Jack Ryan notes: “The very talented graphic artist Farstar has created a rather disturbing comic envisioning a day where 3rd world migrants might not always be the Left’s obedient pets.”
The NYT is finally realizing the Alt-Right represents today’s counter-culture. Stop the press!
From “Why the Far Right Wants to Be the New ‘Alternative’ Culture” by John Herrman:
A wide-eyed observer of today’s political media wouldn’t just see different voices and outlets with contrasting tendencies. It would see a disorienting game of rhetorical appropriation, in which it is constantly unclear who stands for which principles and why.
An essential feature of the rise of Trumpism has been the brazen inversion, that trusty maneuver in which you wield your critics’ own values against them — say, borrowing the language of social justice to argue that the “oppressor” is actually oppressed or suddenly embracing progressive social causes in the service of criticizing Islam. It’s a blunt but effective rhetorical confiscation, in which a battle-ready right relishes its ability to seize, inhabit and neutralize the arguments and vocabularies of its opponents, reveling in their continued inability to formulate any sort of answer to the trusty old ‘‘I know you are, but what am I?’’
There’s something similar in the right’s gradual appropriation of the word ‘‘alternative’’ — an appropriation that, for lack of a stronger claim by disappearing alt-weeklies or leftist publishers, seems to be working…
An ‘‘alternative’’ culture, of course, can’t just consist of a cluster of media outlets. It must evoke a comprehensive way of being, a system of shared habits and sensibilities. There are plenty of right-wing media personalities who see this possibility in their movement and are fond of referring to their various brands of conservatism — whether simply Trump-supporting or far more extreme — as ‘‘the new punk rock’’ or the defining ‘‘counterculture’’ of the moment. These claims are both galling and true enough for their speakers’ purposes. Expressing racist ideas in offensive language, for example, or provoking audiences with winking fascist imagery, is, on some level, transgressive. (Both behaviors do have some precedent in the history of actual punk music.) And portraying yourself as the rebellious ‘‘alternative’’ to the people and systems that have rejected you is at least a precursor to familiar American expressions of cool.
Herrman condescendingly asserts that the Alt-Right’s “rhetoric and style want to evoke, in some ghoulish upside-down way, heroic rebellion” but warns that “fresh eyes might help us avoid underestimating what is happening here.”
They seem to be getting increasingly nervous.
A NYT article on “The Weird, Mystic Pull of Southwest England” has this very cool photo of a statue called “Gallos” (Cornish for power) by Rubin Eynon, which is at Tintagel Castle in Cornwall.
From Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888):
“‘In another six months,’ says Dravot, ‘we’ll hold another Communication and see how you are working.’ Then he asks them about their villages, and learns that they was fighting one against the other and were fair sick and tired of it. And when they wasn’t doing that they was fighting with the Mohammedans. ‘You can fight those when they come into our country,’ says Dravot. ‘Tell off every tenth man of your tribes for a Frontier guard, and send two hundred at a time to this valley to be drilled. Nobody is going to be shot or speared any more so long as he does well, and I know that you won’t cheat me because you’re white people — sons of Alexander — and not like common, black Mohammedans. You are my people and by God,’ says he, running off into English at the end — ‘I’ll make a damned fine Nation of you, or I’ll die in the making!’….
“‘I won’t make a Nation,’ says he. ‘I’ll make an Empire! These men aren’t n*ggers; they’re English! Look at their eyes — look at their mouths. Look at the way they stand up. They sit on chairs in their own houses. They’re the Lost Tribes, or something like it, and they’ve grown to be English.”
The NYT reports that “After Puerto Rico’s Debt Crisis, Worries Shift to Virgin Islands”. It seems the island also has an unfunded pension crisis, much like Puerto Rico.
…[T]he debt dilemma is now most acute in the Virgin Islands — the three main islands are St. Thomas, St. Croix and St. John — where the government has been struggling ever since a giant refinery closed in 2012, wiping out the territory’s biggest nongovernment employer and a mainstay of its tax base.
Its troubles began to snowball last July, when Puerto Rico defaulted on most of its debts.
In August, Fitch downgraded the Virgin Islands’ debt to junk, citing the territory’s chronic budget deficits and habit of borrowing to plug the holes, like Puerto Rico.
More downgrades followed, and in December, Standard & Poor’s dealt the territory a rare “superdowngrade” — seven notches in one fell swoop — leaving it squarely in the junk-bond realm.
And what better way to ‘solve’ this problem than to give people fish instead of fishing poles:
Still, Mr. Mapp is contending with many of the same problems that proved too much for Puerto Rico, driving it in May to seek bankruptcylike protection under a new law for insolvent territories, known as Promesa. Puerto Rico is now embroiled in heated negotiations over how to reduce its roughly $123 billion in debts and unfunded pensions.
When Congress drafted the Promesa law last year, it made it possible for the other American territories to seek the same kind of help…
In something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, by giving territories the option to declare bankruptcy, Congress seems to have made such an outcome more likely.
“That innocuous provision, when sent to the bond market, said, ‘Here’s an escape valve for your debt obligations,’” Mr. Mapp said. “That changed the whole paradigm.”
Imagine that.
Puerto Rico has many… Puerto Ricans.
The Virgin Islands have many… well, let’s just say, ‘non-caucasians’.
Who will be next: Guam?
From Jellyfish’s 1993 album Spilt Milk, songwriters Roger Joseph Manning, Jr. and Andy Sturmer channel their inner Brian Wilson & Beatles through XTC compression, punctuated by Brian May guitar punches, with surreal lyrics out of Alice in Wonderland:
Far behind the forest of flying paper aeroplanes
Grazing on the grounds of ponytails
The substitute is counting down her ticks till recess
Hammering down to size her fingernails
Because today’s the day Sebrina builds her box lunch buffet
(Kool-aid, sandwiches and chips for all the shoulders)
Lunch is on the table, soon dessert is on the floor
(singing)
So serene Sebrina makes me feel so serene
So serene Sebrina makes me feel so serene…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKquzN8S_Cc
The Robot Job Automation Threat will have drastic consequences for all types and levels of jobs. The degree of job displacement is becoming, and will continue to be, quantum and accelerative. This radically new and burgeoning dynamic is a game changer to the libertarian model of things.
Should society still be steered by Naïve Libertarianism (i.e., classical libertarian principles) through this coming Dark Period, there will be tremendous social unrest and, potentially, very real and significant waves of political violence.
The inertia, then, appears to be on the side of growing redistributionist policies, on a scale not seen since classic Communism.
In the NYT today, alongside an article titled “In Towns Hit by Factory Closings, a New Casualty: Retail Jobs” (e.g, the unprecedented vertical integration of Amazon into every facet of our lives and the consequent, ever growing list of jobs being displaced), Kai-Fu Lee writes on “The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence”, providing another call for a universal basic income, what may be an unfortunate sociopolitical necessity in the coming Dark Period:
Here is where the enormous wealth concentrated in relatively few hands comes in. It strikes me as unavoidable that large chunks of the money created by A.I. will have to be transferred to those whose jobs have been displaced. This seems feasible only through Keynesian policies of increased government spending, presumably raised through taxation on wealthy companies.
As for what form that social welfare would take, I would argue for a conditional universal basic income: welfare offered to those who have a financial need, on the condition they either show an effort to receive training that would make them employable or commit to a certain number of hours of “service of love” voluntarism.
To fund this, tax rates will have to be high. The government will not only have to subsidize most people’s lives and work; it will also have to compensate for the loss of individual tax revenue previously collected from employed individuals.
I don’t necessarily agree with this prescription, but it would seem the historical forces are blowing strongly in this direction.
The prospects of this turn would be much more affirming if Western societies were homogenous ethnostates of, say, 60 years ago, but in the ‘vibrantly diverse’ proposition nations of today, where Putnamian social capital is at its lowest ebb, and where R selective races exploit the generous altruism of K selective races, the prospects are much gloomier.
In the WSJ, Jeryl Bier writes of “The Insidious Influence of the SPLC”. The article is behind a firewall, but AmRen has excerpts:
Aided by a veneer of objectivity, the SPLC has for years served as the media’s expert witness for evaluating “extremism” and “hatred.” But while the SPLC rightly condemns groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Westboro Baptist Church and New Black Panther Party, it has managed to blur the lines, besmirching mainstream groups like the FRC, as well as people such as social scientist Charles Murray and Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a critic of Islamic extremism.
A clear illustration of the SPLC’s pervasive and insidious influence is the March riot at Middlebury College, where Mr. Murray had been invited to speak. “The SPLC is the primary source for the protesters at my events,” Mr. Murray told me. “It is quotes from the SPLC, assertions by the SPLC that drive the whole thing.”
Mr. Murray’s politics are libertarian, but the SPLC labels him a “white nationalist.” In reporting on the Middlebury fracas, numerous news organizations repeated the SPLC’s characterization without noting it was false. The AP even put it in a headline: “College Students Protest Speaker Branded White Nationalist.”…
The SPLC’s work arguably contributes to the climate of hate it abhors—and Middlebury isn’t the worst example. In 2012 Floyd Lee Corkins shot and wounded a security guard at the Family Research Council’s headquarters. Mr. Corkins, who pleaded guilty to domestic terrorism, told investigators he had targeted the group after learning of it from the SPLC’s website. The SPLC responded to the shooting with a statement: “We condemn all acts of violence.”
Last week the SPLC found itself in the awkward position of disavowing the man who opened fire on Republican members of Congress during baseball practice. “We’re aware that the SPLC was among hundreds of groups that the man identified as the shooter ‘liked’ on Facebook,” SPLC president Richard Cohen said in a statement. “I want to be as clear as I can possibly be: The SPLC condemns all forms of violence.”
That a publication would publish a column like this, one quite critical of the $PLC, is very good.
The Overton Window is slowly moving in the right direction.
More ‘refugees’ raping indigenous white European women. This time, it’s 3 “refugees” from Ethiopia:
A tearful woman broke down in court in Germany as she alleged that three asylum seekers raped her a total of nine times when she was ambushed at a town fair.
The alleged attack in August 2016 left the 28-year-old Hungarian victim ‘shattered,’ she told a court in Mühlhausen.
Her mobile phone was stolen and the men used it to film their brutal assault which included kicking and punching her and dragging her by her hair, she claims.
The woman said she was forced to have unprotected oral, vaginal and anal sex with three Ethiopian men who she identified in court, The Local reports…
The men were arrested the next day. DNA from two of them matched up with DNA collected by police.
‘Every one of them raped me three times,’ she sobbed in court on Monday.
This is the hell the liberals in Europe have created.
Normism: The Philosophy of Norm Macdonald, a short book I wrote about the late great comedian, is available on Amazon.
