25 yrs ago, Bubba (and the circling wagons of the MSM) gave liberal “pro-feminist” men a special license to do what they please. Now, in 2017, the chickens have come home to roost. Conservatives, when accused, should flat out deny or say “This is overkill”. But with libs, let them eat their own. IOW, the madness will only stop when libs themselves say “Okay, enough with this P.C.”
Liam Gallagher jokingly told Ed Sheeran to “calm down on the two-handed wanking” when the pair met for the first time after Sheeran broke his arm in a bike crash.
“The collapse of coalition talks shows how much the far right has changed its politics,” reads the byline as seen from the NYT homepage.
Also from the piece:
Germany’s fear of political instability goes deep. For many, the AfD’s entrance into the Bundestag brings to mind the dark shadow of the Weimar Republic, its disastrous collapse and all that followed. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has featured a series of German historians mining the parallels between the 1920s and ’30s and today: Back then, a divided political spectrum and a splintered left, with extremism on both sides, created a run of minority governments and a perception of political chaos, all of which made Nazi authoritarianism look like an attractive alternative.
Posted inEurope|Comments Off on NYT: Germany and the Age of Political Absolutism
“First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach. Wild!” That was the assessment of Bernardine Dohrn, the champagne radical who, with her husband, Bill Ayers, participated in a campaign of domestic terrorism, including bombings, and later became cozy with Barack Obama, hosting events for the aspiring politician in her home… ;” [Dohrn would also say: “Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson.” – Ed.] Dohrn would later join a very prestigious Chicago law firm, Sidley Austin, and later worked as a professor of law at Northwestern University — remarkable accomplishments for a woman without a law license…
Dohrn wasn’t the only Manson admirer of her time. Other Weathermen hoisted a “Manson Power” banner in 1969 when they issued their declaration of war on the United States, and Rolling Stone’s coverage of the man and his crimes — it dedicated a special issue to him — was at times fawning. The magazine depicted him on its cover as the thing he’d always wanted to be: a rock star. A radical newspaper named him “Man of the Year.” Jerry Rubin, the celebrated anti-war activist, said: “I fell in love with Charlie Manson the first time I saw his cherub face and sparkling eyes on TV.” That cherub face later had a swastika carved into it. “His words and courage inspired us,” Rubin said…
John Lennon, who ought to have known a cynical operator when he saw one, described Manson as a man who “took children in when nobody else would.” Not that he was a fan of publicity-stunt mass murders: “I just think a lot of the things he says are true.”
Posted inCulture Wars, NYT|Comments Off on NYT: Charles Manson was a Harbinger of Today’s Far Right
Even free trade and a welcoming attitude toward immigration, longtime liberty-conservative staples, are under assault in today’s GOP. The Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins recently published a paper, “The Five Types of Trump Voters,” describing the groups that coalesced behind the president in the general election. Only 25 percent were what she labeled “free marketeers” — people opposed to higher taxes and bigger government but supportive of free trade and immigration. A larger number were “staunch conservatives,” and this group opposed illegal immigration overwhelmingly, loved the president’s proposed Muslim ban, and had grown much less supportive of free trade since 2012. A third group, “American preservationists,” nearly a fifth of Trump voters, were even more intensely opposed to immigration and free trade. Steve Bannon is attempting to unite these latter groups against the free marketeers in party primaries…
After the Goldwater debacle, longtime National Review editor Frank Meyer argued that traditionalists, anti-Communists, and liberty conservatives should unite, forming a “fusion” of their movements and ideas. That is what happened, but the past 20 years show that the liberty wing is much weaker than it imagined itself to be. It can reinvigorate itself only if it finds a way to make itself relevant to a new conservative fusion.
Posted inLibertarianism|Comments Off on NR: “What Happened to the ‘Libertarian Moment’?”
The fictional but not-too-distant-from-future-reality Slaughterbots scenario is thought provoking:
UC Berkeley professor Stuart Russell and the Future of Life Institute have created an eerie viral video titled “Slaughterbots” that depicts a future in which humans develop small, hand-sized drones that are programmed to identify and eliminate designated targets.
In the video… the technology is initially developed with the intention of combating crime and terrorism, but the drones are taken over by an unknown forces who use the powerful weapons to murder a group of senators and college students.
9/11 was a precursor. Adherents of a primitive, anti-modern religion utilize the levers of modernity (e.g., freely available GPS for marking a location; flight school instructor training; affordable airline pricing which gets your body on a jumbo jet; etc.) to exacerbate that modern society’s destruction.
When in malevolent hands, smart, cheap, easily reproducible, nanotechnology will be capable of wreaking unimaginable horror. In fact, where this is all going is only limited by your imagination? Why have we received no contact from alien civilizations? Most likely because at a certain in a civilization’s development, advanced weaponry wipes out the said civilization.
The most likely route of total human destruction will be some form of self-replicating Von Neumann Machine.
I recall some years back, how Cornell University researchers created a machine that could build copies of itself. It was essentially a breakthrough ‘proof of a concept’ that was first formulated in the 1940s by the brilliant mathematician John von Neumann. Von Neumann conceptualized the basic components of a self-replicating machine and, inadvertently, ‘predicted’ the yet-to-be-discovered phenomenon of DNA. The gedanken experiment of a ‘Von Neumann machine’ was born.
In pioneering ‘conceptual research’ surrounding nanotechnology, figures such as Eric Drexler, Hans Moravec, and Ray Kurzweil have posited the conceptual possibilities of Von Neumann machines exploring the universe: such probes would make their way to a planet, reproduce themselves, and then repeat the process. A growing fleet of such probes would increase at an exponential rate.
At their most optimistically speculative extreme,transhumanists such as Moravec put forward the following possibility:
A) At the nano-level, we will someday be able to re-arrange a molecule of X to become a molecule of Y, effectively allowing us to ‘change matter’ and change reality itself. Here is a 2005 report from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology asserting that we are closer to ‘molecular manufacturing’ than previously thought.
B) Premise A coupled with the concept of Von Neumann probes will mean that all of reality in the known universe could someday be fully ‘mapped out’ by probes.
C) The information (aka matter) of all such probes could be centralized in a distributed computer network (think ‘the internet’ or the A.I. in The Matrix).
D) Such a distributed network would ‘be’ all known reality and, as such, would be tantamount to God.
Part D of this chain (singularity) has a difficult hurdle in John Searle’s famous Chinese Room problem. I side with the New Mysterians (Searle, Nagel, McGinn) in believing this hurdle cannot, in principle, be overcome by any artificial intelligence at any point in the future.
The dark side of nanotechnology and self-replicating machines is real. Given the trajectories of globalization, modern communications, and economies of scale, the possibility of the total destruction of mankind from malicious nanotechnology run amok is, at least to me, all-but-inevitable.
Such a scenario has been referred to as the ‘grey goo’ possibility, which Wikipedia summarizes as follows:
Grey goo, a term coined by nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler, refers to a hypothetical end-of-the-world event involving nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all life on Earth while building more of themselves (a scenario known as ecophagy). It is usually used in a science fictional context. In a worst-case scenario, all of the matter in the universe could be turned into goo (with “goo” meaning a large mass of replicating nanomachines lacking large-scale structure, which may or may not actually appear goo-like), killing the universe’s residents. The disaster could result from an accidental mutation in a self-replicating nanomachine used for other purposes, or possibly from a deliberate doomsday device.
Bill Joy’s “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us” was a widely-discussed article exploring the grey goo potential, and Nick Bostrom’s work on Human Extinction Scenarios is perhaps the most scholarly work on the subject today. In fiction, the grey goo scenario is a premise of Michael Crichton’s novel Prey, as well as Kurt Vonnegut’s earlier ’60s novel, Cat’s Cradle, wherein a fictitious, synthetic “ice-nine” poly-water converts every drop of water it touches into a solid. Placing one drop of ice-nine into a lake leads to the adjacent molecules of water in the lake to turn solid, and so on. Very soon, all the water on the planet has been turned into an ice-nine solid.
Basically, we’re talking about the possibility of a nanotechnological weapon of mass destruction. Unfortunately, such a possibility in some variant form will happen. It could take on a myriad of forms: a deliberate, synthetic contamination of livestock or some other food supply chain; the creation of an immune-resistant bacteria or virus that wipes out plant, animal, or human life; etc.
All that is required is:
Sufficient Applied Science: Is it physically possible to create the grey goo? If yes, then check off this box.
Availability of Knowledge Base: Is the know-how to build the grey goo widely available? The ill-founded decision to publish the genome of the 1918 flu virus is a harbinger. If the objective science allows it, and the Anarchist Cookbook is now available to on every muslim’s cellphone, we’re on our way…
Economies of Scale: The production costs are a limiting parameter. But with the arc of capitalism one that lowers costs, and with Arabs sitting on sperm banks of oil, providing a medieval religious mindset with billions of dollars its own culture would never otherwise possess, this is increasingly possible. 50 years from now, imagine a Kickstarter-type mechanism for eschatologically-oriented Muslims to fund the nanotechnological destruction of the West.
Sufficient Will: Are there individuals, and even groups, with the will to initiate this destruction? Are there sufficient actors willing to intentionally destroy the world (or just the West for that matter?)
The expanding Salem Witch Non-Trials (no trials are necessary if you’re fired or otherwise punished before due process) have taken down Jeffrey Tambor of Transparent. This paragraph from a Deadline Hollywood piece is worth noting:
Transparent writer and producer Our Lady J became the first and only member of the series to publicly back both accusers. Thanking Lysette for her “leadership,” the transgender scribe added, “we cannot let trans content be taken down by a single cis man.”
I have been noticing how they no longer even disguise their contempt. That they hate goyim, and in ever interesting variations of ways, is not new… but what is new is the extraordinarily open way, vis-a-vis mainstream publications, that they feel comfortable enough to air this hatred.
Jonathan Weisman writes for the NYT as is the author of the forthcoming book [1](Semitism): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump.
His NYT piece titled “When the Right Pushes Fake Jews” is dripping with hatred and paranoia about all those gentiles and their barely contained anti-Semitism:
Bernie Bernstein pretty much fits the mold of a Jew — at least as the alt-right sees us.
A strange Northeastern accent, somewhere between New York and Boston? Check. Tossing money, but not too much money, around to no good end (remember, we’re rich, but cheap)? Check. Pursuing the agenda of the liberal fake-news media? Check. Riling the worst instincts of the South’s conservative base? Check.
But there was something a little too on the nose, forgive me please, about those robocalls in Alabama from a mythical Washington Post reporter named Bernstein seeking women to dish dirt on Roy Moore, something too “Jewy” to be actually Jewish. And that’s where the rising anti-Semitism of the new white nationalists loses its punch…
Leaving aside the low esteem that many Alabamians hold the national media in, no mainstream outlet is paying women for dirt on Mr. Moore, and no one is promising to publish half-baked uncorroborated allegations. But whoever recorded the call thought voters in deep-red Alabama would swallow such aspersions on the profession of journalism, especially if they came from a Yankee Jew…
Hatred of Jews in my native South is a phenomenon that is distinct from the more pervasive racism. White Southerners who hold bigoted views tend to know — or think they know — African-American and Hispanic people, and are convinced of their own superiority to them.
They don’t know nearly as many Jews, if any at all, and because of that Jews play a key role in their bigotry. If they are superior to blacks and Hispanics, yet believe they are losing ground in the battle of the races, then some other force must be orchestrating the “white genocide” that is befalling them. Enter the Jews, puller of strings, manipulators of the masses.
The anti-Semitism of the alt-right, the newest manifestation of bigotry that combines age-old hatred with internet-era technological savvy, biting wit and a self-conscious sense of irony, shows no more logical consistency than the anti-Semitism of the past. Jews are both all-powerful puppetmasters and sniveling weaklings, rapacious capitalists and left-wing anarchists. The Holocaust never happened, but man, was it cool.
The real fun begins when you read the comments section, where various NY-area Jews and PC shabbos goy affirm Weisman, discussing “weaponized” Christianity, newfound fears Jews have for their personal safety in America, and “this rising fascist tide in our country.”
Normism: The Philosophy of Norm Macdonald, a short book I wrote about the late great comedian, is available on Amazon.