A MIDWEEK BOOK POST APPEARS!

Posted on | June 16, 2022 | Comments Off on A MIDWEEK BOOK POST APPEARS!

Anya about to punch a kid out.

Usually I do these on the weekend, because the workdays are usually full of other things that need doing, but Hans Schantz is hosting a humongous book sale on behalf of writers who are actually on our side in the Culture War. So stop giving money to people who hate you and instead support authors who are doing something about the culture. Every book listed is 99 cents or free, and there are some big names involved like Larry Correia, David Drake, Tom Kratman, David Weber, and John C. Wright. Also some newer talents like yours truly, whose short story collection The Anti-Dog Tank & Other Stories can be found in the New Additions section of the sale for just 99 cents.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

Well, after seeing all kinds of memes about the Forger family, I went and picked up the first three volumes of Spy x Family, and it was well worth it. Loid Forger is a superspy for what’s obviously West Germany, his new bride Yor is an elite assassin, and his daughter Anya can read minds. Of course, Loid doesn’t realize that Anya can read minds or that Yor is an assassin; Yor doesn’t realize she’s married a super spy or that her daughter is psychic – but Anya, of course, knows EVERYTHING. Fortunately, she’s fascinated by spy stuff (her favorite TV show is about spies) and terrified that she’ll be dumped back into the orphanage Loid found her in, so she’s doing her best to make Mom & Dad happy. This is a hilarious blend of family comedy and espionage novel, as if Lucy & Ricky Ricardo were playing he lead roles in the James Bond movies. Highly recommended.

I’ve been fascinated by the story of the Czech Legion ever since I was a young wargamer and they made a destructive appearance in SPI’s Russian Civil War, but it was hard to find any English-language books about them, as first the Nazis and then the Soviets did their best to memory-hole the history of the men who fought their way literally from one end of Russia to the other just so they could go home – with a brief stop in France to fight the Hun, of course. So when Dreams of a Great Small Nation came out, featuring a lot of source materials never seen before in English, I jumped right on it. Unfortunately, the book spends a lot more time on the politics of Czechoslovakia’s creation and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian & Russian Empires than it does on the actual Anabasis of the Czechs from European Russia through Siberia to Vladivostok, and I lost interest. If unlike me, you’re more interested in the political than the military history, this book may be for you; as for me, I think I’ll just go reread David Drake’s The Forlorn Hope.

Way back in the day when I was discovering science fiction and reading everything I could get my hands on, I came across Olaf Stapledon’s Last & First Men. This was a thick tome recounting the history of mankind into the far future, and directly inspired many British SF writers as well as Freeman Dyson, who says that Dyson spheres should be more properly referred to as Stapledon spheres…anyway, John C. Wright has gone Stapledon not just one better, but far beyond that with the series that begins with Count To A Trillion. The Eschaton Sequence follows the adventures of Menelaus Montrose, gunslinger & mathematical genius who plays a stupendously outsized role in the future of humanity, pitting himself against his archrival Ximen “Blackie” Del Azarchel and his fellow Hermeticists in an aeons-long battle to determine whether humanity will be free, exist as slaves to the aliens from the Hyades, or be exterminated. I started reading this series years ago when I lived in Virginia, and only recently had the time to follow up on the last three books of the series, which comes to a final, cataclysmic battle between Montrose and Del Azarchel for not just the fate of humanity, but the universe itself in Count To Infinity. Highly recommended.

Remember, your purchases through the Amazon links here and your contributions to my tip jar help me afford the purchase of new (and occasionally used) books to include in these posts. Thanks in advance!

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Category: Books

In The Mailbox: 06.15.22 (Evening Edition)

Posted on | June 15, 2022 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 06.15.22 (Evening Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #1749
357 Magnum: No One Is Coming to Save You – The Lesson of Uvalde
EBL: Republican Mayra Flores Wins Special Election In Texas Democrat Stronghold, also, Joe Biden Drives America’s Economy Into A Recession
Twitchy: Vice – White Nationalists Trying To Reclaim Nature As Safe Space For Racism, also, Pelosi – Drag Queens’ Freedom Of Expression “Is What America Is All About”
Louder With Crowder: Joe Biden Would Rather Not Be Blamed For Gas Prices, But…
Vox Popoli: Fake Patriot Front, Clown World Makes You Stupid, and The March Of Technology
Stoic Observations: Gladwell’s Four Color Crime Drama Matrix

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Just Another Day With Pure Blood In My Veins
American Conservative: Biden Cracks Down On The Gig Economy, also, Unburnable Books & Jokers Not In On The Joke
American Greatness: Elon Musk Says He Voted For Flores, Leaning Toward DeSantis In 2024, also, Can Republicans Save The Middle Class?
American Power: Taylor Lorenz Hypocritically Sneers At Death Threats Received By “Libs Of TikTok”, also, The State Department’s Toxic Equity Agenda
American Thinker: Democrats’ Quest for Gun Control May Harm Blacks Worst Of All, also, Team Of Fools – Biden’s Cabinet Picks Prove He’s Unfit To Lead
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Nearly Half Of Cuba’s National Karate Team Defects In Guatemala, also, Cuban Slave Doctors In Mexico Reportedly Limited To “Making Beds And Conducting Surveys”
BattleSwarm: Republicans Flip Another Texas Hispanic House Seat
Behind The Black: Today’s Blacklisted Americans, ROK Postpones Second Test Launch of Nuri Rocket, and DNA Tests Suggest Kirghizstan Region Was Origin Of The Black Death
Cafe Hayek: Economic Lessons From “This Old House”
Chicago Boyz: Cloward Pivening
Da Tech Guy: Questions About The “Gun Control Deal” So Obvious They Shouldn’t Need To Be Asked, Frank Wills, The Hero Of Watergate, and The GOP Leadership Is Still Playing The Old Game
Don Surber: Worst Timing In The World, also, The Politics Of Kneeling
First Street Journal: Paying Cash For Crime Tips, also, Latina Republican Flips TX-34, NYT Aghast
Gates Of Vienna: Pakistani Culture-Enricher Abuses Ukrainian Refugee Kids, Ukrainian Refugees Disappointed With Their German Hosts, and German TV Circles The Behavioral Sink Drain
The Geller Report: Another Food Processing Plant Goes Up In Flames, also, Republican Maya Flores Beats Democrat In District Held By Democrats For Over 150 Years
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, Neptune’s Rings, and COVID Karma
Hollywood In Toto: Michelle Wolf – Anatomy Of Woke Comic Fail, also, Terror On The Prairie Brings The Old-School Western Roaring Back To Life
The Lid: AARP Supposedly Represents Seniors, But Who Do They REALLY Represent?
Legal Insurrection: Biden Recycles “Ultra-MAGA” Scare Tactics Over Social Security. Medicare, & Medicaid, Judge Rules Against Former UNL Lecturer Who Claimed School Violated Her Rights After She Harassed Conservative Student Group, and Biden’s Climate Czarina Wants Big Tech To Censor Climate-Related Debate
Michelle Malkin: What Really Happened To Justin Bieber?
Nebraska Energy Observer: Electric Vehicles & Flags
Outkick: WWE’s Vince MacMahon Under Investigation For Relationship With Former Employee, $3 Million In Hush Money, Even When The Games Matter NBA Finals Ratings Continue To Suck, and Floyd Mayweather Wants To Buy An NBA Team
Power Line: Celebrity Lefty Prof Busted For Plagiarism, How High The Wave? and Quote Of The Day
Shark Tank: Mills Wants Publishers Who Distribute Porn To Kids To Be Criminally Charged
Shot In The Dark: The New Brown Faces Of White Supremacy, Rationalization Du Jour, and Compare & Contrast
The Political Hat: European Parliament Of Madness
This Ain’t Hell: Airmen Cleared In Deaths Of Afghans Who Mobbed C-17 During Kabul Bugout, Biden’s Drink At The Tap Of Stolen Valor, and Female Soldier Yells At Other Soldiers Karen Style
Transterrestrial Musings: Solar Desalination, The Catastrophic DEF Shortage, and Nuclear Reactors
Victory Girls: Yes, Taking Your Kids To Pride Makes You A Bad Parent, also, Jane’s Revenge Plans More Attacks On Pro-Life Centers
Volokh Conspiracy: Supreme Court Decides Major Chevron Case Without Citing Chevron
Watts Up With That: Biden’s Energy Secretary – Buy An EV, Peasant! also, Shell Goes Full BP, Part Trois
Weasel Zippers: Labor Secretary Refuses To Say U.S. Money Shouldn’t Be Funding Red China’s Military, Mayor Eric Adams Not Worried About Losing 1500 NYPD Cops This Year, and Joe Biden Mocks The City Of Detroit
The Federalist: Backlash Against Soros’ Soft-On-Crime DAs Continues, Biden Asks Oil Companies To Lower Prices After Trying To Put Them Out Of Business, and Jack Del Rio Was Right About The George Floyd Riots, And He Paid For It
Mark Steyn: Lessons From A Won War, also, A Sham of A State

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Category: Linkagery

In The Mailbox: 06.15.22 (Afternoon Edition)

Posted on | June 15, 2022 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 06.15.22 (Afternoon Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Long and tiring day yesterday with lots of errands to run, and I just flat ran out of time to get the blogging done. Here’s the makeup for yesterday.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Constitutional Carry In Ohio
EBL: The Staircase
Twitchy: Washington Free Beacon Busts Biden & Ron Klain For Lying About Domestic Oil Production, also, Peak Tom Nichols Reached
Louder With Crowder: Elon Musk Gets Results, also, Reset The Clock – Biden Has Another Senile Meltdown
Vox Popoli: The Battle Of Ukraine Is Over, The Tragedy Of Suddenly, and Are You Really THAT Stupid?
Gab News: You Have An Enemy That Hates You – Do Not Ever Forget It

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The J6 Protesters Took Aim At The King & Missed
American Conservative: What Happens When The Third Rome Falls?, also, America Is Crippling Small Farmers
American Greatness: WH Says Biden Will Run For Reelection In 2024, also, The J6 Pilot Flopped
American Power: The Good White Man Roster, also, Why Aren’t Dems Dancing For Joy about Sky-High Gas Prices?
American Thinker: It’s Not About The AR-15, also, American Individualism Is Being Extinguished By The New “Elite”
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Alaska Politics News
Babalu Blog: Another Cuban Exile Suing Over Her Portrayal In The Wasp Network, also, Goodbye Chicken – Hello Shark Meat & Apples
BattleSwarm: Red China’s High Speed Rail Network Is A Trillion Dollar Debt Sinkhole, also, Bank Runs In Red China?
Behind The Black: Today’s Blacklisted American, Ingenuity Successfully Completes 29th Flight On Mars, and Momentus Concedes Vigoride Tug Probably Won’t Be Able To Deploy The Rest Of Its Smallsats
Cafe Hayek: Riding Social Security Off A Cliff, also, COVID Poses No Significant Risks To Children
CDR Salamander: There Must Be Consequences To European Security Freeriding
Da Tech Guy: Thoughts Under The Fedora, Why Nobody In The MSM Should Be Considered Credible, and Report From Louisiana – Our Service Sector Is Anemic
Don Surber: Democrat Leaders Are So Old The Call Boomers “Sonny”, Biden Proves Krugman “Right”, and Democrats Hope Gaytriotism Saves Them
First Street Journal: Pennsylvania Dems Always Double Down On Polices That Have Failed In The Past
Gates Of Vienna: Gypsies vs. Muslims – Who Will Win?, The Bloom Is Off The Ukrainian Rose, and “Wake Up Before It’s Too Late”
The Geller Report: Duval County (Fla.) Hosting Mega Ron DeSantis Boat Rally, also, $863 Million Of Biden’s Stimulus Payments Went To 597,000 Prison Inmates
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, Defects In Red Flag Laws, and A Bit Of ECON 101
Hollywood In Toto: Streisand Effect Supercharges 2000 Mules And What Is A Woman? also, Terror On The Prairie‘s Tyler Fischer Fought The System – And Won
The Lid: Border Patrol Officers Falsely Accused Of Whipping Will Still Face Discipline After Being Cleared
Legal Insurrection: Park Service Renames Yellowstone’s Mount Doane, California Regulations Helped Kill The Golden Pig, and Wholesale Prices Rise Almost 11%
Nebraska Energy Observer: America Rising, also, Waiting
Outkick: Brittney Griner’s Pre-Trial Detention In Russia Extended Again, The Reason Jack Del Rio Was Fined Has Now Changed, and You Won’t Believe What Auburn’s Catcher Said After Reaching Omaha
Power Line: Someone’s Bear Market, Maybe It Was Something We Taxed?, and Democrats Want To Ban Telling The Truth
Shark Tank: Miami-Dade GOP Chair Denounces Proud Boys Accusations
Shot In The Dark: Wrong About Rights, Great Look!, and Lesko Warranty
STUMP: Childhood Mortality Trends, 1999-2021
The Political Hat: Nevada Primary – End Of Early Voting, also, Happy Flag Day!
This Ain’t Hell: Growing Pressure To Enforce Law Prohibiting Pickets At Justices’ Homes, Fake NBA Star Banned For Life, and Happy Birthday, U.S. Army!
Transterrestrial Musings: Fusion, How Much Would It Cost To Live In Space? and Good News From Boca Chica?
Victory Girls: Is Occasional Cortex Thinking Of Running For President In 2024? also, Twitter Wants To Purge “Libs Of TikTok”
Volokh Conspiracy: Recent Books On The Constitution
Watts Up With That: Biden’s Virtue-Signaling & The Costs Of Climate Policy, also, Australia’s Greenest Voters Plunged Into Darkness
Weasel Zippers: Chevron CEO Says There May Never Be Another Refinery Built In The U.S., Biden Adviser McCarthy – Content Critical Of Green Energy “Transition” Must Be Censored, and Squad Members Say US Will Descend Into Civil War If GOP Wins Midterms
The Federalist: McConnell & Others Who Attack The Second Amendment Can’t Be In GOP Leadership, Twitter Repeatedly Claims “Error” To Disguise Deliberate Censorship Of Conservatives, and Parents Are Profiting From Child Abuse And Fox News Is Helping
Mark Steyn: Over The Rainbow, Happy Birthday To GB News! and Islamic Movie Night!

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Category: Linkagery

The J6 Smear Machine

Posted on | June 15, 2022 | 2 Comments

“A show trial is a mock or make-believe trial in which the guilt of the party is predetermined. The trial is just a form of theater. Lenin called them ‘model trials.’ The aim was not to discover the truth — which was supposedly already known — but to stage a propaganda exhibition.”
— Roger Kimball

What does Kimberly Guilfoyle’s speaking fee have to do with the alleged “threat to democracy” that the House Select Committee claims to be investigating? Nothing, so far as I can tell, and yet there’s the headline in the Washington Post (“Publix heiress paid Kimberly Guilfoyle’s $60,000 speaking fee on Jan. 6”) at the top of Memeorandum. An acquaintance who was subpoenaed by the J6 Committee described their requests for texts and emails as a “fishing expedition,” making broad categorical requests for communications in the apparent hope of finding something useful to embarrass or discredit either the subject of the subpoena or some other target of the investigation. Like the revelation of Guilfoyle’s speaking fee, these “fishing expedition” subpoenas show that the committee isn’t seeking to prove any actual crimes, but rather seeks more generally to smear Republicans. In terms of what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, this isn’t such a mystery that a congressional investigation is necessary. Most of us (by which I mean, people who pay attention to politics) watched the thing happen live, in real-time, streaming on video and social media. Yet the committee hearings — which so many people have compared to Soviet-era “show trials” — continue to generate headlines as if Benny Thompson and his comrades were actually making newsworthy discoveries.

In true Stalinist fashion, these hearings are utterly one-sided. All of the witnesses appearing live before the committee — e.g., the bloated has-been Chris Stirewalt — have been hand-picked to give testimony reinforcing the foregone conclusion that (a) there was no reason to doubt the result of the 2020 election and therefore (b) the protest against certification of the Electoral College vote was inherently illegitimate, a seditious “insurrection.” There is no cross-examination of these witnesses, no one at the hearings who represents the opposing viewpoint. Most importantly, there is no ranking Republican member of the committee. Nancy Pelosi rejected House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy’s choices for the committee, instead appointing anti-Trump Republicans of her own choosing, so that the composition of the Select Committee’s membership is a violation of House rules. “Norms, restored.”

At no time during the Select Committee’s proceedings is anyone going to mention why so many Republicans believed (and most GOP voters still believe) that Biden didn’t actually win the election. The election was effectively decided by the results in three states (Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin) with a combined 37 Electoral College votes (EV) in which Biden’s reported margin of victory was less than 1% of the total:

Georgia (16 EV)
Biden ….. 2,473,633 (49.5%)
Trump …. 2,461,854 (49.2%)
Margin …. 11,779 (0.236%)

Arizona (11 EV)
Biden ….. 1,672,143 (49.4%)
Trump …. 1,661,686 (49.1%)
Margin …. 10,457 (0.309%)

Wisconsin (10 EV)
Biden ….. 1,630,866 (49.5%)
Trump …. 1,610,184 (48.8%)
Margin …. 20,682 (0.627%)

Switch those 37 Electoral College votes from Biden to Trump, and the result would have been an Electoral College tie — 269 EVs for each. So about 43,000 votes in three states actually made the difference. It furthermore bears pointing out that Biden’s margin in two other states (Pennsylvania and Nevada) was also rather slender:

Pennsylvania (20 EV)
Biden ….. 3,458,229 (50.1%)
Trump …. 3,377,674 (48.8%)
Margin …. 80,555 (1.165%)

Nevada (6 EV)
Biden ….. 703,486 (50.1%)
Trump …. 669,890 (47.7%)
Margin …. 33,596 (2.391%)

Now, while the numerical margin was larger in Pennsylvania, it was statistically closer, percentage-wise, than Nevada. And in both states, Republicans were suspicious of “shenanigans” in major Democrat-controlled cities. Pennsylvania Republicans pointed to Philadelphia, where Joe Biden got more than 600,000 votes, while Nevada Republicans pointed to Clark County (Las Vegas) where Biden got more than 500,000 votes. As to exactly how such “shenanigans” happened, some of my friends who are obsessed with the topic could lecture you for hours on the details, but the subject bores me to tears, and I’ll just summarize my general impression that this involved “ballot harvesting” of the mail-in ballots which were mandated as an emergency COVID-19 measure. My point is not to argue about such details, but rather to say that it’s not really a far-fetched “conspiracy theory” to suspect that the 2020 election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. Far be it from me to claim it is proven as a fact that Democrats stole the election, but neither am I inclined to argue with anyone who believes it was stolen.

All of this is relevant to the J6 “Stop the Steal” rally which led to the so-called “insurrection” that Nancy Pelosi’s Select Committee claims to be investigating in this show trial. Tens of thousands of Trump supporters showed up for the rally at the Ellipse — peaceably assembling to express their grievances, just as the First Amendment says — in an effort to make it clear to Congress that they didn’t think Biden won the election, and thus hoping to prevent certification of the Electoral College vote. This was not illegal, nor was this protest manufactured by “Trump’s big lie,” as Democrats have insisted. That is to say, there were (and still are) millions of Republican voters who watched the returns on Election Night, gathering the impression that Trump was on the verge of winning re-election, only to wake up the next day and be told that Biden had won, and at that moment became instantly convinced they were the victims of a massive election fraud. They decided this on their own, independently of any claim made by Trump. So a central assumption of the J6 Committee investigation — i.e., that the crowd who gathered for the “Stop the Steal” rally were “manipulated” and “incited” by Trump — is flatly false. Those people didn’t need any incitement from anybody to be mad as hell about the election, and if a few hundred of them got so mad that they broke the law by knocking over police barricades and storming the Capitol — well, they were “mostly peaceful” protesters, eh?

The actual purpose of Nancy Pelosi’s J6 Committee is not to “investigate” what happened during the riot, since we all saw what happened with our own eyes, but rather to scapegoat and smear Republicans as part of the propaganda operation aimed at shifting votes in this fall’s midterm elections. They intend, furthermore, to intimidate anyone who might raise questions about the fairness of future close elections that Democrats win, and beyond that, to promote the impression that any Republicans who complain too much are potential “domestic terrorists.”

In September 1936 [Nikolai] Yezhov replaced [Genrikh] Yagoda as the head of the NKVD. More than any other police chief, Yezhov was prepared to indulge Stalin’s paranoic fantasies by fabricating evidence of ‘counter-revolutionary conspiracies’ and ‘spy rings’ everywhere. He had curried Stalin’s favour by uncovering the Kremlin Affair in 1935.
For several years, Yezhov had promoted the theory that, on Trotsky’s orders from abroad, Zinoviev and Kamenev had been plotting to murder Stalin and other members of the Party leadership, including Kirov. On this basis, Stalin reopened the Kirov investigation. In August 1936, Zinoviev, Kamenev and fourteen other Party leaders were put on trial for treason. All of them were sentenced to death, along with 160 other people arrested in connection with the trial.
This was the first of several ‘show trials’ during 1936-38. Their aim was to expose a coordinated ring of ‘spies’ and ‘terrorists’ organized by former oppositionists. It was not enough to convict and punish them: the aim of the show trials was to prove the existence of these ‘conspiracies’ beyond doubt by having the accused confess their guilt before the Party and the world (unaware of the torture used to extract their confession). In NKVD circles the confession was regarded as the highest form of proof. There was no other evidence.

The larger purpose of the “show trials” was to consolidate Stalin’s power by eliminating potential rivals while, at the same time, creating a justification for more repressive measures by the Communist dictatorship. And this was all helpful as a distraction from the increasingly obvious economic failures of the Soviet experiment. At the same time Zinoviev and other former Bolshevik leaders were being purged and subjected to “show trials,” the collectivization of Soviet agriculture was reaching the 90% level, and far from providing the bountiful harvest the Communists had promised, hunger was widespread. Millions had died in the Ukraine terror famine, and many tens of thousands of peasants had been executed or sentenced to prison labor camps — the population of the gulags was nearly 2 million by 1938.

Publicly punishing “enemies of the revolution” supplied Stalin with ready-made scapegoats for his regime’s failures. If the wheat harvest fell short, or if the meat ration was reduced, the conspiracy of Stalin’s enemies was to blame — hadn’t they confessed to counter-revolutionary actions, after all? A similar propaganda function is served by Pelosi’s J6 show trials. Demonizing the opposition in public spectacles serves not only to distract public attention from the economic failures of the Biden administration, it also serves to discourage dissenters from speaking out, since they can see what kind of punishment the Democrats are willing to mete out to their opponents. Comparing it to The Great Terror may be hyperbolic, but the fact is that Democrats are essentially totalitarian in believing that they deserve a monopoly on political power, and that opposition should be repressed. Their totalitarian beliefs are the inspiration for their totalitarian tactics. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Category: Congress, Democrats

‘Orange Man Bad!’ Trump Still Living Rent-Free in the Left’s Collective Head

Posted on | June 14, 2022 | 1 Comment

Linking to an article about internecine conflict in “progressive advocacy groups,” Glenn Reynolds notes the real source of their problem:

Woke white people are annoying, stupid, and frequently vicious. Fortunately they’re also usually self-destructive and incompetent. But ultimately, this is just Trump exercising a magical power to destroy his enemies via their own ideology:

Sooner or later, each interview for this story landed on the election of Trump in 2016 as a catalyst. Whatever internal tension had been pulling at the seams of organizations in the years prior, Trump’s shock victory sharpened the focus of activists and regular people alike. The institutional progressive world based in Washington, D.C., reacted slowly, shell-shocked and unsure of its place, but people outside those institutions raced ahead of them. A period of mourning turned into fierce determination to resist. Spontaneous women’s marches were called in scores of cities, drawing as many as 5 million people, a shocking display of force. (Their collapse in a heap of identitarian recriminations is its own parable for this moment.)

Indeed. Trump Derangement Syndrome exacerbated the worst tendencies of the worst people in politics. The RINOs and neocon grifters — e.g., Steve Schmidt — exposed themselves as cynical frauds who had never believed in anything except their own careerist ambitions. On the Left, the desperate panic of the #Resistance sent emotionally fragile people searching for saviors, thus creating opportunities for crooked hustlers like Michael Avenatti and Patrisse Cullors, to say nothing of the “cabal” that foisted President Joe Biden on the nation. The very worst people, motivated in various degrees by selfishness and paranoid fear — “Orange Man Bad!” — were to be found in the anti-Trump mobs. They deserve whatever misery they’ve created for themselves because, God knows, they’ve created enough misery for the rest of us.

Category: Economics

‘The NPR Tote Bag Set’: Liberal White Guys and Their Target Audience

Posted on | June 14, 2022 | Comments Off on ‘The NPR Tote Bag Set’: Liberal White Guys and Their Target Audience

One of the things about performative liberalism that must be understood is the desired audience for the performance. When those in the media — including people with large social-media followings — spend so much of their time virtue signalling and expressing concern about The Current Thing (e.g., Ukraine, J6, #MeToo), it raises the question, who is this for?

Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy distilled to its essence the psychological basis of liberalism, namely the belief of liberals that they are more enlightened than — morally and intellectually superior to — ordinary people. Once you recognize this as the emotional core of liberalism, everything they say or do makes a lot more sense. The “anointed” must continually demonstrate their superiority by advocating for causes and issues that contradict the values and beliefs of ordinary people. Although The Vision of the Anointed was written in the mid-1990s, and the examples Sowell uses to illustrate this tendency are some 25 years out of date, we still see the basic point confirmed daily, on issues ranging from violent crime to energy policy to transgenderism. On all these issues and more, the Anointed view the basic purpose of political engagement as creating opportunities to congratulate themselves for their manifest superiority.

These latter-day Pharisees are always righteous in their own eyes, and like to believe they are admired by others. This is why liberals are always attending annual events where they hand out awards to each other, to confirm their status as members of the Anointed elite. In fact, liberals will often take over otherwise non-political organizations and convert them to such purposes, which is why events like the Hugo Awards are now just a ceremonial celebration of liberal activism. You can’t get an award for science fiction writing unless you’re a liberal, in pretty much the same way that the Oscars and Emmy awards are just festivals of liberalism.

Life has gotten rough out lately there for one important segment of the Anointed. Because of the identity-politics madness that they’ve encouraged, white male liberals find themselves increasingly marginalized by their own movement, and their efforts to remain relevant are sometimes comically desperate, e.g., “Charlotte” Clymer.

Circa 2013, Charles Clymer was running “a rather successful feminist page on Facebook called Equality for Women” where, among other things, he presumed to lecture women who were doing feminism “wrong.” His “creepy” behavior attracted critical scrutiny:

Despite all this, Clymer desperately wants to be in the feminist spotlight. . . . He is expressing to you, he is demanding that you understand: Charles Clymer is dedicated to the cause of feminism and you and your magical vagina are going to believe him, like it or not.

Feminists started the hashtag #StopClymer to alert women to this problematic “male feminist.” Eventually, and perhaps predictably, Charles “came out” as transgender in January 2018, and now “Charlotte” Clymer is such a celebrated activist that “she” got invited to this year’s White House “Lesbian Visibility Day” event. Clymer’s trajectory is perhaps the most extreme example of the desperate measures by which white male liberals seek to remain relevant in the Age of Wokeness.

Freddie deBoer lampoons the somewhat less desperate, but nonetheless laughable, posturing of those he deems “Good White Men”:

These are the guys who have carefully crafted personas as ALLIES, as the good ones, as the right kind of white guy. These are the dudes whose every engagement on social media functions to let you know how very sorry they are, but always seem to come out on top in doing so. . . . These are the guys who will harangue you about how white dudes do this and white dudes do that, speaking to you from their blameless white dude mouths in their righteous white dude faces. These are the guys who look at the discourse about white supremacy and patriarchy and see market opportunity.

The target audience of these guys is what deBoer calls “the NPR tote bag set,” as for example his description of MSNBC’s Chris Hayes:

The only man who talks more about Donald Trump than Donald Trump himself, the living picture of the media liberal who’s compelled to outwardly disdain Trump but whose continued professional existence depends on him. . . . I would like to underline that he was once a genuinely interesting lefty writer who was willing to skewer liberals. . . Now Chris flatters people who have a favorite “podcatcher” app for a living, telling the world’s Sarah Lawrence graduates that when they feel better than everyone else, they’re right. He’s a living, breathing laundromat for the post-collegiate elite’s ugly feelings of superiority, reassuring them every day on his show that their snobbery and self-obsession are justified thanks to their superior moral virtue. . . .
He has tweeted 160,000 times; I challenge you to find one that dares to be anything less than perfectly anodyne to the median suburban liberal Democrat. This is what Hayes has done with his very rare opportunity as a cable news host, fixated relentlessly on Big Orange in order to juice ratings sufficiently to afford his affluent Brooklynite lifestyle. Otherwise, he’s simply avoided giving offense like it was the plague, specifically to the NPR tote bag set who keep him solvent. Imagine climbing your way up the totem pole in media and, having reached the top, using your perch to tell Montgomery County soccer parents that yes, the problem with our country is poor white people, and doncha wish we could all vote for Obama a third time?

And about another, less prominent, “Good White Man”:

This man is the basic bitch of Good White Men, a computer-generated NPC of a Noble Ally. Everything about his performance (and, if you’ll forgive me, his face) is so perfectly in the center of Good White Manness, I half suspect he’s been created by a creepy machine learning algorithm designed to mimic embittered social studies teachers who always told themselves they were destined for more. Everything about this dude is so bland and so utterly dedicated to not giving offense that I’ve forgotten what exactly it was that he was bitterly droning on about recently to inspire his inclusion in this list. Suffice to say that his tasteful crewneck and Warby Parkers are indeed emblematic of his politics, which amount to an NPR tote bag brought to life by a mischievous wizard that dreadfully recites tiresome woke cliches about standpoint theory and constantly says “my fellow white people, listen up!”

Someone should have told these guys that one of the risks of following the herd is that you become a stereotype, a caricature, a cliché. Conformity is not a virtue, nor is popularity-seeking, but liberals typically lack the kind of self-awareness necessary to avoid this trap.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Category: Liberals

Max Boot and Allahpundit Are Very Worried About Our Friends in Ukraine

Posted on | June 14, 2022 | Comments Off on Max Boot and Allahpundit Are Very Worried About Our Friends in Ukraine

Allahpundit’s headline at Hot Air:

Ukraine is running out of ammo
and taking heavy casualties

Max Boot’s headline at the Washington Post:

We can’t let Ukraine lose. It needs
a lot more aid, starting with artillery.

These alarming headlines are at least three weeks too late, really, and part of the reason is that Ukraine has been too good in the information warfare game, successfully convincing Westerners that everything was going fine in their war against the Russian invaders, even as problems were becoming apparent to those who scrutinized the maps.

By mid-May, Ukraine had clearly won the Battle of Kharkiv, and the Russians retreated from Ukraine’s second-largest city. With the threat to Kharkiv eliminated, I focused my attention on the Donbas in a post featuring a Ukrainian bikini model and this map:

[T]he main battle front in the Donbas, in the vicinity of Lysychansk, continues to be very active. Thursday, I blogged about Russian forces attempting a river crossing near Bilohorivka, east of Lyman, that went disastrously bad for the Russians. There are reports that the Russian invaders tried to cross the same river again on Thursday, with similarly disastrous results. . . .
Severodonetsk is on the eastern bank of the Siverskyi Donets River, across from Lysychansk on the west bank. Bilohorivka is about 12 miles west of Lysychansk, so if the Russians could cross the river there, they would threaten the flank and rear of the Ukrainians at Lysychansk, and force them to pull back from Severodonetsk. However, about 25 miles west of Bilohorivka, the Ukrainians still hold Lyman, from which they could advance eastward to threaten the Russian forces attempting to flank the position at Lysychansk. Therefore, if the victory at Kharkiv has freed up Ukrainian troops to fight elsewhere, this region between Lyman and Severodonetsk may present the most pressing emergency.

My point was that the Ukrainians held the eastern (or northern) bank of the river at exactly two points — Lyman and Severodonetsk — and the failed attempts by the Russians to cross the river showed how important it was for Ukraine to maintain those footholds, from which counterattacks could be launched against the Russians. Two days later, on May 16, I expanded on this idea:

If the Ukrainians could reinforce Lyman and launch a counterattack toward Zarichne and Kreminna, this would force the Russians to retreat from the river at Yampil and would also relieve pressure against Sievierodonetsk. Clearing the Russians from the north bank of the river would then allow the Ukrainian forces now holding the south bank to cross over and join the counteroffensive. . . .
So the question is whether Ukraine can assemble a strike force for the kind of breakthrough effort I’ve described. Something like this must be attempted somewhere in the Donbas theater, because Ukraine can’t keep playing defense and let the Russians have the leisure to pick and choose their points of attack. That’s a formula for slow-motion defeat.

If a civilian amateur could see this, certainly it must have been obvious to military professionals. As I said at the time, however, the question was whether Ukraine had reserves available to mount such a counteroffensive. In his post, Allahpundit writes:

[N]ow that the war has shifted to the east and become a long-range slugfest in open terrain, the forecast has shifted. Unable to match the range of Putin’s artillery, it’s the Ukrainians who are taking horrendous casualties while Russian soldiers remain out of reach. One advisor to Zelensky told reporters this week that around 150 Ukrainian troops are dying each day and another 800 are being wounded. That’s a thousand men off the battlefield every 24 hours among a total force of maybe 500,000. And not just any men: Their troops in the east have combat experience. Replacing those soldiers with new conscripts isn’t a one-to-one substitution.

Really? Does Ukraine actually have 500,000 troops? I strongly doubt it. Certainly we have seen no evidence in the past month that Ukraine has at its disposal a spare brigade of reserves that could be used as a strike force to mount a serious counteroffensive in the Donbas. Instead, they lost Lyman in late May, and are now on the verge of being wiped out in Severodonetsk. It is apparently the belief of Max Boot, et al., that these reversals are a result of Ukraine’s shortage of military equipment and supplies, which may be the case, but no amount of Western aid will help if the actual problem is a shortage of Ukrainian manpower.

Does Ukraine have “enough” artillery and ammunition to match the Russians? Of course they don’t, and never have. If the war was to be decided by who has the most artillery, there is no doubt the Russians would win. What made Ukraine successful in the first 10 weeks of the war was that they successfully struck Russia’s supply lines, causing logistical problems that forced the invaders to retreat. Why have they been unable to repeat that feat in the Donbas? Why has Russia been able to advance from Izyum and Popasna, rather than being compelled to protect their supply lines against Ukrainian attacks? Why was Russia able to capture Lyman, instead of facing counterattacks from that key river outpost?

Since mid-May, Ukraine seems to have suffered either (a) a failure of strategic thinking by its military leadership or (b) the effects of exhaustion aggravated by a shortage of trained troops. If they had enough manpower and intelligent leadership, they would have located some weak point in the long Russian front that stretches about 100 miles around from Izyum to Severodonetsk to Holubivka and struck that weak point with a brigade-sized attack. Smash through the front and go driving deep into the Russian rear, wrecking communications and supply lines — force the invader onto the defensive, and never mind whether you can hold onto any of the territory you’ve gained. What Ukraine needed to do was to seize the initiative and upset the apple cart, so that the Russians would not be able to continue their pound-and-ground slow-motion offensive.

There are limits to what the West can do, at this point, to help Ukraine. Yet here comes Max Boot with his Christmas shopping list:

The most obvious Ukrainian need is for more artillery tubes and shells. The Biden administration has already provided 108 M777 155mm howitzers and more than 220,000 artillery rounds. More recently, it promised to send four High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (Himars) and ammunition with a maximum range of roughly 45 miles. That is wholly insufficient; even the 220,000 rounds would not last five days at current rates of use.
The West should be sending hundreds of howitzers and multi-launch rocket systems, thousands of rockets and hundreds of thousands of artillery rounds. This should include Excalibur GPS-guided rounds for the M177 (range: 24 miles) and Army Tactical Missile Systems for the Himars (range: 186 miles). Those longer-range munitions would enable the Ukrainians to target Russia’s artillery, rockets and supply lines without risking their new weapons close to the front lines. Of course, it will take time to train Ukrainians on these systems, but they have shown they are fast learners.
Ukraine is also in desperate need of more aircraft to stop Russian airstrikes and to mount its own attacks on Russian ground formations. Biden made a serious mistake in March when, because of overblown fears of Putin’s reaction, he refused to facilitate the transfer of Poland’s MiG-29 fighter jets. But it’s not too late to rectify that blunder.
While the MiG-29s would still be useful, in general we should be transitioning Ukraine to NATO equipment such as MQ-1C Gray Eagle drones, F-16 fighter jets, A-10 “Warthog” ground-attack aircraft and Patriot air-defense systems.

While I am certain that U.S. armament manufacturers would be glad to get the contracts to supply Ukraine with all these goodies, (a) it’s going to cost money and (b) it’s going to take time. If Ukraine were to place an order today for “hundreds of thousands of artillery rounds,” when would the desired product be delivered? Even if the U.S. and its allies just happened to have a bunch of spare shells lying around in their arsenals, shipping them to Ukraine in massive quantities would take time, and I’m under the impression that we don’t have sufficient ammunition manufacturing capacity that we can just crank out a few hundred thousand extra rounds quickly to meet Ukraine’s emergency needs.

Even if Uncle Sam were willing to play military Santa Claus for Ukraine — “Ho! Ho! Ho! Here’s a brand new fighter jet for you! And a Patriot air defense system for you!” — the question is whether we have the ability to supply everything on Max Boot’s list quickly enough to make a difference in the Donbas. Even if we could magically conjure up these supplies overnight, however, wouldn’t NATO aid to Ukraine on such a massive scale run the risk of provoking a wider war in Europe? So far, we have been lucky in that regard, but there’s no telling when our luck might run out. Certainly, I would like to see Ukraine emerge victorious in its war against the Russian invaders, but if it requires the kind of massive aid demanded by Max Boot (much of which couldn’t be delivered until three or six months from now, if that soon) doesn’t this start looking like the kind of “escalation” that preceded the Vietnam War?

Max Boot doesn’t have answers for that. He’s spent his entire career advocating war everywhere, and we’re tired of his one-note-Johnny act.