Sunday Stream

Warning: graphic content (livestream footage of Texas church shooting), 1:10:50

Not for children or those with heart conditions or delicate sensitivities. 7:39 A reading: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells" 10:50 Arvo Part's "Credo" 20:49 Don's Descent 30:55 A reading: Nikki Minaj's "Stupid Hoe"

Racism is Forever

There's an old joke that goes something like "gee, blow one guy and all of a sudden you're gay."

In the woke era you offend minorities once and all of a sudden you're irreedemably racist, forever.

Poor Don Imus. I sampled his show back in the day and had to ask: where was the promised controversy? The first thing I heard was a parody song (last refuge of the morning zoo dj) mocking Rush Limbaugh's racism (Garth Brooks' "Friends in Low Places" became "All My Friends Have White Faces"); how daring! How relevant! Even for the nineties, it was bad. Cringe wasn't a word yet.

I suspect the politcally incorrect image was exagerrated by the same establishment figures who lined up to appear on his show. They could engage in a sort of Kabuki, a mock engagement with controversy, knowing it would never go too far. Like the late Tim Russert on Meet the Press, the only people who praised his "tough interviews" were the interviewees, all establishment figures who appreciated Tim's ultimate discretion. Like Conrad's Lord Jim, to the powerful Imus was "one of us"--or at the least a dependable patsy.

But he was definitely not one of us.

His service to the status quo would not save him after he was fired from CBS for referring to players on the thuggish-looking Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hoes” in 2007. He managed to salvage a radio career and was allowed to live in a sort of partial exile from the powerful, but, he had to know this too, sadly, whatever penance he performed would not spare him the posthumous fate of all "racists" and--especially--"antisemites"; upon death his crimes would be ritually read out. He, like many better and more accomplished people before, would forever be "Don Imus, Racist." The human stain that even in death does not fade but only grows.

You wonder what any aging white public figure--who sees the lies--is saving himself for, or from, the shellacked, multi-colored nails of a Jezebel hack?

On the morning of December 27th, known racist and radio host Don Imus died at the age of 79.

If you’re lucky, you grew up not knowing who Don Imus was. If you’re around my age, chances are you found out who Don Imus was in 2007 when he was fired from CBS for referring to players on the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hoes.” At the time, it felt like it was almost impossible to turn on the news without seeing someone offering their opinion on his remarks.

Gwen Ifill, who had previously been referred to by Imus as a “cleaning lady” appeared on Meet the Press and offered a sentiment that is, unfortunately, just as relevant today, over a decade later, as it was in 2007. Speaking with Tim Russert she said, “My concern about Mr. Imus and about a lot of people… is not that people are sorry that they say these things, they’re sorry that someone catches them.”

This was, of course, not the first or the last time Imus had been caught using racist language, which is not surprising given that he was, in fact, a racist.

Later in 2007 Imus appeared on Rev. Al Sharpton’s radio show to address his remarks. After becoming frustrated with the conversation, Imus remarked that he couldn’t “get any place with you people.” That comment obviously didn’t go over well with Sharpton.

A 2006 The New York Times reported that in 2004 he had referred to book publishers Simon & Schuster as “thieving Jews,” and had previously called Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz a “boner-nosed … beanie-wearing little Jew boy” in 1998.

In 2008 Imus, while discussing the suspension of Dallas Cowboys’ cornerback Adam Jones, asked “what color” Jones was. When he was informed Jones was Black, Imus cavalierly replied, “Well there you go, now we know.”

It’s unfortunate that Imus was allowed to continue making these kinds of remarks and spewing his vitriol into the airwaves until his retirement in 2018. After his firing from CBS, New York based radio network WABC picked up Imus’ show Imus in the Morning from 2007-2018. Fox Business Network also ran Imus’ show on TV from 2009-2015.

If somewhere there do exist fans of Imus’ work, they can return to Imus’ infamous quote, forever solidified in Nicki Minaj’s 2012 track Stupid Hoe, certainly a far more generous memorial than Imus deserves.

Someone who's decided to nod along with the ongoing rape of the West has made something of a nihilistic determnation; he's abandoned posterity for the present and, presumably, a respectable image in death. He fears the wrath of no god; he respects the desires of no ancestor; he protects no descendant.
Even after retirement almost to a man they maintain the respectable lie all the way to their death bed. Fear of God is replaced by fear of man--of a shameful reputation.

It isn't as if Imus dared challenge a single operating assumption. He was only too glad to join the point and sputter mob and reinforce them. You see in his gaffes no substance, just crude insults. They are deplorable, and stupid. Especially so coming from a false renegade, establishment hanger-on who supported the system and narrative that elevated his dumb jokes to absurd heights of transgression.
He would never dare challenge the order that sustained him in comfort.

So his lame "racist" jokes only serve to harm, albeit not much, the cause of turning back that system, by serving up the image of the hate-spewing bigot. When someone calls out the system for one of its many contradictions, when someone points out the lie that is "racism", for one, he at least forces the powerful to reveal their hypocrisy as they take him down.

Don Imus never dared go there. I hope he's in a better place, and I hope he wishes he had.

Of course had he, you wouldn't be reading this. We wouldn't know who he was. So he got to have his career, money, even some status but in the end he will be forever "Don Imus, Racist"; this was the price he paid to play.

Celluloid Sunset

An analysis of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
(spoilers ahoy)

Quentin Tarantino has made a career making nostalgia acceptable to the critics by clothing it in irony. I think without his postmodern pose they would be hostile--or will be when the Feminist Inquisition finally comes around for him--to the recurring lament implied in all his sampling of the recent past: things were better before.

Coupled with another of his dominant themes--the necessity of violence to protect the weak from the depraved--it's surprising they haven't unpersoned him already. By celebrating righteous masculine violence through satire and pop culture sampling, giving it the veneer of irony (irony now, ironically, takes the place of false piety) he's been pulling one over on hipsters and critics for a long, fruitful career. Nearing the end of that, and, probably, seeing the feminist tyranny on the horizon, his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood defiantly takes nostalgia from setting to story.

Tarantino's never been much interested in the present; most of his films are not set in it. Even his breakthrough Pulp Fiction disdained the early nineties in which it was set by shuffling ("pulping") a narrative peppered with references to recent history--even Samuel Jackson's Jeri Curls and mutton chops mocked a present we found so boring we had to scramble it up and spice it with a more colorful past; critics and audiences responded instinctively. But there's an implied theme here, who knows if it's intended, fittingly nothing new, and its timing was perfect--we've gone soft.


Despite being seen as a norm-shattering postmodernist, Tarantino's outlook is one of reverence for the past. Whatever else is going on in one of his films, there's a continual celebration of film-making and its history, traditions and great men. It's a conservative point of view in a world rapidly becoming hostile to any genuine conservatism. Hollywood is to be looted by diversity and womyn just like everything else now; its privilege earned for propagandizing on behalf of the new diverse order that will soon devour it--like baby spiders eating mom--is expired. Tarantino got his career in just in time; I'm not sure there's a place for him now, despite his influence on the culture we have now.

Is there money now for something like Reservoir Dogs, about a group of white guys sitting around in suits speaking frankly? No; if it gets made now it's handed off to a soulless JJ Abrams type who casts it with a diverse crew of uninteresting minorities, making no impression on the culture from which it is indistinguishable, like a drop of rain joining a puddle.

Tarantino's references aren't all pop culture either, but reveal the dedicated student of film; in his latest we find him once again paying homage to French director Robert Bresson, with his close shots of feet. I had to read about him doing this in Kill Bill to notice it here; side by side with his embrace of "low" pop culture, red meat for critics and commoners alike, there is an elitism, congruent with his themes of elite heroes operating outside societal norms. Tarantino is for hierarchy and order, whether he knows it or not.

The hero operating outside of the social order is an old, favored trope, but the fact is the social order has changed. There's no place for operating outside norms now that the progressive left, for lack of a better term, sets them.

But the common people, for whom Tarantino distills film down to the good juicy bits the way a pulp novelist does, or the way a dj extends a break (his references too come just like samples in dj music) are attracted not just to the flashing violence and recognition of reference, but also to the strong leader. The people, as Tarantino's more politically sophisticated supporters know, are naturally attracted to the fascistic.

Tarantino holds in himself the democratic contradiction, the source of his genuine, not critical, popularity: in appeasing the popular he praises the strong. His characters are violent elite ubermenschen (born to the role, that is it's genetic) who uphold an order outside the law. Pacifism is depraved, egalitarianism disdained.

In his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood he sets the story in the late sixties, pairing and pitting his two favorite types (and themes)--a movie star and a man of action--against what Tarantino sees as their loathsome opposites: degenerate hippies.

Leonardo DiCaprio is Rick Dalton, a television star who's made a couple of films that a young Quentin Tarantino would have studied and whose career appears to be petering out. It's 1969 and eight years since cancellation of his successful television series "Bounty Law", a black-and-white western that belongs entirely to the previous era, but he doesn't see that, even as he mutters about hippies on the street, driving home devastated after a meeting with an agent (Al Pacino) who wants him to go to Rome to make spaghetti westerns.

Brad Pitt is his stunt double, Cliff Booth, who's relegated to gopher for the most part after getting caught sparring with Bruce Lee on the set of The Green Hornet. It's a welcome surprise: Lee is portrayed as a pompous ass who brags he would "cripple" heavyweight champion Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) and is then bested by Pitt. The scene even triggered the Lee family, used to years of fawning reverence.

We learn at some point DiCaprio lives next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate on Cielo Drive; as he enthuses over the possibilities of living next door to the "hottest director in town" it's supposed to come off darkly comic: DiCaprio doesn't know the horror history has in store. In reality a pregnant Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson Family not long after he says this.

But Tarantino is offering an alternate history, a preferred history, as he did in Inglorious Basterds. He imagines the 1969 horror as a sort of historic wrong turn, and our dual heroes, Pitt and DiCaprio, are redeemed by setting it right.

The Manson girls arrive in the film as a feral, dumpster diving, sexually charged pack (it's hard not to see today's lost girls in them), singing a song written by Charles Manson:

Always is always forever

As one is one is one

Inside yourself for your father

All is none all is none all is none

It's time to drop all from behind you

The illusion has been just a dream

The Valley of Death may not find you

Now as then on a sunshine beam

So bring only your perfection

For then life will surely be

No cold no fear no hunger

You can see you can see you can see

From a sinister low angle we see the girls singing "as one is one is one" as they march single file past a mural of the Marlboro Man, contrasting the new self-erasing egalitarianism with an icon of the heroic individual--Western--ideal they've come to destroy. They are egalitarianism become nihilistic, and despite Tarantino's nihilistic trappings (he's sort of nihilistic-at-a-distance) as nihilists they are the other pole to his worldview of strong characters living by strong codes.

Margot Robbie's Sharon Tate appears and it's just more subversion of the new feminist norms. She's lovingly, unapologetically objectified; we see her in close shots, in slow motion, we see her dancing. There's no edge to her; she's all sunny, feminine optimism and enthusiasm. She's also vulnerable by virtue of her feminine virtues, in need of a strong male protector--which she doesn't have. In a hilarious scene we see her dancing at a party, being watched by Steve McQueen, who laments that Tate's penchant for short, unimposing pretty boys meant he "never stood a chance".

Tarantino has us follow Tate into a theater to watch herself on film. It's a remarkable scene, where he brings that celebration of film-making to the fore. This is the opposite of the dark critique of Hollywood you might get from David Lynch or countless lesser directors. Tarantino sees in Hollywood--at least an earlier Hollywood--a blessed community of talent coming together to create excellent art. Tate dons a pair of glasses with massive lenses--like camera lenses--and revels at the audience's approval of her performance. After decades of the culture ridiculing the vanity of actors--the easy gag--Tarantino offers a defense of it. Tate watches herself in a successful fight scene and recalls with joy her training with--who else?--Bruce Lee. It's an unironic celebration of the joy of the multi-discipline magic in film-making and acting. It's what he's done with the picture as a whole, pairing a war-hero stuntman with an actor.

In a counterpoint scene later, DiCaprio, guesting on someone else's television pilot and struggling, rebounds and nails a scene; his good-natured and simple Rick Dalton has learned finally to act. This is after an encounter with an eight year-old prodigy and her method acting comes as a harbinger of the future. DiCaprio's tearful reaction to the success of the scene is the only earnestly touching moment I've seen in a Tarantino film.

Tarantino loads the film up with constantly shifting background pop music and advertising. Anytime someone takes a drive across town (and it's an LA story so there's lots of driving) we're treated to a array of pop songs and radio commercials. It's a noisy film but it works. The effect reminds me of impressionism achieving realism: just as a painter blurring objects on a palate seeks to represent a messy world as we see it, half focuse and in motion, Tarantino's ever-shifting background of pop noise conveys how our chaotic, noisy world feels--more than a conventional, cleaner soundtrack.

The commercial samples are often used to great narrative effect: when DiCaprio catches first glimpse of his famous neighbor Polanski, he's in his sports car with stunning Tate by his side, the image of carefree success; the radio commercial for a men's cologne is an un-ironic celebration of masculinity. It encapsulates the dynamic, of the scene and a theme, perfectly.



The action is given mostly to Pitt's stuntman, who encounters the Manson family at Spahn Ranch--where he and DiCaprio shot their successful television series and then later in a scene that will likely confuse people--the Manson killers arrive at DiCaprio's house instead of next door. I'm still not sure if they get there by accident or if they changed plans.

But there's a note here that seems to be Tarantino addressing the role of all the violent imagery he celebrates in the horror: a Manson girl suggests they "kill the people who taught us to kill"--DiCaprio being one of them. It's a brilliant scene, though I'm sure he doesn't intend it how I took it: there's an element of blowback in the horror.



What he intended with that I don't know. Is Tarantino acknowledging the pop culture he celebrates produced these monsters in the first place?
In killing them off does he see himself excising the sickness emerging from the culture he celebrates?
Awareness is key to producing art. Perhaps a certain lack of awareness is required as well.

I talked about the film a bit here:



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Clown Juice and the Hebros

My YouTube channel.

Black Hebrew terrorist goes into the Narrate-o-Matic, comes out white. Poor bastard.
The New York Times:

For almost two decades, the intelligence bureau of the New York Police Department has built a security apparatus designed to track international terror groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Now, the department is aiming those resources at a different target: far-right and extremist hate groups.

Police officials say they have formed a new unit within the department’s intelligence bureau, known as “Racially and Ethnically Motivated Extremism,” or “R.E.M.E,” that will be primarily dedicated to investigating terror threats from far-right and neo-Nazi organizations, including groups like the Atomwaffen Division and The Proud Boys.

The unit became operational early this month, and already has dozens of open investigations, police officials said.

John Miller, the commissioner of the intelligence division, said the far-right extremist groups are not that different in nature from Islamic extremist groups like Al Qaeda. “There’s no different recipe except our offenders are likely to be on the ground here,” he said in an interview.

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the unit’s creation on Wednesday at City Hall, just a day after a gun battle in Jersey City, during which two people with guns opened fire at two different locations, including a kosher supermarket, killing three bystanders and a Jersey City detective.

“What we saw yesterday was a premeditated, violent, anti-Semitic hate crime,” Mr. de Blasio said. “In other words, you can say it was an act of terror.”

Did super-skeevy TMZ neglect to mention the (apparent) overdose of rapper "Juice WRLD" happened during a drug bust out of a woke sense of decency?
TMZ:

Juice WRLD, the talented young rapper and singer whose career was just taking off, is dead after suffering a seizure in Chicago's Midway airport ... TMZ has learned.

Juice's flight from California landed early Sunday morning and, after deplaning ... witnesses tell us he suffered the seizure while walking through the airport. Law enforcement sources say he was bleeding from the mouth when paramedics got on scene.

We're told Juice -- real name Jarad Anthony Higgins -- was still conscious when he was transported by Chicago Fire. However, he was pronounced dead a short time later at the hospital. The cause of death is unclear at this time.

My Wife's Son

Couldn't help noticing the inner-family diversity of these humanoids on a poster ad (for what I don't remember) at a local market. Looks like that honeymoon in Jamaica was, er, interesting.

Pensacola

Seeing a pair of Saudi officers in the mess hall at Pensacola Naval Air Station was a mere curiosity in 1986. My squadron had sent me there to attend something called Naval Aircrewman Candidate School. The Naval Officer Candidate School across the street from us, not long before portrayed in the film An Officer and a Gentleman, was our model. For them it was their boot camp, Officer Training School (OTS) with an aviation focus. Candidates wearing comic chrome helmets were continually harried by Marine Drill instructors, all of senior enlisted rank.

For us it was bootcamp-lite. Very light. Up early for physical training and classes and usually done and at liberty by three or so in the afternoon. The course was dominated by water survival training. You did things like swim a mile in a flight suit, tread water for ten minutes in same (not as easy as it sounds), and of course the legendary "Dilbert Dunker", a simulated water crash wherein you had to escape blindfolded from a great big barrel dropped in the water and turned upside down.



A couple of days camping hungry at Elgin Air Force base constituted survival training. The land there was spare woods of small thin trees, strafed by the sound of OV-10 Warhogs and occasionally the sinister drone of "Puff the Magic Dragon", a C-130 mounted with a 25mm gatling gun.



Pensacola was pleasant, especially compared to the giant scrub patch that is Camp Pendelton.
Spanish moss draped the trees and the architecture was colonial. Overhead you might see the bases' Blue Angels flying team practicing. We chased girls at night and talked about it in the day, without shame. Political correctness wasn't here yet.

9/11 was years away.

Nightstream

The Unbearable Whiteness of the Democratic Field

Kamala Harris was arguably the establishment candidate before Elizabeth Warren surged ahead, despite being virtually unknown beyond California and Democratic politics (Liz is actually getting a boost now from earlier national attention as Trump's foil).

Lacking the desire or nerve to separate herself from the pack, which at this point resembles a dog race with fringe group approval as the rabbit, she was left with only her record as California's Attorney General, in our season of "mass incarceration", and her Law and Order-Homocide-SVU acquired affectations. As when grandstanding during her questioning of Bret Kavanaugh, in debate she was all pursed lips and stern gazes; she seemed to be always channeling her favorite characters from television, on television (we see a curious effect here that deserves study--art imitating life imitating art imitating life imitating...spiraling down into--imagine that--boring mediocrity).

But if that's her real personality she must be hell to live with--"did you not, in fact," tossed hair, lowered chin, raised eyebrow, hand on hip, "leave the cap off the toothpaste--let me finish, sir--yet again?", head tilt, icy glare.

The occasional dips into ghetto inflection, a silly controversy about her listening to Tupac Shakur while smokng weed (to deflect from all the Tupac-wannabes she's put in jail--a comic affirmation the Democrats have completely inverted the morality of law and order), getting smacked down by the younger Tulsi Gabbard, the bad hair days, and Willie Brown leering over it all.

Despite favorable coverage from the Press she simply couldn't get traction with the actual human citizens the Democrats still, sullenly, have to deal with. She thought she was playing to her strengths--"black" status and a vagina--and running from her weakness--having put away countless criminals in California.

Apparently outflanking Trump on the law-and-order issue--after immigration perhaps the biggest reason for his success and something he's abandoned entirely--was unthinkable, at least in the nomination stage. So it ended, with her finally showing some genuine emotion as she addressed her defeated troops and packed it in.

The Daily Caller reports now on the predictable response from the Democratic left:

“Obviously I’m no centrist but it’s downright effed up that smart, compelling, *very* experienced, centrist Democratic candidates of color are floundering while a smart but wildly inexperienced, centrist white mayor of teeny tiny city is surging,” liberal writer Sally Kohn wrote in a tweet. “Bad look, Democrats.”  

Left-wing commentator Lauren Duca implied that Democrats have a racism problem, as evidenced by Harris’s failed campaign. “White supremacy is not just a Fox News problem, folks,” she charged.

Some are talking of abandoning the Party:

“Kamala may not have been my number one candidate, but she belongs in the race,” added Imani Gandy, an analyst at left-wing outlet Rewire News. “Now we’ve got rich white dudes papering the airwaves with their bullshit,” Gandy wrote, adding: “I’m not voting for Biden or Buttigieg.”

Sanders is unwanted by the Party because he threatens to actually attempt some of the progressive economic reforms he champions. Oh, and he's "white". Tulsi Gabbard, woman of color and especially despised by Harris, likewise regarding foreign policy.

This mini-rage might be a deliberate action on behalf of the campaigns of Stacy Atkins and Julian Castro to rearrange the Democratic primaries to give the Democrats' most powerful constituency, black women, a greater whip hand in the nomination process

“We can’t go around thanking black women for powering Democrats to victory all over the country and then at the same time, hold our first caucus and our first primary in states that have almost no African-Americans,” Secretary Castro told Vogue. “We’re right to call Republicans out when they suppress the votes of African-Americans or Latinos, but we’ve also got to recognize that this 50-year-old process was created during a time when minority voices had zero power in the party.” (Iowa initially began going first in 1972.)

Ironically, identity politics enthusiast Castro has virtually no support among Latinos. He has none among black women either, but their status as least productive, most loud demographic has made them the collective idiot king of the debased Democratic Party.

Castro concedes that the third and fourth primary states, Nevada and South Carolina, which come almost a month later, are more racially diverse. But he also says that the first states of primary season can make or break a candidate’s momentum. “Nobody can pretend that the first one or two states don’t have an oversized influence on what happens in the whole process,” he said. “If you can’t do well in Iowa or New Hampshire, then the chances of doing well in Nevada or South Carolina are much slimmer.”

The Democratic Party is the model for the future one-party United States they have planned, and they appear increasingly untenable as a meaningful institution.
Good times.

James LaFond

Live at 5:30, will Skype with James at 6:00, God and tech willing.

James' Channel

Crackpot Podcast with James and Lynn Lockhart

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Understanding Women

The cruelty of the weak exceeds the cruelty of the strong.

Broadcast Note

Tomorrow at 6PM Pacific Time I'll be talking to semi-barbarian violence enthusiast (my description) and prolific author James LaFond on my YouTube channel.

Here are a couple of recent posts from James:

Our junk, or shacks, our asphalt tracks, our concrete streets are all aspects of our divine space wherein the Faith of Civic entitlement and ancestral guilt hover like Apollo Helios in his shimmering aspect about the braided head of Delphi’s drugged, bimbo Pythea. Our civic space is our holy place, where we worship at the altar which has swallowed all others, the altar of consumption. 

So today, on the way to Boomer Fred’s Baltimore County digs, the bus drove me through a construction site in Whitemarsh Maryland, where five six story, hotel sized low income housing projects are being placed dead center in the middle class urban flight zones where two generations of Baltimoreans have fled from the seething urban crime of the Citay. Each of these buildings is a barracks for the invading forces of occupation being removed from Baltimore City to make room for hipster homesteader bug people to serve the dark lords 30 miles down the rushing road… 

Here lives Boomer Fred, a father of four daughters, injured, retired, guilty, nearly expired. The eldest girl lives with a working paleface in rural Pennsylvania, the two fled rather than dead. 

The three younger girls are all hoodrat incubators, impregnated owned, and abused by Knights of the Master Race. 

Fred wants to keep the family together and has the slacker sperm donners who hate him for the terrible guilt of his race over for dinner. 

Yesterday, for Sunday dinner, when the youthful incubator showed up with her knightly master, the Ebon God, Kenny the Kang, insisted on calling Fred’s daughter vile names, threatening Fred’s wife and otherwise disrespecting Fred in what might once have been imagined as his house. 

Fred is flummoxed, wondering if he should have a fatherly talk with Kenny the next time he visits, suggesting decorum, perhaps going so far as to suggest that Kenny should not scold his daughter as a bitch and a whore in his house. 

It was painful to be regaled by the old friend about his fall from knight to serf and the elevation of a member of the race who had hunted him in the streets as a youth into his honored place. 

What was more painful was Fred’s guilt-mired lack of appreciation for yesterday’s incivility. He actually thinks this young man attacked his daughter and his wife out of some lack of impulse control, some quirk in a parentless upbringing, when in fact, an intact and unguilty paleface could tell at a breath, that Fred had been usurped from his throne, stripped forever of the dignity of the only office he has ever aspired to. 

So withers a wretched folk in the civic space of America, the Cemetery of Races.

Indeed, I've long thought of our situation as akin to, say, early European hunter gatherers being conquered by Aryan invaders, with our men emasculated and enslaved, our women their concubines and breeders. Of course, if we were allowed to put up a fight, we wouldn't be having this humiliating conversation. Here's a recent book review from James:

2017, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 199 pages

Reading Navy SEAL memoirs is a pastime of mine—having read five. However, Discipline Equals Freedom was leant to me to read by my friend Dante, who spoke of it as an inspirational book which helped his son overcome some hard times. So, I dove in with both feet and found that Discipline Equals Freedom is the most uniquely formatted book I have read and, it appears, fits very well with the military mind set of the author. Whoever the ghost writer was was brilliant. This book is a tome of bullet points, mantras, positive declarations and can-do/don’t do interpretations of dilemmas we all face. 

Coming from a certified Deep State ass-kicking machine who trains with top MMA pros like Tito Ortiz [pictured in training photos] Willink is very convincing and to-the-point without being mechanical but rather inspirational. His advice on what martial arts one should train in according to what priority and in what order is excellent, but does reflect the budget of a high-earner and is something I never could have pursued as a low life in Baltimore, Maryland when I was the age of the guys he is writing for. But then again, Willink is all about positive energy and outcomes and would possibly remark that he doesn’t write for losers, but for winners. 

If you are an anti-statist, a free-thinker, a questioner and investigator of the human condition, and you have not served as a slave of the most effective military machine to ever stalk the earth, that is the U.S. military which holds nearly 1,000 war bases in foreign nations and is the virtual Lord of Hosts and God in Heaven summoned and called down by people of all classes, factions and nations to smite the Unbeliever, to displace those governments and murder people who do not worship the Divine American Body Economic, than you should partake of this strong man’s pitiless perspective. For, the servants of evil are very often good. They must be to be effective, to be good men in a vile cause. Wallink and his ilk have battled the world over to install rapacious engine of economic extraction, to install tyrants, implement and facilitate crimes against humanity, facilitate drug shipments to their home nation, promote pornography-based cultural values, and in large measure, such men prevail, succeed and survive because they are better quality people than the poor bastards who are the unwilling recipients of our good intentions. 

In the end, I care not a lick about the murder Americans commit across the world in my name, at the hands of men like Willink. What I do care about is that one day, if some infotech company’s censorship functionaries decide I need to die, that all they will have to do to accomplish it, is to quote this article and snippets of various other pieces I have written critical of America, present me to Willink as an Enemy of Freedom, and he will dispose of me in some manner for a handsome fee, and I will have been declared as having shot myself in the back of the head with a hunting rifle. 

It took 2 hours over 2 days at Bear Lake, Utah to read Willink’s book, while resting between my labors building Dante a retaining wall, and, as I hefted each block, flipped each railroad tie, dug each shovel full of earth, I’d imagine how Willink would kill me “right now” and if I’d even know it happened, and in the end decided I was so easy to kill while working that he’d probably send a Mexican to do it. 

Do yourself a favor and read Discipline Equals Freedom, a mantra I live by, and keep in mind that the man that wrote it and his brand of high-resolution postmodern warriors, have been hunting U.S. citizens in the U.S. since at least 2016 and probably earlier. This is the kind of man that will be called in on you when you swerve out of your lane in the long night to come. Willink’s premise and title, Discipline Equals Freedom is profoundly true, as is his mantra Hesitation is the Enemy. These are both internal concepts.  

However, as noted above, discipline such as that demonstrated by apex warrior types is the ultimate external enemy, for such men have the capacity to discipline their mind to such a degree as to serve naked evil in the shadows of the human sheepfold. My friend Tony Cox has a profound distrust of such discipline, for he has seen it manifested by mega-PIGs in criminal settings. 

As always, there is a third view. 

What have Tony [a barbarian], myself, a disciplined barbarian advocate, and Willink [a highly disciplined agent of Civilization] in common? 

We have actionism in common and Willink’s existence demands that Tony and I be better.
None of us hold commonality with the bleating flocks and folds of sheeple or even the puppet masters—wolfish minds in sheepish bodies—which deploy men like Willink to further their many evil desires. In the end, in my simian mind, I only have meaning because someone like Willink is training to kill me [as an anonymous “bad guy”] for stepping out of my assigned lane, when and if the order comes. And even then, if I had been granted a moment of clarity before the end, I’d admire my killer and some part of him would know jealousy for me as he left me dead in the dirt and walked away wondering if he could have been free like I had been and if his bid would have ended as finally. 

What use is an enemy to the combatant if you cannot salute him?

Okay, but it will be only my cold, dead hand that salutes the Dindu tools that tie me to the stake. For, they are not my real enemy. My real enemy hides, in comfort and splendor, and the magnificence of his blind, stupid hatred.

He's not worth saluting either--because he doesn't really fight.

Please join us tomorrow.

Sick Stream

8:46 Musical interlude "Madonna Dell’Arco- Invocazione e Canto", Francesco Pellegrino, Vesuvius Ensemble

23:36 watching limeys trolling limeys over trans rights
41:28 watching Jesse Lee Peterson at a Slutwalk

Stream

Stream

13:38 Jewish comedian Dave Smith on the "alt right"
1:02:20 Democratic debate

Daystream

Intro:
Video, The Turin Horse, opening scene.
Music, "Dumb This", Odd Nosdam.

White Trash Wisdom

Shit-for-brains is the best manure for bad ideas.

Diary of Decline

Talking about stuff. Subscribe to my channel

Pocahauntus' Revenge

Lizzie Borden took an axe 
And gave her mother forty whacks 
When she saw what she had done 
She gave her father forty-one 

Lizzie Warren has a scheme
To take your guns and mute your memes
After this is made a fact
It's reparations for the blacks 

 Elizabeth Warren has a plan:

Taking investigations out of the hands of state and local jurisdictions and shifting all hate crime referrals to the FBI.

Directing federal prosecutors to seek tougher penalties for individuals who commit hate crimes “regardless of their race, ethnicity, or supposed ideology.”

Expanding background checks for gun ownership and keeping firearms out of the hands of those already prone to violence.

2020 is gonna be lit, yo.

Dictionary of Post-American English

queertarch, kweer-tark, n, One who rules from authority granted by homosexual status. Usually a celebrity, often minor.
From queer, homosexual (from Proto-Indo-European terkw- "to twist") + archon (Greek, from ἀρχ- "to rule")

"Some queertarch I've never heard of just got my favorite YouTube channel shut down, the fucker."

 Also, see here.

Refuge

Finally, a genuine refugee:

DADAAB, Kenya — Hamdi Abdullahi stands outside the United Nations compound in this dusty, sprawling camp — home to more than 200,000 Somali refugees — and throws stones at its barbed wire fence and heavy gates.

Though the U.N.’s refugee agency, UNHCR, is known everywhere as the chief protector and spokesman for most of the globe’s 25 million refugees, Abdullahi shouts as she hurls the stones, accusing the agency of stealing her children.

She has been protesting outside the compound off and on for years.

The Somali refugee’s four children are now 8,000 miles away in Minnesota, with her former husband and his new wife. She last saw them in 2014. They were among the less than one percent of refugees in the entire world chosen to be resettled in a new country and given a chance to start their lives again.  

Abdullahi said that while her family’s need to resettle was genuine, she was left behind because of false information fed to the U.S. government by a UNHCR resettlement officer, David Momanyi, to whom her ex-husband paid a hefty bribe. “I always remember his face,” Abdullahi said.

Like any divorced male the joke occurred to me right away: did he have to pay more to leave her behind? But when you get to the end of the quote above you realize he very well may have bribed the corrupt UN official to hamstring her so he could skedaddle with wife number whatever. The sympathetic account from something called "100 Reporters" linked here isn't interested in refugees scamming the system but in corrupt African officials working for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) shaking them down for bribes.

Whatever the case, the husband sounds like someone who has indeed found refuge:

Reached by phone, Abdullahi’s husband confirmed he had been resettled in Minnesota, but said any allegations of corruption were "false information."  

 "The U.S. government gave me resettlement to come to the United States but that’s it. There’s no bribe. … She was rejected by the United States government. That issue, it’s over… You know (in) America there’s no bribes."

Eight thousand miles. Eight thousand miles he put between himself and his rock-throwing ex. Sir, we salute you. Cue up a parody of the old Budweiser Real Men of Genius campaign for this guy.

Refugees who are part of the Nakivale settlement in southwest Uganda said UNHCR staffers and officials from organizations that work with them demand bribes for everything from medical referrals to food rations to contacting police, and it can cost $5,000 in bribes to resettle a family. 

In the Dadaab refugee camp, whose residents are almost all Somalis, 19 refugees said it used to cost as much as $50,000 to resettle a large family, or roughly $3,000 per person, before the Trump administration effectively stopped resettlement of Somalis in the U.S.  

Refugees who cannot afford to pay bribes report that unscrupulous resettlement workers will sell their case files, often compiled painstakingly over years, to others with more wealth.

When I see Africans claiming to be displaced coming up with cash a lot of working Americans don't have in their bank accounts I suspect it's because extended families pool their money to send over one family with the expectation more will be brought over via family reunification later, without having to bribe the other Africans.

It's an old story now, part of the larger story of corruption in UN efforts in Africa:

However, exploitation of refugees by the UNHCR staff is not new. Frank Montil, a former senior UNHCR investigator and narcotics detective, uncovered a refugee extortion racket in Kenya in 2001, in which the agency’s staff may have made millions of dollars by taking bribes at every stage of the resettlement process. 

“We’re 18 years later, and it’s even worse now than ever before,” he said, after hearing the results of this investigation... Like several other former U.N. investigators and insiders who spoke to NBC News, Montil compared the UNHCR to the Catholic Church, in how he says it repeatedly tries to avoid admitting or tackling wrongdoing by staff, and will not allow skilled independent investigators to get involved.

Everyone involved in refugee resettlement is unsurprisingly less affected by corruption than the apparent true-believers at 100 Reporters.

Refugees, current and former UNHCR employees, aid workers and two former U.N. investigators say bribery and corruption are common in a variety of services the UNHCR and companion organizations are charged with providing, but report that it is especially unavoidable in resettlement — a precious opportunity for the world’s most vulnerable refugees to restart their lives in safe new countries, usually in the West.

Eliminating corruption would spoil a "precious opportunity"; the UN and others are in the business of facilitating migration; the best face you can put on their program is of a dunce who views it as global poverty alleviation. The others are all more sinister and ugly.

The report elaborates, without noting it, how much refugee resettlement has become a racket, with those taking advantage not the most desperate but the most cunning.

In Dadaab, where resettlement is known as “boufis” — or “the urge to move abroad,” resettlement is associated with wealth. “A poor man has no place in resettlement,” said one Somali refugee in his 50s who has been in the camp 16 years. “So many in the diaspora, when I ask them [how they were resettled], they say, ‘It was my money.'”

In Kakuma, northwest Kenya, home to almost 200,000 people from a dozen countries, refugees said it is possible to pay some of a resettlement bribe by signing over ownership of your shelter. “If you don’t have money, you need to hand over your house, if it’s good,” said a South Sudanese refugee, who paid $600 to forward his own case. “If your house is bad and you don’t have the money, you will never go.”

Settling refugees in neighboring countries with an eye toward sending them back would put an immediate stop to this, because nobody's really paying to escape their home as much as they're paying to come to a US they see as a consumer wonderland, what servicemen abroad used to call "the Big PX".

But one more nod of respect on the way out, to the man who put his ex on the other side of the world. "All your exes live in Texas, you say? Phhhhht!"

Hell is for Theorists

Baltimore's James LaFond has written a lot about white bondage in his "Plantation America" series, a subject that would be deliberately suppressed if there were more than a few brave souls like James talking about it.

So I asked him about the passing of critical race theorist Noel Ignatiev ("How the Irish Became White" and other absurdities) and he was kind enough to respond:

Noel's Hell

Dennis Dale

Nov 12, 2019, 12:53 AM (6 days ago)

Noel Ignatiev just died and I realize his whole con—"How the Irish Became White" involved turning something that should temper, to say the least, the culture of shame leveled on white Americans for black slavery (that is, Irish bondage) into something turbocharging that culture. The example of white bondage presents a problem to the whole project, which depends on the notion the African slave trade was unique and motivated primarily by white racism (rather than racially diverse greed)

I don't know if Ignatiev thought this, but the best defense is a good offense. Making of the economic exploitation of the Irish "oh but you see, they weren't actually white" was audacious and inspired.

The real point was always to preserve the myth of the African slave trade as uniquely white. Ironically—I wonder too if this was lost on Noel—the poor historical Irish Americans were brought into it (by someone decidedly not, er, Irish) and seemingly defended really just to dispossess their present-day descendants, along with all the other white people. I wonder if he'll run into any of those Irishmen where he's going.

*****

Dennis, Noel and the rest of us have stumbled long in the dark trying to make sense of the great moral and racial miscegenation clothed in a lie that is America. The chill that went down my spine when I read slave purchase records that made me realize that this giant data-pit I've been floundering around in, which I never intended to explore let alone write about, would completely discredit me as a writer, an American and a human, was frightening. I sat on the bogus externally assigned aspect of "white" identity for a year like a coward—no, not like, but as—and then just blurted it in a lapse of discipline and shot myself in the foot. This premonition came true, and I suppose makes discussing this a little less stressful now.

I have been pondering the Irish question for some time now and do think I have hit upon an unsatisfactory answer. It was karma.

The Irish did not make good slaves. Runaway records record vastly more Irish runaways than African and German combined. Though it seems that the Scottish and Indians were just as likely to cut the English master's throat, the Irish were by far the most numerous runaways. There were as many Irish as Germans sold into Plantation America, with both totals over a million, yet only 1 record of a runaway German has passed before my eyes, while near a thousand of Irish and only a few dozen African have been sifted through this bemused brain. Gaels overall, seemed more likely to run and fight the system than did Germans and Africans, in the British Isles and in America. the most brutal peasant revolt in 1548 was Cornish, with catholic overtones The Africans were used deliberately to replace European slaves and freemen from 1678 in Virginia and points south. Furthermore, the African was generally favored as the house slave to the Irishman in German-dominated Pennsylvania.

It is obvious that the vastly more expensive African slave, who ran away at roughly 10% of the Irish rate and but rarely rose up in violence, and who sided with the master class by a margin of 1800 to 200 in Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, was brought in to Virginia and points south in great numbers beginning in 1680s as a costly security measure against the increasingly restive backwoods types who were beginning to mix with and mimic and even fight against Indian tribes.

Note that Germans called themselves "white," where Irish, Cornish, Welsh and Scottish were loath to do so at earlier dates. Was it because the master class derided them by their authentic ethnicity, refusing to grant them membership in "white" society for being unruly? Or was it a refusal to conform to an explicitly economic racial identity on the part of the ethnic Gaels, or both in varying measures and at varying times and places?

This is not something I can sort out. However, beginning within a few years of two great rebellions by non-elite European Americans [for the evidence that King Phillip's Indians were largely ethnic Europeans is strong] planters went to vast expense to purchase large lots of Africans, partially on the basis that they would have no native free communities to flee to and partially to drive the restive, unruly and willful ethnic European Americans from their lands with a breeding workforce of slaves. Much anger at the Irish, being the most rebellious and felonious of the ethnic European Americans, seems to have remained imbedded in the elite American consciousness to this day, and I suppose, accounted for Irish Americans being denied "white" status on one hand [often jokingly and by me] and denied slave status on the other with academic denials of their condition being tendered as I write.

Indeed, in 1773, an English army under a Scottish general sided with the Shawnees after the Battle of Point Pleasant against an Irish militia force. When I get to where Noel is going, I'll be sure to parse this out with him.

*********

More on the subject from James.

Charlie's War

Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA is a conservative student group that latched on to the Trump campaign after he routed the Republican field of their preferred candidates.
He and his organization combine the standard point-and-titter critique of leftist excess with neoconservatism and free market enthusiasm--as if the last ten years or so never happened. His "Culture War" tour of college campuses (to "own" the snowflakes!) is presently in danger of cancellation after a pair of events were taken over in the Q&A by "groypers" challenging his hypocrisy in supporting Israel and denouncing "white supremacy" in America:


Kirk recently caused a stir when he said, in a speech in Israel, that America is merely a "placeholder for timeless values"; the speech and question-and-answer session is chock full of similar content. On a mission to purge the conservative movement of white nationalists, oblivious young Charlie went to Israel and gave a speech denouncing ethno-nationalism as immoral and stupid--to a group of young Zionists.
Some of them couldn't help challenging him on that. I think the notorious "placeholder" comment came in one of the fumbling responses to the question "what's so bad about ethno-nationalism?"



Those of you enjoying Kirk's tour melting down (like a snowflake!) will be pleased to know he was catching hell for his hypocrisy before he left Israel, by the very people his hypocrisy shields.

Nick Fuentes is taking some credit for sending forth the voluntary groyper army. Kirk envisioned his tour as engaging in a "culture war" with the leftists who would no doubt turn out in protest. In another state-of-the-political-art circa 2005 move, Kirk brought his Gay Black Veteran friend on stage to own the leftists.
 He found a culture war alright, not with snowflakes melting down gloriously (clips of which engorge the members of donors), but with the very white advocates it is his mission to purge; the irony is probably lost on him:

Black Gay Hero: "Who's into Cardi B? Anyone?"

Trailer Park Torah Talk: The Flood

Reading from Genesis 6.9 to 11.32
Also:
"Individualism and the Western Tradition" by Kevin MacDonald, (2:15:44)

New York Times article on Proud Boy convictions: https://tinyurl.com/yyzfy7zp

Macabees's 1:
 And the inhabitants of Jerusalem fled away by reason of them, and the city was made the habitation to strangers, and she became a stranger to her own seed, and her children forsook her. Her sanctuary was desolate like a wilderness, her festival days were turned into mourning, her sabbaths into reproach, her honours were brought to nothing. Her dishonour was increased according to her glory, and her excellency was turned into mourning. 

Music:
Psalm 135 "Slavite Gospoda", Serbian Orthodox Singing Society
https://tinyurl.com/y5lr7foz
"Antidotum Tarantulae", Marco Beasley
https://tinyurl.com/y2thqeja
"Sona a Batente", Pino de Vittorio
https://tinyurl.com/y28qweyz

Tarantella del Gargano, L'Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar, Lucilla Galeazzi, Marco Beasley
Album: La Tarantella: Antidotum Tarantulae

Incel-urrection?

The Joker is outperforming the spandex movies at the box office:

Our sources say the Joaquin Phoenix pic is poised to make at least $464 million after global theatrical, TV and home entertainment windows, and it could be more if the worldwide box office for the Todd Phillips-directed movie exceeds $900M. That amount of profit isn’t that far from what Avengers: Infinity War racked up last year in black ink: that pic made a half-billion dollars but was more expensive, with a production cost and global P&A of … a half-billion dollars.

This is despite a deliberate effort to sink the film for straying off-Narrative. At one point the New Yorker had two reviews running, one denouncing its sympathetic portrayal of a bullied white loner and another asserting the film's irrelevance. The politically correct assumed a two-part strategy with unthinking habit, casting the film as immoral (non-woke, or awakened to the wrong realities) on one hand and not worth your time (despite all the time the intelligentsia were investing in it) on the other; don't see this film was the shrieking subtext.

Of course all of this added up to the best promotional campaign a movie could ask for (I haven't seen it yet).

Joker‘s profit is also not that far from Black Panther‘s $476.8M, and way ahead of Aquaman‘s $260.5M (which at combined budget and P&A of $348M was 83% more expensive than Joker), Venom’s near $247M and Deadpool 2’s $235.4M.

Global theatrical rentals for Joker are figured at $421M. With the DC brand having stumbled after Justice League, Joker continues to show the Burbank, CA lot’s resilience with its feature comic book brand after Aquaman, their highest-grossing DC title ever at $1.15 billion, as well as its glass-ceiling crasher Wonder Woman ($821.8M, another film that Joker is besting in black, after she lassoed a profit of $252.9M).

Pro-regime propaganda like Wonder Woman and Black Panther benefit immensely from the voluntary hype of an approving media. These are movies already employing the broad appeal of bombs and bruised balls to give them legs globally. Remarkably, Joker is on track to surpass these films without even getting released in China:

Joker, given its oppressive society tone, isn’t expected to get a release in mainland China, meaning all of the pic’s offshore territories have been released.

Note that it's the white supremacist adjacent (or something) Joker that is censored social commentary in an authoritarian nation, and the most pc fare is waved right in.

For Joker to present itself as a brooding piece of social commentary and (word has it) not particularly entertaining, yet yielding so much better on investment than these films is remarkable and maybe a little scary to the people who wanted it to fail for the same political and social reasons they want Wonder Woman and Wakanda to succeed.

Production costs after New York City tax credits were $70M (though some say it’s lower in the $60Ms, we heard it’s higher) and global P&A is at $120M... 

Joker, meanwhile, is putting a few pics this autumn out of business, i.e., Gemini Man, and cutting into the ticket sales of others.

Like the Joker character, Joker is causing problems for the other scoundrels.

Eff-you-menism

White Trash Bible Study

A survey of religious observance around the world on Sunday.

Subsribe to my channel.

Brothers From Other Mothers

Corey Booker really, really wants the Jews to know he is, well if not one of them at least one of theirs:

When President Donald Trump suggested earlier this year that American Jews who vote for Democrats are disloyal, one 2020 Democratic presidential candidate chose to respond in Hebrew. 

“I know Jewish values,” Senator Cory Booker told a group of reporters. “Tzedakah, chesed” he said — “those are ideas about justice and decency and kindness and mercy. We need to get back to those values.” 

He then went on to quote a prayer said during the Jewish High Holy Days to further make his case. 

“Ki beyti beit tefila yikarei l’kol ha’amim,” he said in slightly Yiddish-inflected Hebrew. “‘May my house be a house of prayer for many nations,’ that’s what is said at the most important time of year, that’s what we need to get back to.”

A "house of prayer for many nations" remains very Jewish everywhere except Israel. They must not have a Lubavitch chapter there.
Corey Booker was recruited by Shmuley Boteach at Oxford:

Not long after he arrived at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1992, Mr. Booker met Shmuley Boteach, an American rabbi who had been sent to the campus as an emissary for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, which places an emphasis on outreach to nonpracticing Jews.  

Mr. Booker eventually became a president of the L’Chaim Society, a Jewish campus group that Rabbi Boteach created, which functioned as a kind of salon and dining club for students. 

“To say that we were close is really an understatement,” Rabbi Boteach said in an interview. “We were the way two brothers are,” he added. “He was an uncle to my children, he was my confidant.”

Chabad-Lubavitch stresses its outreach to non-practicing Jews, but seems to do a lot of cultivation of ambitious and rootless wannabes like young Corey Booker.

And, as is typical of his aw-shucks shallow enthusiasm for things other people have told him, he's fairly comic in his earnest mimicry:

“There’s a twinkle that’s coming from his soul,” said Rabbi Shmully Hecht, with whom Mr. Booker worked to create a Jewish group at Yale. 

He also criticized Mr. Booker’s vote on Iran, but considers him a steadfast supporter of Israel. “When you see him talking about Jewish things and Israel things, it’s extraordinary.” 

Rabbi Menachem Genack, who leads the kosher certifying division of the Orthodox Union and lives in Englewood, N.J., met Mr. Booker through Rabbi Boteach more than two decades ago and has considered him a friend ever since. Rabbi Genack, who published a book of his letters to former President Bill Clinton, said it is often Mr. Booker who brings up Torah in their conversations. 

“I go to his office and I start talking Abraham Lincoln and he starts talking about the parsha,” said Mr. Genack, using the Hebrew term for the weekly Torah portion. “I say: ‘Cory, what is wrong with this picture?’ and he just laughs.””

No, Corey, the Jews aren't laughing at you behind your back. No one is. Totally not.

I can't say if Ed Begley's character in A Mighty Wind was under the same spell, but it sure seems like it:

Duhphorism

One's tolerance and liberalism are positively correlated with one's insulation from their effects.

The Assumption Assumption

Via Steve Sailer, the story of maybe the most egregious Me Too takedown yet, of open software innovator Richard Stallman. From Jack Baruth

 “Wait,” some of you are saying, “that’s right! Jeffrey Epstein had a rape island! I’d forgotten all about it, what with Epstein’s convenient suicide and some remarkably media-friendly mass shootings occurring right as justice was about to be quote-unquote handed out!” Funny how that works. Perhaps it’s because Mr. Epstein had a full list of powerful and notable friends. One of those friends, apparently, was MIT artifical-intelligence savant Marvin Minsky, who is alleged to have had sex with a 17-year-old girl on the island.

When asked to give his thoughts on the matter, Stallman responded like any 110-octane autism-spectrum genius would: by questioning the terminology involved. He suggested that the correct word for Minsky’s alleged statutory rape was not “sexual assault”, noting that

a) Minsky had no way to know the girl was 17, not 18 ; b) she had been coerced by Epstein out of Minsky’s presence and might well have appeared to be entirely willing.
In true Stallman fashion, this was

a) absolutely correct from a logical perspective; b) mind-blowingly stupid from a perspective of The Current Year.

It’s no different from the thousands of logical but emotionally uncomfortable things he has said and written over the past forty years. Stallman has no way to understand how people feel about something; he doesn’t feel that way. The community of actual computer scientists and clued-in tech people has long accepted this because — and I cannot emphasize this enough — Richard Stallman is responsible for computing as we know it.

In a world where Richard Stallman did not exist, neither would Apple, or the Android phone, or “cloud computing”, or Amazon.com. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. The world without Stallman would be a world where you still used a Windows 95 computer, where you paid real money for every single piece of software on it. Internet Explorer would be the browser. Computing would be limited to the upper-middle-class, the way it was in 1985. No matter how you are reading this website, both you and I are using systems which incorporate GNU software. Even if you’re using Windows, which nowadays runs on a very GNU-like operating system beneath the covers.

Stallman's dull, correct analysis inspired a female student to take to Medium to launch a cancel crusade:

I was shocked. I continued talking to my friend, a female graduate student in CSAIL, about everything, trying to get the full email thread (I wasn’t on the mailing list). I even started emailing reporters — local and national, news sites, newspapers, radio stations. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. During my 45-minute drive home, when I normally listen to podcasts or music, I just sat in complete silence. The only reporter who responded quickly was one from WBUR, and they didn’t seem to be in a rush to publish this information. So, I told my friends that I would just write a story myself. I’d planned to do it after work today; instead, because I can’t possibly focus, I’m working on it now.

MIT does not deserve its women.

The world does not deserve them either. I thought back to every person who has ever asked me how to “fix” the gender problems in STEM, how to “get more girls” to join STEM programs. I thought about every time that someone has suggested “men are better at spatial thinking” and that “testosterone is linked to better performance in math”. In my mind I look at all these people, a crowd that is gathered. And in my mind, I stand up and I scream at them. I would put my hands around their shoulders and shake sense into all of them, individually, if I had enough time and enough hands The problems are so obvious.

There is no discernible substance in the girl's complaints, of course, just the standard leveraging of alleged brutish behavior by a high-profile man into an explanation of female mediocrity and demand for "more women in STEM" (to combat sexism in STEM, which is now in and of itself wrong--that is, even if more women in STEM degrades STEM, it's necessary because sexism exists there).

But what struck me is the assumption, always implied now openly expressed, that, in the absence of discrimination or bias all those old white guys who built the modern world would have been represented by women and minorities. The world would be much as it is, only better. Everything would have been created by the lost and neglected genius of Wakandans and Wymmn.

Indeed, the STEM-bette who wrote this piece didn't know who Stallman is before she saw her opportunity

Did I even really know who Richard Stallman was before those emails? To be honest, not really — I’m a mechanical engineer who didn’t pay enough attention, apparently. I did not possess the awe and reverence many people commenting and retweeting seemed to. Maybe if I had known I would have been more “careful”. Maybe if I had known I, too, would have been able to let such comments and behavior slide because of “genius”.

I keep waiting for "genius" to be outed as problematic (unless applied to your favorite rapper because he turned a clever phrase, once).

The assumption at the base of all feminist and anti-racist action is the denial of genius--which is assumed to be evenly distributed by race and sex. (Of course if it was evenly distributed it wouldn't really exist, yet...)

Scientific discovery and enlightenment are a passive process, inevitable, indeed, the modern world would be just what it is, but better, if not for "white supremacy"; it's just a question of who got the "privilege" to create it. This becomes sinister when you realize they are now insisting the future world be the creation of those who have shown no real talent for world-making: women and brown people.

When a female department head at Harvard's teaching hospital decided to take down the portraits of eminent alumnae  in a lecture hall because there was only one Chinese luminary among the white faces, there was the usual weak stir of protest (often accompanied by sops to "diversity" and "discrimination" by good people desperate not to stick their neck too far out).

It didn't seem to occur to anyone to ask why they didn't just include a few tokens, which is after all standard practice in all kinds of applications; the only reason I can fathom this wasn't considered is because they would have had to so lower standards to include just a few brown or female faces that the disparity between their achievements and those of the Old White Guys would be too embarrassing to endure, reinforcing the perception of their superiority. Putting someone who designed a better hospital gown next to someone who saved lives improving heart surgery is perhaps too much even for Woke Administration. Better a bare wall than one that offends.

So they did here what is happening everywhere, scrapping something entirely because it can't be racially and sexually diversified without embarrassment. I was going to write "without catastrophe" but realize to achieve equity they are quite willing to accept that--even the slow, hidden catastrophe that has to be resulting from talented whites being chased out of medicine, and everywhere, now. The result is ultimately measured in mortality. Every one of those offending white faces represents lives saved. Every talented white making way for a brown mediocrity represents lives to be lost. I'm sure if they had to, they'd fashion a rationalization as to why people must die to achieve "equity".

They aren't just eliminating Whites' past achievements taking down portraits, they're pre-emptively eliminating Whites' future achievements. They're taking down future portraits too.

One tweet in defense of whitewashing the lecture hall's wall makes the assumption the discoveries were inevitable, and if affirmative action had reigned, we wouldn't have a bare wall (and impoverished present), but a more colorful one:


Lost in all the emotion, falsity and grift, is the logical contradiction that would put to rest finally the notion that bias operates everywhere always, if only we were allowed to say it: if all this brown and female talent is out there--has always been out there--at some point someone would have figured out he can surpass his rivals--whether it be in business, education or sport--by abandoning bias and recruiting, and paying less for, all this untapped talent.

It is in fact what happened with sports. Here and there coaches and managers decided to break a cultural restriction against black players to acquire superior athletes. Once they've done this, their competitors have to abandon discrimination to compete.

Why does this not replicate in at least one endeavor not related to stereotypical black talents? Why is there not a women's univeristy somewhere collecting all these disaffected, brilliant students and cleaning up?

Total mystery. We may never know.

addendum

The cancel crusaders have historical predecessors, and some may find their way to eminence of a sort after all:

On May 25, 1966, Nie Yuanzi, a party activist and philosophy administrator at Peking University, and six other party functionaries authored and put up a “big-character poster” (called a dazibao) on campus denouncing the university’s administration as furthering the aims of the bourgeoisie. 

Mao seized on the message and ordered it to be read over the national broadcast and reprinted in the People’s Daily. In the coming weeks and months, Mao sought to purge dissent and purify the ideological foundation of China into his cult of personality. Leveraging Nie’s message into a broader call to rebellion, Mao used his Red Guard, a group of militant radicals mostly composed of students, to dismantle higher education and reshape art and literature to support his aims of control.