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“After Butler, America has suddenly become a more Jacksonian nation. The shadow of Old Hickory looms larger than ever, and Donald Trump stands taller as his undisputed heir.” – Walter Russell Mead, WSJ ($) For those unfamiliar with the extraordinary politician and general, Andrew Jackson, check out this link for some biographies and studies. July 15th, 2024 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Some people are just too “clever by half” or lack a basic level of human empathy, despite playing the moral outrage card. I saw this comment on my Facebook page. To spare the guy (who is in the US) embarrassment, and as his comments were not meant to be fully public, I will not name him, and I suspect he’s not alone in taking this sort of line:
The penultimate sentence contains the seeds of this writer’s error (such as his words “passive recipient”), and a key point is that, in the writer’s way of thinking, Trump/other shooter victim should only be viewed as a victim. But the writer missed the point, and here is what I wrote in response:
I would go beyond what I said to this person on FB by making a broader point. Today, we live in an age when it is often widely held among supposed intellectuals, scientists and the like that we don’t have free will, and that we are, in varying ways, the consequences of internal and external forces we cannot understand or control. As a result, it is – as the writer I responded to claims – no cause for praise in how anyone reacts to said forces. To have free will is, according to this point of view, an illusion, albeit perhaps a necessary one for mental health and maybe also an aspect of biological evolution. (The latter has the risk of being a “just-so” story explanation.) But if free will is nothing more than a handy, surface appearance, then it is hard to see how it has much value, much cash value, from evolutionary terms. After all, knowing you are not the author of your actions might, for some people, be comforting, rather than a nightmare. And think of how certain well-known writers, such as Sam Harris, argue that free will is an illusion and that, for example, criminals are ill, primarily, rather than wicked. The flipside of this is that a person who shows courage, either physical or mental, gets no praise because, on the determinist view, he had no choice in the matter. Everything, including the words I type right now, I had no choice over. None. We are all in the Matrix. But this is self-contradictory. If determinism is true and judgement is pre-determined, how can we know the truth of determinism if we had no choice but to do so anyway? I think we know from introspection that the sense that we are making a choice to focus our minds or not, to set the course of how we want to think about something (or not), is real as anything is in the universe from an empirical sense. To think is to choose; thinking and volition are intertwined so much as to be one and the same. If introspection is an illusion, then so is sight, smell, taste, hearing, etc. But oddly, determinists rarely in my experience challenge these senses’ validity in conveying reality. Back to Mr Trump’s way of reacting to the would-be assassin and others like him: I think that Mr Trump, whatever else one can say about him, had the kind of character, a character that for better or worse he has developed, to want to assert himself in the face of danger. That’s not always smart or fashionable in these weird times, but it is there. There is a sort of Andrew Jackson-style baddass mind-set that came to the fore on Saturday. (Here are some excellent places to look if you want to understand, as I do, why I think free will is real. See this book, by Christian List, for example, or this or this one by Alfred Mele. And finally this, by Lee Pierson and Monroe Trout, for those who want to burrow deep into the evolutionary argument.) Addendum: The writer is also denouncing the idea that Mr Trump being shot is somehow proof of his virtue. However, I doubt anyone thinks that. Of course, Mr Trump does threaten the agendas of a lot of people, foreign and domestic, but that is not the nub of my point here, although I am sure commenters will want to mention these issues. July 15th, 2024 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
I wake up, I check the morning news. Six days ago, on July 8th, President Biden said, “it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye”. In January 2011, a man called Jared Loughner tried to murder Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and did murder six others. The media rushed to blame his crime on a map put out by Sarah Palin’s campaign showing a map of the US with states that she regarded as political targets marked by crosshairs, with the names of those states’ Democratic representatives whom she hoped to unseat listed below. Loughner was a paranoid schizophrenic who held a longstanding – and bizarre – grudge against Giffords. There is no evidence he ever saw Palin’s map. Perhaps it is time to dust off this old post:
The variables l, m and M are defined in the link. July 14th, 2024 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin!” Apart from introducing the president of Ukraine as the president of Russia and referring to Kamala Harris as “vice-president Trump”, Joe Biden got through the NATO summit just fine. The Democrats have got themselves into a bit of a pickle, haven’t they? It is not as if there were no warning signs. Why, the Guardian’s Washington Correspondent, David Smith, compiled a long list of them called “Warning signs: a history of Joe Biden’s verbal slips” only a week ago. Only a week ago. That is the problem. The first item on the list of warning signs dates from March 2021. The Guardian‘s article attempts to explain why it took so long:
Or you could have read a proper newspaper like the New York Post or the Daily Mail and learned about them at the time. The Guardian‘s selection of “gaffes” is skewed towards things that, although they happen to Biden more frequently than average, could happen to anyone, such as Biden’s literal stumbles and his accidental substitutions of one word for another. The only really damaging items in the list compiled by David Smith are Biden calling out “Jackie, are you here?” to the recently deceased Jackie Walorski, and one of several claims he has made that his son died in Iraq. None of the charming anecdotes that he habitually makes up out of whole cloth were included. The New York Post was flagging this habit of his back in 2021. Nor does the Guardian‘s list include any of Biden’s frequent descents into meaningless gabble. Remember how he came out with “I’ll lead an effective strategy to mobilise trunalimunumaprzure” at a campaign stop in Luzerne County, PA, back in October 2020? Of course you do, because you read a proper newspaper, such as Canada’s National Telegraph, from where I got the link. The article by Gerry Kaur, includes a line saying that we need to talk about the “massive problem” of Joe Biden’s “lowering cognitive agility”. It was published on November 3rd, 2020. The Democrats, their friends in the media, and the left in general could have started that conversation four years ago and been in a much better position now, but they preferred to suppress the story. The trouble with hiding the truth from other people is that you end up hiding it from yourself as well. July 12th, 2024 | 53 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the end, what I would offer to anyone on either side of the Atlantic who thinks a new Trump administration would yeet the USA out of NATO on a whim is this; get out more. Actually talk to people on the natsec right. Get out of your intellectually onanistic terrariums. And for the sake of your larger credibility and sanity – do not think the America you read about in the NYT/WaPo and their derivatives, especially in an election year, is a reflection of the full reality. Read broadly. Seek out a contrary opinion. Have reasonable discussions of substance. Don’t assume anyone who disagrees with you on policy is evil and the absolute worst version of their enemies’ caricature. In the end, we all want the same thing, don’t we? Keep America in, the Russia out, and France & Germany down. July 10th, 2024 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
A conclusion is hard to escape: America suffers from an incompetent leadership class. Its problem isn’t ruthlessness but softness, its inability to deal with the world without a media that constantly lies to make it feel better about itself. What we are learning is that much of what Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds sometimes calls the “gentry class” is just not that good, competent, honest, or insightful. And more and more people have noticed. July 7th, 2024 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
JD Tuccille articulates, brilliantly, one of the main reasons I am a classical liberal who belives in limited, constrained and small government:
The idea of an all-powerful, benevolent Daddy federal state is a lot harder to sustain if it appears the head of it is not playing with a full deck of cards, or even knows he’s in a casino.
Exactly. Let’s not forget that the size of the federal debt did not shrink under Mr Trump. And he’s no Calvin Coolidge. Alas. The final paragraph is right on the money:
It appears too few in the commentariat seem to join the dots between the “aren’t the presidential candidates/political classes awful?” with “and perhaps we should constrain government and make it do less” sort of viewpoint. I wonder how much the Founders thought about the problems of an ageing president who was losing his mind, of an opponent such as Trump, and other sort of characters, when they composed the architecture of the republic, with its checks, balances and principles. But at times like these, all the abuse that gets thrown at the Founders (some of them kept slaves, etc) needs to be put in context, and that people should be grateful for their wisdom and understanding of the need for government to be restrained. We could use a bit of that mindset around the world. July 2nd, 2024 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
John Naughton, in an Observer article called “Closing the Stanford Internet Observatory will edge the US towards the end of democracy”, writes
Worse? It is strange how the writer of an article saying how the ability of everyone to publish whatever they like makes things worse claims to be so concerned for democracy. If he would deny mad Harry the right to publish what he likes and read what he likes, why would he grant Harry the right to vote? Naughton continues,
Down-ranking theories deemed to be false by secretly stopping them from being communicated freely is not a crazily expansive idea of censorship, it is censorship. The censors’ kindness in allowing the censored material to remain on site so long as nobody sees it is akin to the kindness of the 1960s London gangster Charlie Richardson, who, having had a man beaten bloody in front of him, would make a gift to his victim of a nice clean shirt to go home in. June 29th, 2024 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Why did Joe Biden’s poor performance in the debate last night come as a surprise to many on the left? The responses of two people writing in today’s Guardian give a clue:
Emphasis added in both quotes. Why have I bolded the parts about Charlottesville? Because it seems that neither Rebecca Solnit nor Lloyd Green were aware that in that speech about Charlottesville, Trump said literally seconds later: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the White Nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and White Nationalists, OK? And the press has treated then absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also you had fine people, but you also had troublemakers.” Check for yourselves by watching this video of the 2017 press conference in which Trump referred to “Fine people on both sides” from CNBC news: “President Donald Trump On Charlottesville: You Had Very Fine People, On Both Sides” Aug 15, 2017. Here is my transcription, with timestamps, of Trump’s answers to journalists’ questions in the relevant section of that press conference. I have not attempted to transcribe the questions, but everything Trump said is there. Bear in mind that it was very noisy, with people constantly shouting over each other, hence Trump’s constant repetition of “Excuse me – excuse me”. * 0:04 I’m not putting anybody on a moral plane. What I’m saying is this: You had a group on one side, and you had a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs, and it was vicious, and it was horrible, and it was a horrible thing to watch. But there is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left – you’ve just called them the left – that came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is. 0:35 Well, I do think there’s blame, yes, I think there’s blame on both sides. You look at – you look at both sides, I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either. And – and – and if you reported it accurately, you would say- 0:56 Excuse me, excuse me [inaudible] and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people – on both sides – you had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue, and the renaming of a park from “Robert E. Lee” to another name. 1:27 George Washington was a slaveowner. Was George Washington a slaveowner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down – excuse me – are we going to take down – are we going to take down statues to George Wash– 1:42 How about Thomas Jefferson, what do you think of Thomas Jefferson, you like him? OK, good, are we going to take down the statue, because he was a major slaveowner. Now, are we going to take down his statue? So you know what, it’s fine. You’re changing history, you’re changing culture, 1:57 and you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the White Nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and White Nationalists, OK? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. 2:14 Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the, with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats. You get – you had a lot of bad – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too. * Despite what Trump actually said being on video for all to see, the mainstream media has repeated thousands of times that Trump praised the neo-Nazis and white supremacists, or that his “both sides” comment was intended to equate the entire group of left wing protesters to neo-Nazis and white supremacists, rather than to equate the extremists of the right to the extremists of the left, and to equate the fine people on the right (whom he explicitly defined as being those who were NOT neo-Nazis or white supremacists) to the fine people on the left. Which journalists are lying and which genuinely believe this disinformation? It is reasonable to assume Rebecca Solnit and Lloyd Green genuinely believe it. They probably would not have wanted to make themselves look foolish in public, and, besides, the poor lambs probably get their news from the Guardian and the other organs of what is still called the “quality” press. But didn’t anyone point out to the Guardian the many debunkings by Scott Adams (https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays) and others of what Adams calls the “Fine People Hoax”? Hey, I tried to do it repeatedly when commenting on those few Guardian articles that allow comments these days. About five per cent of my many attempts slipped through; the other 95% of them were censored immediately. The same went for my comments about the genuineness of Hunter Biden’s laptop, however polite, however well-referenced. Deleted immediately. The same went for my comments detailing the many times that Joe Biden came out with provable falsehoods (although he probably believes them, poor chap) or descended into meaningless gabble. Deleted immediately. And I am sure that in keeping its readers and its writers safe from disturbing evidence of Biden’s decline, the Guardian was only following the lead of the New York Times and the rest of the “respectable” media. And thus the Democrats and their friends wove the net in which they now find themselves trapped. June 28th, 2024 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
“New polling data shows that support for LGBTQ rights is dropping precipitously in Canada”, writes Adam Zivo in the National Post, “and while many queer activists will inevitably blame the far right for this development, the fact is that they themselves helped sabotage their own public support.” The article continues:
Decreases in the popularity of groups supposedly protected by activists happen so predictably that I have concluded it is what the activists, consciously or unconsciously, wish to see. It gives them something to do. June 20th, 2024 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Via Daniel Sugarman, I found this article by Talia Jane in the New Republic. Before I quote from it, I must apologise for quoting myself. Over the last few days, I, like many other people, have talked about several instances of blatant Jew-hatred in New York. So that this post will stand alone, I am going to repeat part of what I said then:
I urge you to watch the video if you have not yet seen it. Now read how Talia Jane describes it:
“I was just kidding. Can’t you take a joke?” Bullies learn to say that in the school playground. Antifa activists and other racist persecutors quickly graduate to the the group version: “Can’t you people take a joke?” As a line to use while intimidating members of the public, it is effective in several ways. It both shields the racists from being punished for threatening behaviour, and torments their victims a second time, by forcing them to either deny that it was all a joke and admit how afraid they were, or to pretend to laugh along for fear of worse, and thus become complicit in their own humiliation. Both of these responses give the fanboys and fangirls like Talia Jane a good laugh. June 18th, 2024 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
“This is the zombie apocalypse”, tweeted Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll. “You need to watch this.” You do need to watch it. The “zombie apocalypse” is jokey fiction. This is real and not funny. It happened in New York a few days ago. Here is the same scene from a different angle. The tweet by Drew Pavlou says,
The speaker leading the chants is not the woman with the long hair, as I thought at first, but the woman intermittently visible on the left wearing a Muslim hijab-and-keffiyeh combination over a combat shirt and black jeans. Judging from their clothing, the crowd is a mixture of Muslims and Leftists. Compiled from both video clips, here is my transcript what the leader and the crowd said, Leader: “Fuck the Nova music festival” Crowd: “Fuck the Nova music festival” Leader: “AKA the place” Crowd: “AKA the place” Leader: “where Zionists decided to rave” Crowd: “where Zionists decided to rave” Leader: “next to a concentration camp” Crowd: “next to a concentration camp” Leader: “That’s exactly what this music festival was.” Crowd: “That’s exactly what this music festival was.” Leader: “It’s like having a rave” Crowd: “It’s like having a rave” Leader: “Right next to the gas chambers” Crowd: “Right next to the gas chambers” Leader: “during the holocaust” Crowd: “during the holocaust” Pro-Palestinian activists like this style of repeating chants. I think it is because they feel they need not take responsibility for their own words if they are just repeating what their leader said a second ago. Here is another recent example, posted by “KosherCockney”. The video shows a bunch of supporters of the Palestinians, their faces hidden by keffiyehs or black ski masks, who have evidently just poured into a New York subway carriage. The ordinary travellers stand rigid or sit hunched with their eyes down, trying to avoid being selected. The leader of the pro-Palestinians says, “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.” Activists: “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.” Leader: “This is your chance to get out.” Activists: “This is your chance to get out.” Understandably, none of the travellers raise their hands. The progressive says with satisfaction, “OK, no Zionists. We’re good.” I do not think it is an exaggeration to hear in that sentiment an echo of the Nazi term “Judenfrei”. June 15th, 2024 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
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