Yearly Archives: 2017

Agit prop and the agent provocateur

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The one blessing about being brought up in a communist household is that you understand the left a good deal better than most. It also brings an added measure of concern when I see how easily a public unused to lying as a tactic is influenced by these manoeuvres which are standard practice on the left. My Dad was an expert in agit prop and I grew up understanding the role of the agent provocateur only too well. These are not well-meaning individuals who wish to investigate the truth. They are individuals whose only interest is to disrupt the communications among those on the other side through whatever lies they might find convenient and they hope persuasive.

There are a few I feel I have spotted over the years coming to this site, but I will only focus on one since I find the comments by BorisG particularly instructive. And the example I am going to use are the comments made on my post Remember Michelle Fields? It is simply undeniable that Fields told a story that was intended to harm Donald Trump’s run for president but was thoroughly discredited by the videos that showed everything she said, and the Washington Post initially said, were lies. The point of the post was to remind us that the media will lie without any hesitation if they can see some political advantage for the left’s political agenda. That is the message of this post, and it is one that can never be repeated often enough. You will be lied to by the left to the furthest extent they believe they can get away with. That there is not an instantaneous scepticism amongst us on this side of politics from any unverified political story carried by a mainstream media organisation fills me with dread since most of us are so middle class that we find it hard to believe others will lie, distort, or withhold relevant information without the slightest hesitation if it serves their ends. The attitude you need to take when reading anything from an MSM report is the same attitude you might take when buying a used car. Do not trust a thing you are told and make sure you verify everything you can from a separate source.

So let me take you to BorisG’s comments on Michelle Field’s post. And the first one he wrote was also the first one on the thread since one of the basic aims is to structure the subsequent discussion in a different direction. Below are all of his posts in sequence without the comments from other commenters. We will see if we can find a pattern of wilful obtuseness.

BorisG
#2564074, posted on November 24, 2017 at 1:16 am (Edit)
Steve is an amazing partisan hack. Even Trump initially said that the allegations against Moore if true, are deeply troubling. No one knows if they are true but the fact that 30 people gave information to the Post about it suggest that they are likely true. Papers can be sued for big bucks and won’t publish such things without good research.

BorisG
#2564091, posted on November 24, 2017 at 2:54 am (Edit)

Moore is going to win bigly

Ok but according to Steve

The great uncertainty I have is who will be elected to the Senate from Alabama in December.

Who is right ?

BorisG
#2564101, posted on November 24, 2017 at 3:14 am (Edit)
Seven middle aged women not known to each other made allegations and gave their names. Sorry it is hard to imagine they are all lying.

Maybe you also believe the women who accused Trump also lied.

BorisG
#2564363, posted on November 24, 2017 at 11:13 am (Edit)

Boris there is no more leftist communist partisan blogger here than you.

Even though I says the same things about Moore and clinton?

Anyway I see there are enough sane people still left here.

Just a coupe of points
1) it is not accurate to claim that the media only targets the right. The media is busy reporting allegations against all sides, including media itself. Including NPR.
2) I am myself troubled by lack of due process. How do you defend yourself against trial by media? The only way is to sue them but this just reverses the burden of proof, and that is not fair. But no one suggests Moore should be jailed. The people of Alabama will decide in this case.

BorisG
#2564393, posted on November 24, 2017 at 11:33 am (Edit)
And Ivanka Trump. Is she a Democrat? If she was she would probably have distanced herself from her father. Or trump would distance himself from her.

BorisG
#2564398, posted on November 24, 2017 at 11:36 am (Edit)

you think if Moore had an ongoing interest in teens given his profile something would have emerged in the last 40 years,

Yes. But he wasn’t ongoing and he wasn’t a national figure.

BorisG
#2564404, posted on November 24, 2017 at 11:39 am (Edit)
Spacey has had a couple of ‘incidents’

Unfortunately many incidents. Hollywood knew about it. We didn’t.

Let’s face it, politicians will always be held to much higher standard than actors.

BorisG
#2564413, posted on November 24, 2017 at 11:40 am (Edit)
And this thread is a good example the far right are enraged when someone disagrees with them. Good example of tolerance and Christian ethics they pretend to adhere to.

BorisG
#2564439, posted on November 24, 2017 at 11:53 am (Edit)

The entire story was a fabrication,

It is amazing what for Steve and co passes for evidence.

You can take him and others of his kind as just stirrers or contrarians. BorisG is deadly earnest in everything he says without the slightest indication he is interested in an actual debate or in discovering the truth. Fascinating to watch and there is much to learn from what he and others of his kind do. Dishonesty is the trade mark of the left, not that they have a monopoly, but it is a specific tactic aimed at the fair minded who are seldom as aware as they need to be of the practice, and seldom think of the need to guard against the premeditated lies told by the left. Boris G would have to be pretty thick not to know that Michelle Fields was a liar and that her aim was deliberate and strictly political. The interesting part is that for the left to succeed, they can only achieve their ends by lying. For the right, what you hear people say is almost invariably what they believe. The left often mimics the same concerns but it is tactical and never substantive unless for a change good policy overlaps what they see as tactical advantage.

The one valuable part of being on this side of the fence is that with so many out there on the left who will swarm around any genuine falsehood stated by someone on the right, the standard of probity is higher. This is part of the reason why sex scandals, to just name the issue in relation to Roy Moore, are not as common on the right as on the left. Except that when they are caught out – such as with Bill Clinton – it is no longer a scandal and is put to bed as soon as it is practical to do so. They never mean it. It is not hypocrisy, it is a policy of deceit. They are perfectly aware they are lying and just take the rest of us for fools.

Even the NeverTrumpers are coming around

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It’s from Instapundit

IN NATIONAL REVIEW, OF ALL PLACES: This Thanksgiving, Thank Donald Trump:

This Thanksgiving, Americans in general — and free-market conservatives in particular — have plenty for which to be grateful. And much of it would be absent had the White House’s current occupant not become president on November 8, 2016. The day after Donald J. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, Princeton University economist Paul Krugman called Trump’s victory “the mother of all adverse effects.” He predicted “very probably . . . a global recession, with no end in sight.” • The Dow Jones Industrial Average, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 all hit record highs on Tuesday. The Wilshire 5000 Index calculates that some $3.4 trillion in new wealth has been created since President Trump’s inauguration and $5.4 trillion since his election. Fueled by the reality of deregulation, expectations of lower taxes, and a new tone in Washington that applauds free enterprise rather than excoriate it, the economy is on fire. • Atop the second quarter’s 3.1 percent increase in real GDP, and 3.0 in 3Q, the New York Federal Reserve Bank predicts that 4Q output will expand by 3.8 percent. This far outpaces the feeble average-annual GDP growth rate of 1.5 percent on President Obama’s watch. Meanwhile, the IMF expects global GDP to rise by 3.5 percent this year. So much for a Trump-inspired “global recession.”

Unemployment is at 4.1 percent, a 17-year low. New unemployment claims in September were at their most modest since 1974. Goldman Sachs on November 20 “lowered our unemployment rate forecast to 3.7 percent by end-2018 and 3.5 percent by end-2019.” According to the Wall Street powerhouse’s chief economist Jan Hatzius, “Such a scenario would take the U.S. labor market into territory almost never seen outside of a major wartime mobilization.” . . .

• For every new regulation that Trump has imposed, 16 have been erased.

• The FCC has begun to dismantle Obama’s “Net Neutrality” takeover of the Internet, which functioned marvelously, thank you, before his needless e-power-grab.

• Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is on the bench, along with 13 constitutionalist lower-court judges. At this stage in Obama’s presidency, the Senate had confirmed just seven of his district- and circuit-court nominees.

Much more at the link, concluding with this: “The Never Trump faction still claims that the president of the United States ‘is no conservative.’ And yet, with rare deviations (such as free trade), he spends nearly every day implementing the conservative agenda. Ideas that center-Right activists have demanded for decades are becoming public policy, one after another — to the pleasant surprise of even some of Donald J. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters.”

Did I mention this was in National Review, of all places?

101Posted at 10:58 pm by Glenn Reynolds
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Can these people be trusted with our children?

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Picked up on a Canadian website with the heading: I, Napoleon. I assume this is Victoria, Australia and not Victoria, British Columbia, which is only a city, but wherever it is, it is seriously disturbing. The most telling comments on the thread:

“mature minor” – Words right out of Newspeak.

Just pass a law that no one can perform “gender transition” without prescribing aspirin for the patient. Since a minor cannot be prescribed aspirin without informing the parents, the proposed “gender transition” will be leaked to them as well. What a totally screwed up department of education, and screwed up liberal idea of health care in general. You cannot give an aspirin or apply band-aid to a kid without parental consent, but you can perform abortion or “gender transition.”

The habit of choosing one’s own course for oneself

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This is how Alfred Marshall, in the last editions of his Principles of Economics published in 1920 (in para 4), described “the fundamental characteristics of modern industrial life”.

There is no one term that will express these characteristics adequately. They are, as we shall presently see, a certain independence and habit of choosing one’s own course for oneself, a self-reliance; a deliberation and yet a promptness of choice and judgment, and a habit of forecasting the future and of shaping one’s course with reference to distant aims.

This is what freedom means, and it is a burden. Not everyone can bear the weight. It is the struggle between those who value freedom and independence against those who wish to be told what to do and given their daily bread like a household pet that has been at the centre of the great political divisions for the past five hundred years.

Remember Michelle Fields?

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What’s your view on whether Michelle Field was pulled to the ground by Trump’s Chief of Staff?

This is the truth. The entire story was a fabrication, a complete and absolute lie wholly made up with malicious intent. It was not an error nor an exaggeration. It was not a mis-recollection of the facts nor a misperception of an event. It was a premeditated and calculated lie told repeatedly by both Democrats and Republicans, inside the media and out, with no other intention than to manufacture a scandal around Donald Trump to prevent him from becoming president. And it would have gone on and on, and you would be hearing about it to this day, except there were videos taken and so the lie was revealed and could no longer serve the purpose it was designed to serve. And when the facts came out, they did not apologise, nor show contrition, nor exhibit the slightest remorse. They just shut up about this and went and found other lies that were not as obvious and blatant and as easy to expose. They have no conscience or moral scruples or give the slightest indication of wishing to deal fairly and honestly. They will do whatever it takes and count on the deceit and connivance of everyone on their side, along with the stone cold imbecility and ridiculous naivete of so many, too many, on the side of the Republicans.

Which brings me to: President Donald Trump all but endorsed embattled Alabama Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore on Tuesday.

Trump didn’t explicitly say he was endorsing Moore, but he said with emphasis, “We don’t need a liberal person in there. … We don’t need somebody who’s soft on crime like Jones.”

He also noted that the allegations came from behavior alleged to have happened decades ago.

“Forty years is a long time,” Trump said, questioning why it took so long for Moore’s accusers to come forward.

That is, if this had happened why has she never mentioned it before to anyone at any time during the seven previous times Moore had run for office? Why did the forged signature carry the intials “DA” which did not mean “District Attorney” but were the initials of his assistant who wrote her initials next to the stamped signature of her boss on this very woman’s divorce decree which Moore presided over without her saying a word or asking for a different judge. But senior Republicans, including his daughter, have ended up in the ads being run by the Democrat.

Jones began airing a new ad Monday that features statements made by Sessions, Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby and first daughter Ivanka Trump responding to the allegations against Moore.

Shelby, a fellow Republican, said he will “absolutely not” vote for Moore. Ivanka Trump said there’s “a special place in hell” for people who prey on children.

“I’ve yet to see a valid explanation, and I have no reason to doubt the victims’ accounts,” Ivanka Trump told the AP last week.

The one certainty I have that in six months time, Al Franken will still be the Democratic Senator from Minnesota. The great uncertainty I have is who will be elected to the Senate from Alabama in December.

It really is a swamp. How Trump remains so sure-footed in amongst it is one of the political wonders of the age. PDT must despair at the people who surround him and on whose support he depends.

Made it to Instapundit!

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Here’s the link.

MANSON AND THE TOTALITARIAN TEMPTATION: “The potential for entire social movements to end up sympathizing with visibly pathological murderers with swastikas carved in their foreheads is a persistent potential. All you have to do is let down, for a brief moment, your simplest sense of right and wrong, perhaps because you pride yourself on being upset about some social issue….”

Read the whole thing.

15Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll 

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And as always some interesting commentary.

Trump endorses Roy Moore

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And the only reason I know that is because the mealy-mouthed Paul Mirengoff at Powerline, a #NeverTrumper at heart, has written Trump Speaks About the Alabama Race which begins:

President Trump made two points today about the Alabama Senate race. First, he called Democrat Doug Jones “terrible on crime, terrible on borders, terrible on the military.” Trump added: “We don’t need a liberal person in there, a Democrat.”

Second, he noted that the alleged sexual misconduct by Roy Moore took place “40 years ago” and that the candidate has insisted “this did not happen.” Trump also said Moore has “totally denied it” and that “you have to listen to him, also.”

Farther than that he cannot go, nor does he have to. Here’s a candidate who has been defamed by women in relation to acts which cannot even in the slightest be verified and the defamation has come from The Washington Post. Subsequent evidence of lying is so massive that you really have to want to see Trump lose in spite of all the harm it would do. This is Mirengoff’s idiotic highly principled position:

Personally, I would not campaign for Moore unless I affirmatively believed he did not do what Corfman and Nelson allege. Though Trump didn’t express this belief today, Politico suggests that he holds it.

OK, on the say so of the media, what’s your view on whether Michelle Field was pulled to the ground by Trump’s Chief of Staff?

People who are not all in for Roy Moore are such disgusting fools I can barely stand having to deal with them. They are cocktail party Republicans who will be the death of the Republic, and the rest of us as well, by the time they are through.

And now I have found the article itself: President Donald Trump all but endorsed embattled Alabama Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore on Tuesday.

Trump didn’t explicitly say he was endorsing Moore, but he said with emphasis, “We don’t need a liberal person in there. … We don’t need somebody who’s soft on crime like Jones.”

He also noted that the allegations came from behavior alleged to have happened decades ago.

“Forty years is a long time,” Trump said, questioning why it took so long for Moore’s accusers to come forward.

But senior Republicans, including his daughter, have in fact ended up in the ads being run by the Democrat.

Jones began airing a new ad Monday that features statements made by Sessions, Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby and first daughter Ivanka Trump responding to the allegations against Moore.

Shelby, a fellow Republican, said he will “absolutely not” vote for Moore. Ivanka Trump said there’s “a special place in hell” for people who prey on children.

“I’ve yet to see a valid explanation, and I have no reason to doubt the victims’ accounts,” Ivanka Trump told the AP last week.

It really is a swamp. How Trump remains so sure-footed in amongst it is one of the political wonders of the age.

AND THIS WILL COME AS NO SURPRISE: Trump privately doubted Moore’s female accusers. Been there himself and seen the destructive effects on Republican voters who have no idea how to play to win.

President Donald Trump’s near-endorsement of Alabama Republican Roy Moore followed days of behind-the-scenes talks in which he vented about Moore’s accusers and expressed skepticism about their accounts.

During animated conversations with senior Republicans and White House aides, the president said he doubted the stories presented by Moore’s accusers and questioned why they were emerging now, just weeks before the election, according to two White House advisers and two other people familiar with the talks.

The White House advisers said the president drew parallels between Moore’s predicament and the one he faced just over a year ago when, during the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, Trump confronted a long line of women who accused him of harassment. He adamantly denied the claims.

The president’s private sentiments broke into the open Tuesday when Trump all but declared he believed Moore’s denials.

“Let me just tell you, Roy Moore denies it. That’s all I can say. He denies it. And, by the way, he totally denies it,” Trump told reporters. Moore, 70, who has been accused of sexually pursuing — and in some cases assaulting — teenagers or young women when he was in his 30s.

PDT must despair at the people who surround him and on whose support he depends.

The National Security Editor at The Oz speaks out

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There are times when I think newspapers are inhabited by clueless clowns and then there are times when I think things are even worse. This is written by the person The Australian has designated as its “National Security Editor”: Tony Abbott’s vacillations leave him at risk of permanent irrelevance. I realise the difficulties of a cabinet government, in which his cabinet contained Malcolm, Julie and Christopher, and the intractability of a hostile Senate, which made impossible passing some of the things the Libs wished to do, are beyond the comprehension of some people, but here we are.

Having presided over the most brutal emasculation of the Westminster system since Federation, Tony Abbott is now busy singing the praises of Western civilisation. . . .

It was Abbott, who along with other conservative MPs, foisted the same-sex marriage plebiscite on this country. Plebiscites are grimy, divisive affairs, beloved by tyrants as a means of mobilising one group in society against another. They are kryptonite to a Westminster democracy, which holds the parliament as the supreme source of moral authority. . . .

Wasn’t it Abbott who fought to the wire for the right of priests and celebrants to refuse to solemnise gay marriages? Indeed it was. But where was Abbott when Pauline Hanson walked into the Senate chamber in a full length burqa? . . .

As for free speech, the sine qua non of all democratic life, Abbott’s record is none too flash. He flirted with the idea of banning Hizb ut Tahrir, a militant Islamic group whose anti-Western bluster is offensive, but otherwise harmless. . . .

He has since called for the entire abolition of the Human Rights Commission, a consequence-free act of political posturing that does nothing to remove one of the country’s most illiberal laws, one his government left encoded in our statutes.

Etc, etc. I’ll pick a couple from the comments. If there was one that supported what he wrote I completely missed it.

An amazing blend of Abbott hatred, SSM enthusiasm and a wilful blindness to the dangers posed to western society by the likes of Hizb ut Tahrir. Gee I am glad you write about security and do not have the job of maintaining it.

I for one support Tony in this. Christianity is a core element of the Western tradition, not Islam. Islam is in fact against the Western tradition in many of its practices. How can the author be so selective in this aspect. It is an Abbott bashing exercise first and foremost and expects us to overlook the disingenuous and fallacious arguments that he cobbles together in a lame attempt to convince the reader that this is more than just a hate-filled diatribe against TA.

Buying the OZ is like voting for the Libs. You wouldn’t do it except that all of the others are worse. Not much worse as this shows, but still worse.

Manson and the totalitarian temptation

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Two articles on the very same subject although superficially about entirely different things. There is first this: The Charles Manson Fallacy. The second is: 100 Years. 100 Million Lives. Think Twice.

Here is how the first article ends:

The potential for entire social movements to end up sympathizing with visibly pathological murderers with swastikas carved in their foreheads is a persistent potential. All you have to do is let down, for a brief moment, your simplest sense of right and wrong, perhaps because you pride yourself on being upset about some social issue….

Here is how the second one ends:

The stories of survivors paint a more vivid picture of communism than the textbooks my classmates have read. While we may never fully understand all of the atrocities that occurred under communist regimes, we can desperately try to ensure the world never repeats their mistakes. To that end, we must tell the accounts of survivors and fight the trivialization of communism’s bloody past.

My father left behind his parents, friends, and neighbors in the hope of finding freedom. I know his story because it is my heritage; you now know his story because I have a voice. One hundred million other people were silenced.

One hundred years later, let us not forget the history of the victims who do not have a voice because they did not survive the writing of their tales. Most importantly, let us not be tempted to repeat it.

Read them both, which I took down from Powerline Picks where they appeared separately but at the same time.

TO WHICH WE MAY NOW ADD THIS: Charles Manson’s Radical Chic which comes with this very telling subhead:

Some on the left adored him, before and after the murders.

And this is how the article begins:

The history of the postwar period is the history of the struggle against Communism. What’s sometimes forgotten — conveniently forgotten — is that our victory in that struggle was far from assured, and that a substantial swath of the Western intelligentsia and much of its celebrity culture was on the other side. It wasn’t just Jane Fonda and Noam Chomsky, Walter Duranty and Lincoln Steffens. (“I have been to the future,” Steffens wrote after a visit to the Soviet Union, “and it works.”) Eventually, 100 million people would die under Communism as part of the longest and widest campaign of mass murder in recorded human history. As a phenomenon of specifically nuclear terror, the Cold War lasted from 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb thanks to the help of the American leftists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, until 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down.

Precisely in the middle of that period came the strange career of Charles Milles Manson, who has just died in a California hospital at the age of 83. Manson’s death, like his life, was wrapped up in the radical politics of the 1960s.

He died of natural causes, his execution having been set aside as part of the temporarily successful progressive campaign against the death penalty in the 1970s. Just as it is easy to forget how pro-Soviet the American Left was at times, it is easy to forget how pro-Manson American radicals were. “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach. Wild!” That was the assessment of Bernardine Dohrn, the champagne radical who, with her husband, Bill Ayers, participated in a campaign of domestic terrorism, including bombings, and later became cozy with Barack Obama, hosting events for the aspiring politician in her home.

An old question of mine: what do you think of the 1960s – all good? all bad? or a bit of both. I know my answer but I’ll leave that for another time.

You wouldn’t want to be distracted, would you?

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There’s this.

Eight women say Charlie Rose sexually harassed them — with nudity, groping and lewd calls

THE WOMEN: MEDIA IGNORED CLINTON ACCUSERS…
FOUR MORE?
What if Ken Starr Was Right?

ANOTHER woman accuses Franken of grabbing…
SILENCE OF THE DEMS…
WHISPERS: NO RESIGNATION, NO OUSTER CALLS COMING…

NYT WHITE HOUSE REPORTER SUSPENDED AFTER SEX HARASSMENT CLAIMS…

And then there’s this.

GREAT AGAIN: USA Growth Forecasts on Rise… 

UNEMPLOYMENT AT 4.1%, lowest since December, 2000.

And not that it matters but there is also this.

UPDATE: Roy Moore Jumps to 15 POINT LEAD in PredictIt Market as Accuser Accusations Fall Apart

For the Dems, on the other hand, the accusations seem to flower and persist.