence exists.

It's a scam, by which white Americans surrender our notion of "us" and "them". Rest assured, they, whoever they happen to be, have not. The effect for intellectual callow American blacks, Muslims and others of this deliberate double standard has been to strengthen their in-group identity and demonize us as a hostile out-group.

And the extreme nature of the violence is not just telling of the depths of the hate we're up against, it's an outrage we're no longer allowed. The nature of the violence is entirely relevant, but we're supposed to equate a disaffected loner shooting up a church in outrage over a nonetheless accurate notion of the state of affairs--Dylann Roof--with a police assassin wound up by fantastic tales of a "war" being waged against him by racist cops. We can prosecute and condemn Roof's actions without denying reality. I'm not sure how many more Roofs can be prevented if we continue to deny that reality and fail to deal with it. Likewise the emergence of an angry loner--such as may be responsible for the Quebec mosque massacre--does nothing to negate or justify the continuing assault on our peace and heritage that Islam represents. Neither do I equate his actions with the torture of innocents by an organized band supported by a larger religious-political movement

This is the nature of tolerance: you aren't allowed proper disgust, revulsion and outrage. Its impulse is still there, however, and it gets channeled into our own destruction; witness the zealous anger of the social justice warrior.

Where the media has no option but to cover such atrocities it hedges with irrelevant or misleading  context about how terrorists don't represent all Muslims and "right wing Christian white men" represent a greater threat. The revealing disparity in the nature of the crimes--a bullied loner shooting up a church versus the gleeful barbarity of Muslims beheading their victims--is hidden in statistics, along with the reality the Muslim terrorist represents an organized effort which "moderate" Muslims seem utterly unconcerned with, until it lands on them--in which case their efforts against it are paraded as of a piece with our own struggle, when it is not. Muslims besieged by ISIS somewhere take up a protest and it's enthusiastically picked up in the global media as evidence of their solidarity with us. But moderate Muslims needn't even oppose their extremists--all they need to do is flee them (or pretend to be fleeing them) and a new theme arises, such as when terrorist attacks in Europe are deemed to have no relevance to the present "refugee" onslaught, for these migrants are, after all, fleeing the same thing back home.
All variety of reality goes into the Narrate-o-Matic, but only Narrative-friendly gruel comes out.

But what's utterly lost is what strikes me as the worst of it: the so-called "right wing" terrorist himself, the so-called "intolerance" and bigotry are all just more results of the enforced diversity of globalization, Muslim immigration and forced integration. Inevitable, predictable, understandable even--for the apologist stands ever-ready to understand the most heinous acts of the Other or of aggrieved minorities.
In light of the barbarous nature of Muslim terror, and the profound betrayal of its apologists, from moderate Muslims to Western elites, the reaction of the "right wing" is tepid.

And it gets worse still. The default, taken-for-granted position of the apologists is that any reaction--muted as it is still in the West compared to what would be provoked anywhere else in the world to such a threat and betrayal, to such a humiliation, to such barbarity--is evidence of the necessity to continue on course with the actions producing it. To finally squelch this Orwellian-describe "prejudice" and "phobia".