There is an unfortunate shortage of Cynicism among the young nowadays. Their idealistic conceptions of “social justice” make them automatic suckers for every “cause” that comes along, e.g.:
Further proof of the BLM movement’s essential bogusness was the fact that, once Joe Biden was installed as president, the protests ended. Black suspects are still getting shot by cops, but the national news media has ceased covering these incidents, because that was never really what it was about. It was about electing Democrats, period, and having succeeded at that goal, the media has moved on from BLM.
“Demand Justice for [Fill-in-the-Blank]” memes are now gathering dust back in the Instagram archives of liberals too stupid to wonder what the 2020 season of “activism” was really about. Never once has a liberal asked the cynical question, “Cui bono?” Who benefited from all that “activism”? Whose interests were served? Who got rich from those months of media-fueled outrage?
Have you heard of Linzell Parhm? He got shot to death by cops in Fort Wayne, Indiana, last month. Linzell’s family has retained the services of Ben Crump, whose legal practice seems to consist primarily of shaking down municipalities for “wrongful death” settlements. It isn’t clear that Linzell’s death was “wrongful,” considering that he had an AK-47-style Draco next to him in the car and the cop ordered him at gunpoint, “Keep your hands on the f—ing dash. If you reach down there again I will shoot you, motherf—er.” I don’t know about you, but if a cop drew his pistol and told me to keep my hands “on the f—ing dash,” my hands would be on the f—ing dash. Apparently this wasn’t how Linzell Parhm was taught to react to such situations, but he’s not here to argue in defense of his own approach to the situation, is he? But I digress . . .
My point is that Fort Wayne hasn’t been burnt to the ground, and nobody’s rioting over the death of Linzell Parhm, despite the fact that he’s just as dead as St. George of the Blessed Fentanyl. All that “social justice” uproar in 2020 was about one thing and one thing only, electing Joe Biden, and his campaign strategists apparently don’t think having nationwide race riots this summer would advance their chances of getting Biden reelected, so major national news organizations don’t give a damn about some idiot getting himself shot by the Fort Wayne PD.
In fact, to get back to Professor Reynold’s point about cynicism, I rather doubt that anybody in the media ever gave a damn about George Floyd. All they cared about was helping Democrats win an election, which is why they incited those “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots.
Merriam-Webster defines cynic as “one who believes that human conduct is motivated wholly by self-interest,” which strikes me as rather too narrow a definition. More generally, cynicism is about doubting those who claim to act from purely altruistic motives. Cynicism is about not being a chump. If you think the “journalists” at CNN are motivated by a noble desire to “speak truth to power,” blah blah blah, then you are the kind of sucker who never deserves an even break.
Do you believe Jake Tapper and Jim Acosta are better people — more virtuous, more honest, more intelligent — than you are? Are you morally and intellectually inferior to them? Then why would you content yourself to be tutored by them, to have them lecture you about “democracy,” as if you were an ignorant fifth-grader? It’s not just that they are “Democratic operatives with bylines” (although they definitely are that), but rather that they think the rest of us are too stupid to see through their scam, and I don’t know about you, but I take kindly to such insults.
By the way, do you know Antithenes is? Did seeing him at the top of this post arouse your curiosity to such an extent that you Googled his name to discover that this disciple of Socrates is regarded as the founder of Cynicism as a philosophy? In just a few minutes of reading, I learned more about Antithenes and Cynicism than 99% of people know, because fewer than 1% of people give a damn about ancient philosophers and their arguments. The reason I acquired this half-hour’s worth of expertise on the subject is because if I’m going to write about something, I certainly don’t want to write something wrong about it. Wikipedia says that the original Cynics “rejected all conventional desires for wealth, power, glory, social recognition, conformity, and worldly possessions and even flouted such conventions openly and derisively in public.” So, in its original meaning, a Cynic was a sort of ascetic non-conformist who rejected common social values. Elsewhere, Wikipedia tells us, the contemporary meaning of cynicism — “an attitude characterized by a general distrust of the motives of others” — arose in the 1800s from an “emphasis on the ascetic ideals” that led to a critique of contemporary society as falling short of such ideals. So now you know as much as I know on the subject which, as previously mentioned, makes you more knowledgeable than 99% of people, probably including Jake Tapper and Jim Acosta.
Am I a philanthropist, with a mission to enlighten humanity? No, I’m just a guy who doesn’t want to look stupid by writing something wrong, because that would damage my credibility, which is my stock in trade. Having disavowed any unselfish motive for my own actions, why should I imagine that other people are more altruistic than me?
Ben — like me and so many others — grew up believing in the story of Matthew Shepard and what his murder meant about America. Or at least certain parts of the country.
But then, a few years ago, Ben heard another narrative. It caused him to wonder: Was the story we heard true?
My first reaction to this confession that Weiss and Kawaller “grew up believing” in the media-manufactured myth of Matthew Shepard as a martyr for gay rights was, “Wow, I’m old.” Because I was an adult — a 39-year-old assistant nation editor at The Washington Times — at the time of Shepard’s murder and, to be honest, 1998 doesn’t seem like ancient history to me. So the idea that there are now adult journalists who “grew up” during that time I so well remember — well, it makes me feel like an antique. But I never bought the martyr-myth of Matthew Shepard.
Amid the media hysteria over the case, I was reading everything that came across the wires and it seemed to me that what had happened was something akin to the central story of In Cold Blood, namely that two small-time criminals had upped their game to murder and thereby managed to commit a murder that became a nationally known atrocity. It wasn’t the police saying that Shepard’s killers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, were motivated by homophobia; that interpretation was being imposed on the story by activists, media and politicians. McKinney and Henderson had prior arrests for drugs and burglary; this college kid from back East made the mistake of getting mixed up with these local hoodlums, and that was basically the story.
About a year after the murder, a liberal writer named JoAnn Wypijewski wrote an article about the case that included details which, if you were reading carefully, seemed to undercut the “hate crime” motif. Wypijewski reported, for example, that McKinney and Henderson were on a five-day meth binge at the time of the murder. Try hanging around meth-heads in the midst of a binge, and you could get murdered, too. Unfortunately, that article seemed not to make a dent in the martyr-myth of Matthew Shepard, which had sprung up more or less instantaneously in October 1998. It was not until 2013 that Stephen Jimenez published a book debunking the “hate crime” angle (see, “The Sorelian Myth of Matthew Shepard: Petty Criminals and Liberal Media Bias,” Sept. 25, 2013):
By making people believe in politically crafted falsehoods, media propagandists seek to inspire action — “to make a difference” — and so the record of the media’s past failures (Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, Dan Rather, et al.) is carefully suppressed.
The one thing the news media will never do is to confess their own lack of credibility, to expose their own errors and biases. So when it turns out that what the media promoted as an anti-gay “hate crime” was, in fact, the act of two petty criminals in the throes of a five-day meth binge, this is a truth that the media will ignore, because it is a truth that exposes the media itself as untrustworthy.
We need more cynicism in America, not less. And however much you hate the media, you don’t hate them as much they deserve to be hated.
“Substack’s leaders … proudly disdain the content-moderation methods that other platforms employ … to limit the spread of racist or bigoted speech. An informal search of the Substack website … turns up scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack—many of them apparently started in the past year. These are, to be sure, a tiny fraction of the newsletters … But to overlook white-nationalist newsletters on Substack as marginal or harmless would be a mistake.” . . .
We’re living in a 21st-century Salem, and the folks who want to hang witches all claim to be “progressive.” Basically anybody who votes Republican nowadays is suspected of witchcraft — “white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi”! — and whatever actual danger there may be from such extremism is obscured by the hysterical paranoia of self-appointed witch-hunters like Casey Newton.
If everybody is a Nazi, nobody is Nazi. If you start exaggerating the extent of extremism by expanding the definition to include anyone you disagree with, don’t pretend that your diminished credibility is anyone’s fault but your own. . . .
You can and should read the whole thing, which is 3,600 words long, but I figured if I was going to introduce myself to a new readership, the introduction should be thorough. By the way, I start out by explaining why my Substack newsletter is not yet monetized, so you can sign up for free, which I urge you to do, because eventually maybe it will be about more than nothing, and therefore worth paying to read.
One of the longstanding arguments in fantasy tabletop roleplaying is the actual worth of chainmail bikinis. Are they actually useful in combat, or just there to provide eye candy? Perhaps the most famous example is the armor of Robert E. Howard’s sword-swinging heroine Red Sonja, which adorns hundreds of comic book and paperback covers. On the other hand, we have more “realistic” armor, here depicted on Barghest from Fate/Grand Order (yes, her boobs are actually that big under the armor) and some home-made scale armor from that_girl_with_the_hearse on Instagram. Here we have a young lady checking her gear before heading out for a day in the woods terrorizing the goblins and kobolds. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
A tough week for my Senators, who lost two of three to Pete’s Brewers and then did the same against the Giants. Yeah, some of them were close losses, but an L is an L, and nobody cares about the point spread except the bookies. We’re still in fourth place at 41-49, just two games ahead of the cellar-dwelling A’s and five behind the Twins. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
Democrats are caught in a trap. They can’t walk out. As much as they may want to dump Joe Biden, there are a few problems — perhaps insurmountable problems — with any scenario to replace him:
“We are monitoring the calls from across the country for President Biden to step aside, either now or before the election, and have concluded that the process for substitution and withdrawal is very complicated. We will remain vigilant that appropriate election integrity procedures are followed,” said Mike Howell, Executive Director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.
The Heritage Oversight Project has identified three swing states — Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin — where they believe removing Biden from the Democratic ticket would prevent anyone else from replacing him.
Wisconsin does not allow withdrawal from the ballot for any reason besides death, while in Nevada, no changes can be made to the ballot after 5 p.m. on the fourth Friday in June of an election year unless ‘a nominee dies or is adjudicated insane or mentally incompetent.’ In Georgia, if Biden were to withdraw less than 60 days before the election, his name would remain on the ballot but no votes would be counted.
So, even if the Powers That Be in the Democratic Party were able to persuade Joe (and Dr. Jill) that it’s best for him to step aside, and even if an “open convention” in Chicago were able to agree on some replacement candidate, the attempt to put the replacement candidate’s name on the ballot would be contested in court in multiple states. Not to mention the dreadful optics of such a move:
Kinda funny to watch the "Trump is a threat to Democracy" crowd openly strategize how to thwart the will of every Democrat who voted in the primaries by engineering a coup at the convention and placing a candidate on the ticket without a single person casting a vote.
All those votes for Joe Biden in the Democratic primaries would be negated — treated as null and void, “the will of the people” rendered moot — by a move to replace him as the nominee, and how could Democrats then argue that it is Trump who is the “threat to democracy”?
So the mortification Democrats experienced on Thursday night, watching Biden stumble and mumble his way through the debate — a debate that Team Biden had arranged, according to their own rules, at an early date with their choice of network — cannot be cured. They’re stuck with Joe now, and will have to suffer the consequences. It’s beautiful, really.
If Biden drops out, it's Kamala or bust for Democrats. Anybody suggesting otherwise is engaging in pure fantasy https://t.co/1Lgz69NyD7
A sense of concern is growing inside the top ranks of the Democratic Party that leaders of Joe Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee are not taking seriously enough the impact of the president’s troubling debate performance earlier in the week.
DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison and Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez held a Saturday afternoon call with dozens of committee members across the country, a group of some of the most influential members of the party. They largely ignored Biden’s weak showing Thursday night or the avalanche of criticism that followed.
Multiple committee members on the call, most granted anonymity to talk about the private discussion, described feeling like they were being gaslighted — that they were being asked to ignore the dire nature of the party’s predicament. The call, they said, may have worsened a widespread sense of panic among elected officials, donors and other stakeholders.
Instead, the people said, Harrison offered what they described as a rosy assessment of Biden’s path forward. The chat function was disabled and there were no questions allowed.
“I was hoping for more of a substantive conversation instead of, ‘Hey, let’s go out there and just be cheerleaders,’ without actually addressing a very serious issue that unfolded on American television for millions of people to see,” said Joe Salazar, an elected DNC member from Colorado, who was on the call. “There were a number of things that could have been said in addressing the situation. But we didn’t get that. We were being gaslit.”
Four females ages 17 to 21 were kidnapped in Pennsylvania, held captive in a shipping container in Monroe County, where two of them were raped in a crime that shocked residents of the Poconos region in the hill country near the New York state line. The victims were rescued by police in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Mount Pocono, after having been kidnapped in Wilkes-Barre (about 40 miles away) where the victims reportedly were witnesses to a shooting. During their ordeal, the victims were first transported to a building (which had once housed a Salvation Army center) that one of the accused kidnappers owns in Pen Argyl. From there, the victims were reportedly taken to a “remote property” that one of the kidnappers owns in Smithfield Township, about 15 miles from Pen Argyl. It was at the Smithfield Township property that the victims were held in a shipping container and two of them were raped.
Strange to say, this crime has apparently gotten zero attention from feminists, who have made violence against women a subject of their activism for more than three decades. Likewise, we have heard nothing from the White House about this horrific crime, despite the fact that President Joe Biden frequently touts his credentials on the issue, as in this March 2022 press release:
This week, President Biden signed into law the Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act of 2022, bipartisan legislation passed by Congress as part of the Omnibus appropriations package.
One of the driving forces of President Biden’s career has been fighting back against abuses of power. That force led him to write and champion the groundbreaking Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) as a U.S. Senator, landmark legislation that first passed in 1994. In the nearly three decades since, he has worked with Members of Congress from both parties to pass legislation to renew and strengthen VAWA three times: in 2000, 2005, and 2013. Each time, he worked to expand access to safety and support for all survivors and increase prevention efforts. Preventing and responding to gender-based violence wherever it occurs, and in all of its forms, has remained a cornerstone of the President’s career in public service . . .
Yes, we must “increase prevention efforts” to stop “gender-based violence wherever it occurs,” as the president says! We can therefore expect him to demand that the Department of Justice assist with the investigation and prosecution of the suspects in this crime. That presidential call for action should be forthcoming any minute now, right?
From ABC News: “Authorities have charged Davaun Carlon Jackson, 29, with a slew of charges, including kidnapping, rape, and other offenses. The second suspect, Isaiah Rogers-Keeney, 19, is also being charged as an accomplice.” Having read several news stories about this case, many details are confusing or mysterious, with different stories reporting the case differently. It seemed obvious to me that this probably wasn’t Jackson’s first crime, and research turned up a listing in a local weekly paper from November 2016: “Davaun Carlon Jackson, 21, of Tobyhanna – charged with retail theft, receiving stolen property and criminal attempt of theft by deception.” When I mentioned this to my brother Kirby, who is familiar with the area from his years as a long-haul trucker, he told me there was an Army facility in the area. This is Tobyhanna Army Depot which, with more than 3,000 employees, is “the largest employer in northeastern Pennsylvania.” It is logical to surmise that Davaun Jackson had some connection to this facility, either having been stationed there in the military, or working as a civilian employee, or possibly having family members working there.
“They’d be in there working late at night. We’ve called the police several times because of the noise,” said the man. “In the morning, the kids sit on that steps over there to get the school bus, and there’s a lot of kids. So we were concerned because this guy seemed a little shady.”
He said there was even an incident with a young woman in distress running away from the property last winter.
“She was barefoot, knocking on doors, and nobody would let her in, but they did call the cops, and I guess by the time the cops got here, she was gone,” said the man.
The borough sent us a statement, saying police have investigated the complaints about the building.
Is this “incident” last winter with a barefoot woman fleeing the building owned by Jackson somehow related to what happened recently with the kidnapped women? We don’t know, although again I think it is logical to surmise some kind of connection between these two incidents.
This crime spans three counties in Pennsylvania — Pen Argyl is in Northampton County, while Smithfield Township is in Monroe County and Wilkes-Barre is in Luzerne County — and one would hope that state officials are coordinating the investigation involving so many jurisdictions. Monroe County District Attorney Michael Mancuso offers even more interesting information about this case:
Mancuso said his office has actually been following Jackson for some time. “There has been an investigation that has involved him over the course of the last several months,” said Mancuso.
Jackson is facing 14 charges, and Rogers-Keeney is facing 23 charges. Both include kidnapping, sexual assault, and false imprisonment, but Mancuso said they could face more charges in the future.
“We needed to make the charges that we thought were most appropriate now, but everything’s on the table,” said Mancuso.
Feminists must be following the case closely, right?
Usual weekend deadlines for the usual weekend posts. Anime Girl Propaganda is having a sale this weekend before the proprietor goes off to Basic Training. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
