There was once a time we could agree on many things, but most importantly we could agree on the processes by which we sorted out our differences. But if even the process of working and living together are gone, what really is left?
Published on 4 Oct 2018
Discovered last night – either from the Bolt Report or The Outsiders – that Ann Coulter will be coming to Australia!!!!!!
I therefore immediately bought tickets. But what is the venue, you might ask? This is what it said on the receipt.
Venue: Venue address will be announced by email on the day of the event.
Why will they not tell you. Because wherever it is will draw a crowd of thugs, so this at least gives the police a head start in getting the fences up.
But why stop us hearing them speak? If everything they say is nonsense, let them say it and discredit themselves. But if it’s not nonsense, then how will you know?
The point is that one way or the other, only in open dialogue is there any hope that the truth can be discovered.
All you young folks out there have almost certainly never heard of Norman Rockwell, but he was was among the greatest artists of my North American youth, mostly famous for his cover illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post, which was a weekly directed at us aspiring members of the bourgeoisie. (And as an aside, let me note I went looking at his work online because I was reading an article at QoL which might interest you as well). This is Rockwell’s painting, The Connoisseur. No one knows whether it is a tribute to Jackson Pollock or a parody. But whatever it is, the painting on the wall struck me as possibly the most riveting and appealing abstract painting I have come across so went searching to find out who had painted it, whether it was Pollack or Rockwell or someone else. This then is possibly the most fascinating part of all. From Norman Rockwell made fun of Jackson Pollock by painting the same way.
Called The Connoisseur, the painting is a mix of art criticism (this is what we’re forced to look at now!) and bravado (but I can do it too!). It mixes Jackson Pollock’s trademark drip painting with Rockwell’s trademark illustrations. Pollock, of course, famously painted with the canvas on the floor.
The catch to Rockwell’s painting? He did it the same way.
According to the Norman Rockwell Museum, Rockwell rearranged his entire studio in 1961. He painted the abstract image first, on the floor like Pollock, and then combined the man and Pollock in his final painting.
While we can’t be sure if Rockwell’s Pollock was parody or homage, we do have a hint. He submitted a section of the sample painting to an art exhibition and signed it with a fake Italian signature. He won the contest and earned a similar honorable mention by submitting as Percival at the Berkshire Museum. It sounds more like Banksy than Rockwell, and it shows the satiric side of the master of illustration.
As we get older we can dimly recognise the very different features of the world ahead that we will only see the first few elements of, but which for the young will be the world they grow up in. That world will in turn disappear before them as they too age. And what should strike you as you look at the painting is that even Jackson Pollock is now passé. His time has come, and also gone.
Nowhere else have I found it so well put: #COUNTMEOUT!.
I think the #MeToo “Movement” is the most dangerous movement since the KKK, which it resembles with its mob mentality. And, I speak with total moral authority because I am a woman, whose every squeak and whine is, therefore, “credible.” I can credibly accuse any male from my kindergarten, high school, college, or long-ago workplaces, of the most lurid crimes, with no corroboration or even dates of occurrence. They will be pronounced guilty by man-hating leftist women and their wussified, terrified, man-shaped consorts who are so generally-repulsive that their only chance at getting laid is to pretend to be “feminist.”
Even after Tawana Brawley, and Mattress Girl, the Duke LaCrosse team accusers, and the fraternity gang rape that never happened, after every poop swastika and banana peel in a tree, all men and most women feel they HAVE to give an obligatory genuflection to “but, of course, the #MeToo movement is an important and wonderful thing.” No. It is not.
It is a deadly cocktail of Professional Victimhood, Neo-Victorianism, the hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials and the certainty of being found guilty of the Stalinist Show Trials. No man is safe, no matter how many decades go by, from being accused of sexual crimes. It is the weaponization of the fantasies or distorted accounts of minor, unprovable, or consensual sexual incidents redefined later by unhinged women.
And then continues in the same vein which I would say really must be read, but if you are reading it here, would mean it will be read only by those who do not need to. But read it anyway.
And then there is this from Mark Steyn.
I mentioned with Tucker the other night the condescension of Gentleman Jim Acosta, who airily presumes that, if you’re a woman, any woman, you believe the accuser and assume this Kavanaugh guy is a serial gang-rapist. That’s how it goes: Identity politics makes moron cultures of formerly sophisticated societies. So it was inevitable that when a picture from yesterday’s hearing popped up, of the judge with three females sitting behind him, the wankerati of Twitter immediately assumed that they were just three regular all-American women staring in disgust at the rape beast of Bethesda.
In fact, they were Kavanaugh’s wife, mother, and one of their dearest friends. And the reason they look like that is because they’re crushed and broken by what Dianne Feinstein, Blumenthal, Whitehouse and the other whatever-it-takes Democrats chose to do to them. It is a testament to the thoroughness with which these malign carbuncles on the body politic set about their task that, in a certain sense, one could forgive the Twitter mob its carelessness: Mrs Kavanaugh was all but unrecognizable from the woman who’d sat behind her husband just a fortnight ago. She was, indeed, a different person, and she will be for the rest of her life.
Dianne Feinstein did that to her, consciously. The Ranking Member is in a tricky position back home. She’s on the California ballot this November, but, having been outflanked on her left, she is not the official Democrat nominee. So she cannot afford to be insufficiently “progressive”, and thus concluded it was necessary to, in Kavanaugh’s words, “destroy” his family.
Nothing personal, just business.
Google is a left-wing biased and distorted search engine
Use Duck Duck Go instead. The vid was there this morning. I wonder what could have happened. Meanwhile:
LATIMES Owner: Social media ‘cancer of our time’…
The most ignorant highly educated fools in history
This is from Campus Review: What Scott Morrison doesn’t get about most of the voting public. And what he doesn’t get is that they are ignorant fools. Here’s the text:
When now-Prime Minster Scott Morrison brought a lump of coal into parliament in 2017, pleading “don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you,” he made a critical error. That is, assuming he wants the Coalition to retain power at the next federal election.
That’s because to Generations X (b. 1961–81) and Y (b. 1981–96), which together comprise the largest segment of the voting public, combating climate change is their priority.
Australia’s generational spread, per 2016 Census data. Photo: ABC
This is a key finding of the University of Melbourne’s Life Patterns report, released this week.
The longitudinal study, which followed a cohort that left high school in 1991 and another that left in 2006, further revealed that although they both cared about minimising the use of coal, they did so for different reasons. Gen-Xers generally worried about their children’s health, whereas Gen-Yers tended to want to protect future generations.
Report co-author Dr Julia Cook, Research Fellow at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, explained how the researchers reached this conclusion.
“In 2017, we asked participants to nominate the three most important issues facing Australia.
“One major issue unites both generations: concerns about the environment and climate change …
“… Both groups consistently expressed grave concerns about the general lack of action towards climate change mitigation from the current government.”
Among Gen-Xers (now aged 43-44), women were almost twice as likely to think this than men, yet among Gen-Yers (now aged 28-29), men predominantly held this view, albeit by a slim margin: 40 per cent compared to 34 per cent.
“We’re not going to have air to breathe soon,” a mother living in a country town said.
A father living in a rural area was equally alarmed: “Climate change could ruin their [his children’s] lives and our governments are not acting.”
The other issues the groups aired tended to reflect their respective life stages. For instance, Gen-Yers were concerned about jobs and housing affordability, while Gen-Xers were anxious about the cost of living and education – a worry potentially exacerbated by Scott Morrison’s independent and Catholic schools funding announcement on Thursday.
I actually think this is reasonably accurate. These people will bring on a collapse of our civilisation – their civilisation – and never know what happened. And then by some coincidence, this was in The Oz today: Labor’s mining of millennials’ envy is a cynical ploy that may work. There you find:
Labor’s delusion that government is better able to order economic affairs than markets has cost Australian taxpayers tens of billion dollars over the decade. Its legacy includes unplanned and unwanted school buildings, the National Broadband Network, an unreliable and expensive electricity system and debt that will pass to the next generation, and possibly the one after that.
Yet Labor is doubling down. Bill Shorten is campaigning on the party’s least diluted socialist platform since Gough Whitlam. He promises intrusive government, and more steeply progressive tax. He will re-regulate the Labor market and hand back more power to the unions.
He will attack private health insurance and penalise self-funded retirees. He will throw more money at public schools and public health under the pretence of improving services.
He will resume subsidies to wind and solar farms, bringing more pain to consumers.
Economic freedom fighters like Uber and Airbnb will face a torrid time. Labor’s addiction to regulate, combined with the trade union movement’s determination to keep every worker within their grasp, will bring down the curtains on the sharing and gig economies.
Which sums up to this:
Labor’s politics of envy has a subliminal appeal to millennials. Winding back negative gearing or capital gains concessions for investors appeals to their grievances, even though its effect will be to tighten the rental property market on which most of them depend.
Higher education on demand has inflated career expectations for some. A significant proportion find themselves employed in jobs for which they are over-qualified, on paper at least.
The Opposition Leader is relying on these voters to get him home.
Mis-educated by design, perhaps, but with no actual knowledge – both among the teachers and the taught – the tragic result.
The Scottsboro boy
The sensibilities of the left are under constant recalibration depending on whatever might give them power at any particular moment. Situational ethics has nothing to do with it since there is nothing remotely ethical about how the left operates. The single most important American novel of the latter half of the twentieth century – based on how often it seems to have been assigned to high school students – was Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The story might have been a parable for our times up until the present, but that was then, this is now. All this is discussed here: Resisting a Lynch Mob. Let him explain:
The story is based on Lee’s childhood in rural Alabama during the 1930s. The narrator is six-year-old Jean Louise Finch. The protagonist is her father, Atticus, who is a small-town lawyer appointed by the court to represent Tom Robinson, a black man who has been charged with raping Mayella Ewell, a young white woman. Despite the community’s near universal condemnation, Atticus defends Tom in and out of court.
And, of course, the girl was lying about having been raped and the black man was falsely accused. So there was a time when one could have said in public that a woman might actually lie about rape. Not now, of course, but you could do it then. But there is an even older story that I grew up with, another famous story about a false rape accusation.
The Scottsboro Boys were nine African American teenagers, ages 13 to 20, accused in Alabama of raping two White American women on a train in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial. The cases included a lynch mob before the suspects had been indicted, all-white juries, rushed trials, and disruptive mobs. It is commonly cited as an example of a miscarriage of justice in the United States legal system.
Once again, you cannot necessarily believe the woman. There might have been some reason to think CBF’s story is true, if it hadn’t happened 36 years ago; if the Democrats had no history of dredging up farfetched stories from the past to achieve an outcome that is plainly on the face of it unjust; if there were zero evidence that anything of the kind had ever happened; if none of the other people who were supposedly there at the time had any recollection of the moment; and if there is were any reason to have made a Federal case of it even if the events had actually happened.
Possibly worst of all, the incident, even if it had happened, trivialises the actual circumstances of rape. Trying to turn such an obvious untruth as the standard of he-said-she-said will make genuine cases more difficult to prosecute since the entire process becomes discredited. Beyond this, the use of a rape accusation that no one actually believes is true – and no one on either side does – degrades the political process into an anything-goes procedure in which politics is itself shown to be a conman’s game, rather than an institutional structure in which good governance through communal discussion is the process on which all sides can depend.
And if you want to read about how sick, scary and depraved a madhouse the left is making of America, try this: When Every Boy Is Guilty, Every Girl Becomes a Monster, followed by this: How to ‘Christine Blasey Ford-Proof’ Your Son.
Do you really think you can discuss things with these people? Reason with them? They are ideologically blinded and filled with hate. We need to protect ourselves as best we can, like against a typhoon. But there is no point in argument with people who have nothing to contribute to any conversation other than accusations and uncontrolled fury.
A quarter of American women think the accusations against Kavinaugh are credible
The actual story has this as its heading: Poll: only a quarter of American women think the accusations against Kavinaugh are credible. It’s actually worse:
25 percent of women responding say that the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh are credible, while 35 percent say that they haven’t heard enough to decide and 18 percent aren’t sure, according to a new poll from HuffPost/YouGov.
For men, there are less who are undecided: 28 percent say that they find the allegations credible, but 34 percent who say they are not credible. 29 percent of men haven’t heard enough and 10 percent aren’t sure.
The US may be a nation of gullible fools, but such is as it is. Sad and pathetic.
Law of Markets 