Category Archives: Politics on the left

What really matters is not what actually matters but who decides what matters

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This is a twitter stream on Big Brother and Protecting Elections which really is not just funny but also relevant and serious.

And speaking of Facebook, let me also mention this: Mark Zuckerberg’s Fake News Problem Isn’t Going Away. From which:

In early September, Facebook disclosed that it sold $100,000 in political ads during the 2016 election to buyers who it later learned were connected to the Russian government. Richard Burr of North Carolina and Mark Warner of Virginia, the most senior Republican and Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have said they’re considering holding a hearing, in which case Zuckerberg could be asked to testify.

Meanwhile, special counsel Robert Mueller has made Facebook a focus of his investigation into collusion between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s campaign. A company official says it’s “in regular contact with members and staff on the Hill” and has “had numerous meetings over the course of many months” with Warner. On Sept. 21, Zuckerberg said the company would turn over the ads to Congress and would do more to limit interference in elections in the future. Facebook acknowledges that it has already turned over records to Mueller, which suggests, first, that the special counsel had a search warrant and, second, that Mueller believes something criminal happened on Zuckerberg’s platform. . . .

On Sept. 14, ProPublica reported that it had managed to purchase ads targeted at users who’d listed interests such as “Jew hater” and “How to burn Jews.”

Well they’ve stopped that now, but only after it was pointed out to them. Every new technology not only changes the way people find things out but also what things they find out. I am therefore a free speech absolutist which is why we should make it illegal for Facebook or Twitter and other platforms of the same kind to prevent people from saying things there that are perfectly legal to say anywhere else.

An historical turning point

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This is the sub-title which explains the point of the article: Obama had to spy on Trump to protect himself. Here are the last three lines:

The left is sitting on the biggest crime committed by a sitting president. The only way to cover it up is to destroy his Republican successor.

A turning point in history is here.

If Obama goes down, the left will go down with him. If his coup succeeds, then America ends.

Now read the rest.

Give Peace a Chance is NOT Peace at Any Price

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It is hard to believe that LIQ was actually ever a general if he cannot see how fortunate we are that Donald Trump is President and not Hillary and no longer Obama. I particularly find it wonderful how invisible Obama has become since he has nothing to say about anything that would not make people on his own side wince at their stupidity. A cipher before and a cipher since, but alas, eight disastrous years as president in between. For a very good summary of what Trump said at the UN and why it matters, there is this which you can enjoy end to end. Much to choose from, but North Korea has almost disappeared from the news since the Democrats, and the left in general, have nothing constructive to add to the conversation, which is why the media have dropped this as a story. So let me focus here.

In particular, and in detail, Trump called out the rogue states of North Korea and Iran. He did not follow a script of pollysyllabic diplomatic enumerations of unacceptable activities. He reminded the UN members of Pyongyang’s “deadly abuse” of American student Otto Warmbier. He talked about North Korea’s kidnapping of a Japanese 13-year-old girl “to enslave her as a language tutor for North Korea’s spies.” And he cited “the assassination of the dictator’s brother using banned nerve agents in an international airport.”

He caused a stir, and inspired plenty of headlines, with his comments:

“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”

That’s not bombast. That’s a pointed and useful warning to a totalitarian tyrant, who in contravention of nine UN sanctions resolutions and all basic decency has been threatening preemptive nuclear strikes on the U.S. and its allies, advertising the testing of hydrogen bombs and shooting intercontinental ballistic missiles over Japan. Let’s hope Kim Jong Un takes it seriously, despite decades of U.S. compromise and retreat that led to this pass.

As for the derision implicit in the label “Rocket Man,” I’d say that Trump in describing the murderous despot of North Korea displayed a distinct delicacy simply by avoiding the use of raw profanity from the UN podium. Would it have been better to deferentially describe Kim as the supreme leader of North Korea? Mockery has its uses in facing down despots. The confrontation here is of North Korea’s making — and the dangers have grown all the worse over the years for such nonconfrontational approaches as the nuclear deals of Presidents Bush and Clinton, and the do-nothing “strategic patience” of President Obama.

And I don’t wish to leave out this which will be quoted far into the future:

“The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented. From the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela, wherever true socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish and devastation and failure.”

How long has it been since we have heard any political leader say things like that, never mind an American president? Our enemies are not only our worst enemies, they are their own worst enemies but are too ignorant even to know that.

God is the one thing they hate the most

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A few excerpts from Orwellian Nice Guys that resonated with me.

My friends, I’m not much of a theologian. I have my faith in God, but I struggle with it as any man might. One truth, however, I believe in totally and absolutely. Our world is a fallen world. While it is full of good things, good people, and pleasant times, such are always bounded by suffering, evil tyrants, and pain. There will be no utopia of man. Protesters out in the streets holding their signs “love wins” are delusional fools, or worse. Only God could ever make such a thing come to pass, and God is the one thing they hate the most. . . .

I don’t care what social “scientists” say about the falseness of free will. They will tell us all day that free will doesn’t exist; that choice is an illusion, that all is predetermined in probabilistic or even fatalistic fashion. We are passengers in our bodies, mere observers. No. I don’t believe this. Even if their data was true, even if every experiment they’ve conducted was accurate, they are making an assumption as to the nature of man. They assume that the flesh is all there is, and all that ever will be. That no part of us is greater; that there is no divine. . . .

Do you know why I believe the free market is superior to a command economy? Because in a command economy, those doing the commanding think they have all the answers, and they damn well don’t. In a capitalist economy, it’s every man trying to figure out his own little corner of things, trying and often failing. Some eventually figure out what people want, what they need, and deliver it. It’s trial and error as much as anything, but that’s a branch of human knowledge that is given too little attention those days. . . .

Competitive victimization is now a thing, where people compete for social status by claiming they’ve suffered more than another. People in First World countries who do this need to be committed. While some RadFem is complaining that a man whistled at her on the subway, people die in job lots all over the world. Slavery proliferates. War rages on. Genocide is a fact of life for millions.

It is proof that such people can never be made happy. Even at the pinnacle of technological society, in the richest, most peaceful places in all of human history, they complain about perceived imperfections because even still, their utopia is not here. And idiots everywhere cater to their delusional fantasies in an effort to be seen as nice. In so doing, they are throwing away everything our forebears labored, fought, and died to create for us. Look at Venezuela for a glimpse at the future that might await us, should they hold on to the levers of culture, media, and political power. . . .

One thing I know is true: since we live in a fallen world, the idea that we can nice-guy our way out of every problem is a category error. It cannot be. Anyone who demands this of us is either a tyrant, or one of their stooges, and deserves our contempt.

Is there a bigger pack of fools anywhere on the planet?

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And here I am referring to virtually the whole of the entertainment industry.

Television’s glittering Emmys placed politics front and center on Sunday, lavishing “The Handmaid’s Tale” with awards for its bleak portrait of an authoritarian America.

The glitzy ceremony in downtown Los Angeles — the first under the administration of President Donald Trump — was widely expected to have a strongly political flavor, and host Stephen Colbert set the tone in his opening monologue.

“However you feel about the president, and you do feel about the president, you can’t deny that every show was influenced by Donald Trump in some way,” he said.

“All the late night shows, obviously, ‘House of Cards,’ the new season of ‘American Horror Story.'”

Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and HBO miniseries “Big Little Lies” were the big winners, with five statuettes each.

“Big Little Lies” cast members Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern and Alexander Skarsgard all took home Emmys, along with director Jean-Marc Vallee. It also won outstanding limited series.

“The Handmaid’s Tale,” Hulu’s acclaimed series based on the 1985 novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, won awards for writing and directing as well as the biggest prize of the night — outstanding drama series.

Ann Dowd, picking up her first Emmy at age 61 for her portrayal of brutal instructor Aunt Lydia, spoke of how her award was “a dream” while outstanding lead actress Elisabeth Moss turned the air blue with an expletive-strewn acceptance speech.

“That was the clean version,” Moss joked backstage after the show, describing the opportunity

“I was just trying to remember everybody, and you do have a weird out of body experience.”

Atwood, 77, said “One takeaway would be ‘never believe it can never happen here’ which was one of the premises that I used for the book. And, as I’ve often said, nothing went into the book that people hadn’t done.”

As it happens, I read The Handmaid’s Tale when it came out and was astonished by how moronic it was. I used to read everything she wrote since we are almost of the same generation, both from Toronto and we used to catch up occasionally when we were living in Vancouver back in my hippy day in the 70s. If you liked the book and then the show, you are now officially classified as dull witted, stupid, and fantastically ignorant of everything that matters. It was, in fact, the last thing of hers I ever read so have been free of her idiocies for more than two decades. How do people take such things seriously?

Coming out conservative

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It’s actually a quite to the left video since she accepts the left on every issue but the economy. I suppose you have to start somewhere.

Let me match that with something from Steve Hayward discussing a presentation he had made at Berkley!

although I identified myself proudly to the audience as a Fox News-watching, certified card-carrying member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, the most hostile questions from the audience were not directed at me, but rather at the new Chancellor, Carol Christ, who is an old-fashioned John Stuart Mill-quoting liberal. Just as in the 1960s, the far left hates liberals more than conservatives.

And JSM-quoting liberals are the worst, bless them.

Everything is amazing right now but nobody’s happy

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There seems to be as much fun in destruction as in creating, maybe more.

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

“This is known as “bad luck.”

Robert A. Heinlein

On the Ball

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Tim Ball, that is. Dr. Tim Ball Crushes Climate Change: The Biggest Deception In History. From which:

The Club of Rome (COR), formed in 1968, decided that the world was overpopulated and expanded the Malthusian idea that the population would outgrow the food supply to all resources, especially the developed nations. COR member Maurice Strong told Elaine Dewar in her book Cloak of Green that the problem for the planet were the industrialized nations and it was everybody’s duty to shut them down. Dewar asked Strong if he planned to seek political office. He effectively said you cannot do anything as a politician, so he was going to the UN because:

He could raise his own money from whomever he liked, appoint anyone he wanted, control the agenda.

After five days with him at the UN she concluded:

Strong was using the U.N. as a platform to sell a global environment crisis and the Global Governance Agenda.

He created the crisis that the by-product of industry was causing global warming. Even Obama claimed that 97 percent of scientists agree. If he checked the source of the information, he would find the research was completely concocted. It is more likely that 97 percent of scientists never read the IPCC Reports. Those who do express their concern in very blunt terms.

And those who don’t put on black ski masks and club other people in the streets.

A marriage of convenience

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Via Andrew Bolt: Same-sex marriage: Why have Muslims been so quiet in the debate? I find the following both plausible and sensible:

Last night on ABC’s The Drum, Ali Kadri, spokesman for the Islamic Council of Queensland and the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, said his community was stuck with the choice of offending allies or siding with critics, and the result had been silence.

“Unfortunately, in the current climate, the right and conservative side has attacked Muslims as terrorists and extremists, and naturally the left side has been allies in defending us for a long period of time,” he said.

“We are afraid if we come out with our opinion then the left may abandon us for going against their view and we can’t be friendly with the conservatives because they have been bashing us for 15, 20 years every chance they get … and that includes some Christian sects as well.”

This, on the other hand I also find plausible, but borderline insanity: ‘Sharia’s no different to Catholicism’: Ex-human rights commissioner Gillian Triggs says Sharia law courts SHOULD be allowed in Australia – just as the Vatican already influences everyday life. You need to read it all but here’s a taste.

Professor Triggs also said Sharia divorce courts should be allowed in Australia, under a system where a Muslim man can leave his wife by saying ‘I divorce you’ three times and a woman’s word is worth less than a man’s.

‘If it’s a matter of private law within the Muslim community and they want to manage their affairs in that way, and they believe in those rules, that’s reasonably acceptable,’ she said.

But whatever you may think about her views, it is why the Muslim community votes Labor. This is how the left wins when it wins. No principle of any kind but a coalition of identity groups with nothing in common other than their wish for political power and public money.

The new new left is even stupider than the old new left

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An article you might wish to read THE OLD NEW LEFT AND THE NEW NEW LEFT in a journal you might like to subscribe to: The Claremont Review of Books. Starts wtth the right question:

Will the ’60s ever end? Ever since the ’60s we’ve been debating the ’60s. With the recent bursts of rioting and student activism at Berkeley, Yale, Middlebury, Claremont McKenna, and across the country, even today’s millennials and post-millennials (Generation Z, as they’re called, perched on the very alphabetic cliff) find themselves drafted into nostalgic comparisons with their grandparents’ generation.

My generation, that is. An unusually stupid but arrogant crew that thought itself superior because it rightly fought for equal rights in the American south but wrongly because it fought on the side of the Vietnamese communists and helped deliver the country to a tyranny that is only now being lifted. A very interesting historical summary that can only truly be understood by someone who was there but has completely changed sides.