Bulverism

I learned a new word, bulverism:

But this method also reminds me of something else. This is Christopher Hitchens:

“I think Hannah Arendt said that one of the great achievements of Stalinism was to replace all discussion involving arguments and evidence with the question of motive. If someone were to say, for example, that there are many people in the Soviet Union who don’t have enough to eat, it might make sense for them to respond, “It’s not our fault, it was the weather, a bad harvest or something.” Instead it’s always, “Why is this person saying this, and why are they saying it in such and such a magazine? It must be that this is part of a plan.” ...

The Bulverist assumes a speaker’s argument is invalid or false and then explains why the speaker came to make that mistake, attacking the speaker or the speaker’s motive. The term “Bulverism” was coined by C. S. Lewis to poke fun at a very serious error in thinking that, he alleges, recurs often in a variety of religious, political, and philosophical debates.

Many times I have pointed out some fact, only to have someone attack me with some strange and false theory about my motivations.

Montana religious dispute escalates

I mentioned coverage of a Montana dispute, and now it is getting more attention:

The Whitefish, Montana, Police Department says it is aware of the white supremacist website “The Daily Stormer” and its call for an upcoming “armed march” through the city of Whitefish, CBS affiliate KXLH reports.

Top elected officials in Montana issued a joint statement Tuesday condemning “attacks on our religious freedom manifesting in a group of anti-Semites,” CBS affiliate KPAX reports.

“Rest assured, any demonstration or threat of intimidation against any Montanan’s religious liberty will not be tolerated. It takes all Montanans working together to eradicate religious intolerance,” the statement reads.

Religious freedom? Liberty?

One side has Jews who hate Christians, and the other has Christians who hate Jews. So I guess you could say both sides are showing religious intolerance. But who is doing the intimidating? The Daily Stormer says:

The lawmakers did not make specific reference to the group or realtor Tanya Gersh, who was serving as operating “street boss” running an extortion conspiracy targeting the mother of a perceived political opponent of international Jewry. Gersh threatened Sherry Spencer, mother of Richard Spencer, with a protest that she claimed would drive down the value of her property in Whitefish if she did not sell the property, denounce her son and make a “donation” to local human rights groups.

Gersh had provided Spencer with a pre-written apology/confession, which they asked her to read to the community. This practice is also popular among ISIS, which usually requires public execution victims to read aloud a scripted apology/confession before death.

It posts a copy of the confession, and it appears to be criminal extortion from the Jewish side.

The news stories do not mention that. They probably would mention it, if they could prove that the scripted confession demand were fake.

The Daily Stormer site is a little extreme, and says:

In a related development, while the international Jewish media has taken interest in our Whitefish march – dubbed the “March on Whitefish” – so have nationalist groups across the country. So far, it looks like we will have representatives from at least three European nations marching with us in January, a sign of increasing global white racial solidarity against the international Jewish agenda to exterminate the white race through programs of mass immigration, feminism and the promotion of homosexuality.

I will be interested to see whether there are any neutral news stories about this dispute.

Robots are taking our jobs

Jobs will be disappearing:

Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania has warned that all the developed nations on earth will see job loss rates of up to 47 per cent within the next 25 years.

The statistic is based on a recent Oxford University study and includes blue and white collar jobs. So far, the loss has been restricted to the blue collar variety, particularly in manufacturing so no one has cared that much as this has been happening since the 1960s.

The new trend is not creating new jobs either. By 2034, just a few decades, mid-level jobs will be by and large obsolete.

So far the benefits have only gone to the ultra-wealthy, the top 1 per cent. This coming technological revolution is set to wipe out what looks to be the entire middle class.

By contrast, this TED Talk assures us that new jobs will be created somehow:

Here's a paradox you don't hear much about: despite a century of creating machines to do our work for us, the proportion of adults in the US with a job has consistently gone up for the past 125 years. Why hasn't human labor become redundant and our skills obsolete? In this talk about the future of work, economist David Autor addresses the question of why there are still so many jobs and comes up with a surprising, hopeful answer.

When farms were automatics, ppl moved to factories, and when they were automated, they moved to office work. What is next?

Sure, there will be work, like giving baths to elderly ppl. But I think that the first article is right that the good jobs will be disappearing, not increasing.

What are the policy implications? It seems to be that we need to reduce our population.

Besides robots taking our jobs, a few experts say marriage will be legal between humans and robots by 2050.

A volcano killed the Neanderthals

I did not know that there was a good theory that a volcano wiped out the Neanderthals:

The Phlegraean Fields (Italian: Campi Flegrei) are a series of craters and volcanic areas located near Naples, Italy. ... There’s even archaeological evidence suggesting that a Phlegraean eruption some 37,000 to 39,000 years ago was so massive, it may have killed large segments of the extant Neanderthal population, either directly or by causing a volcanic winter. Now, the massive supervolcano is showing signs of awakening.

I did not know this. All the popular science articles say that the Neanderthals went extinct because they were out-competed by the superior African hominids, who are usually called "modern" and just like today's humans.

No, the African hominids were not modern, and Neanderthals did not go extinct.

White Guy Resolutions 2017

The MTV's "White Guy Resolutions 2017" can still be viewed here.

It is giving me a resolution: Call out anti-white-male hatred when I see it.

Somehow MTV thought that it was acceptable to celebrate the killing of white cops, and to other denigrate whites, men, and the USA.

Hockey Stick Mann maintains libel lawsuit

Jonathan H. Adler writes:

Simberg and Steyn authored a pair of blog posts alleging that Penn State University had failed to adequately investigate the alleged misconduct of climatologist Michael Mann that may have been revealed by the release of the “ClimateGate” e-mails. The posts were colorful and rude, accusing Mann of “molesting” data to produce the infamous “hockey stick” graph and comparing Penn State’s investigation of his alleged improprieties to its inquiry into the child-molestation accusations against Jerry Sandusky. ...

Simberg and Steyn authored a pair of blog posts alleging that Penn State University had failed to adequately investigate the alleged misconduct of climatologist Michael Mann that may have been revealed by the release of the “ClimateGate” e-mails. The posts were colorful and rude, accusing Mann of “molesting” data to produce the infamous “hockey stick” graph and comparing Penn State’s investigation of his alleged improprieties to its inquiry into the child-molestation accusations against Jerry Sandusky. ...

In refusing to dismiss claims against Steyn and Simberg, the D.C. Court of Appeals placed tremendous weight on the fact that Penn State and other institutions investigated Mann and did not find evidence of academic misconduct. Yet it is the alleged inadequacy of Penn State’s investigation that was the focus of the very posts at issue. Indeed, this was the whole point of the Sandusky comparison. ...

Because the university and other investigations failed to find evidence of scientific misconduct on Mann’s part, the court declared that claims Mann engaged in such action were “definitively discredited.”

So since Penn State also failed to find evidence against Sandusky, then no one else should blame him either?!

I posted the opinion that Sandusky is innocent of the more serious accusations against him, and that his accusers were lying for their own financial benefit. His biggest accuser got millions of dollars. But does this case mean that I can get sued for expressing my opinion?

Name-calling leftist professor attacks alt-right

Brian Leiter is a law professor, over-opinionated philosophy blogger, and typical Jewish leftist, and he has spent the last year calling Donald Trump a Nazi. He says that he is in favor of academic freedom, but he tries to shame any right-wing professors with name-calling. He writes:

All of which brings us to "Charles Martel," the pseudonym of one of the "philosophy" bloggers at what I jokingly called awhile back "Stormfront for philosophers," except I'm beginning to wonder if it is a joke. ... These are not philosophers "on the right," these are NeoNazi morons.

Here is the essay he attacks:

A key thesis of the alt-right, as some contributors here have discussed, is that race is a real feature of the human person ...

Next comes the following claim by the alt-righter: these biological facts about one’s race go on to influence, outright determine, or, more poetically, flavor the sort of civilization that a race will establish. ...

it is not implausible at all to suggest that Western civilization — by which we mean European civilization — can only be fully and genuinely carried on by people of European biological stock (just as, say, Jewish civilization can only be genuinely or fully carried on by people of Jewish stock).

If Martel is wrong, where is the rebuttal?

No, the ctrl-left just wants to silence with name-calling. He is just a hater of white Christian civilization.

Update: BTW, I do agree with Donald Trump that the USA should have vetoed the UN resolution condemning Israel. The West Bank settlements do not violate any international law. I would think that Jews should be calling Barack Obama the Nazi, since he is the one who is saying that Jews should not live in certain places.

SciAm offended by scientific evidence

Leftist and Skeptic Michael Shermer writes in SciAm:

Yet a new study published in the fall issue of the nonpeer-reviewed journal The New Atlantis by Johns Hopkins University's Lawrence S. Mayer and Paul R. McHugh on “Sexuality and Gender” claims that “our scientific knowledge in this area remains unsettled,” that there is no “scientific evidence for the view that sexual orientation is a fixed and innate biological property,” and that no one is “born that way.” ...

Evangelist Jimmy Swaggart articulated the logic this way: “While it is true that the seed of original sin carries with it every type of deviation, aberration, perversion, and wrongdoing, the homosexual cannot claim to have been born that way any more than the drunkard, gambler, killer, etc.”

Shermer is very much offended by this, and cites others who say there is evidence for moderate genetic influences, and that this evidence is greater than that for the most commonly hypothesized social causes.

Okay fine, but isn't that also true for the drunkard, gambler, killer, etc.? And how does this refute the above Mayer-McHugh claims? Don't all the studies imply that no one is "born that way", but rather the product of various social and nonsocial causes?

The peer-reviewed gay research overwhelmingly supports the ideology that ppl should be able to choose their genders, but not their sexual orientations. Shermer admits that publications on this subject are tainted by "the possibility of motivated reasoning and the confirmation bias".

Shermer also makes this argument:

When did you choose to become straight?

Say what?

By demographic distribution (about 95 percent of the population identifies as heterosexual), the majority of you reading this column are straight. You no more chose this sexual orientation than gays or lesbians choose theirs.

This is a poor argument. If you ask straights this question, many of them will vividly recall the moment that they decided in favor of heterosexuality.

The academics would do this study if they thought that it would help their cause.

I don't know why Shermer calls himself a skeptic, because he uncritical accepts pseudoscience all the time.

Blaming all hatred on Trump

The NY Times reports:

This Week in Hate tracks hate crimes and harassment around the country since the election of Donald Trump. ...

On Friday, a post on the anti-Semitic website the Daily Stormer called for a “troll storm” against Jewish people in Whitefish, Mont., where Sherry Spencer, the mother of the white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, owns a building. The post’s author, apparently reacting to calls for Ms. Spencer to sell the building, published pictures of Whitefish residents, including a child, with Star of David symbols and the German word for “Jew.”

If you want both sides of the story, see Sherry Spencer and Daily Stormer. She posts some evidence that she is the victim here.

This appears to be some sort of rural conflict between a left-wing Jewish group that hates Christians, and a right-wing group that hates Jews. The NY Times takes the side of the Jewish leftist Christian-haters, and blames it all on Trump.

Speaking of hating Jews, a Si Valley paper reports:

Google says it is “thinking deeply” about improving its search results after learning that Holocaust deniers and others were successful in making their links rise to the top. ...

In the U.S. and the United Kingdom, those searching for “Did the Holocaust happen?” received a top result linking to a website with the headline, “Top Ten Reasons why the Holocaust didn’t happen.” The site is run by Stormfront, a neo-Nazi white supremacist group.

The Jewish groups should just rebut the reasons, instead of trying to censor them.

Update: Most of these Trump hate stories have turned out to be hoaxes. In other words, fake news from Trump haters.

Neanderthals belonged to the human species

Here is a new BBC interview about the story of human evolution:

It’s been roughly 200,000 years since the first anatomically modern humans, our species Homo sapiens, arose in Africa, and since then we’ve pretty much got everywhere. Our amazing story is written into our genes, mixed up with genes of the other early humans - such as Neanderthals - that we met and mated with along the way. This genetic journey is the subject of a new book - A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived - by writer, broadcaster and geneticist Adam Rutherford.

No, Rutherford tells a different story. He says that the African hominids and Neanderthals belonged to the same species.

So maybe modern humans originated in Europe, as a result of Neanderthal-African interbreeding and subsequent evolution.

He also says that "we are no more or less evolved than any other organism on Earth." [at 6:02]

Yes, I think that we are more evolved than sharks, cockroaches, and termites. Leftists like to deny that any person or animal is better than any other, but this is ridiculous. A typical dictionary definition for evolve is "to change or develop slowly often into a better, more complex, or more advanced state". Yes, we are better, more complex, and more advanced.

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne complains about this statement:

the theory of evolution represents a philosophical worldview: “Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion — a full-fledged alternative to Christianity.”

Yes, evolutionists denying human evolution is ideological, while Christianity and other religions teach that humans are better than animals.

Meanwhile, I guess it has suddenly become acceptable to compare the President to a monkey again.

Disagreeing with Trump to placate academia

Here is an NY Times Sunday Opinion:

That is the opening for those of us who disagree with Mr. Trump. It’s now our job to argue constantly that what voters did in elevating this man to the White House constitutes the greatest assault on our own people in a generation, and to offer another option. ...

... anxiety from a shrinking white majority ... doesn’t have to be our destiny.

Mr. Trump’s victory must make all Americans acknowledge that the choice of embracing or rejecting multiculturalism is not abstract. I know this better than most, because I’ve followed both paths. It is the choice of embracing or rejecting our own people.

R. Derek Black is a graduate student in history, focusing on the early Middle Ages.

Is this guy a Nazi? He is credited with popularizing the meme, “Stop White Genocide”.

My guess is that he realized that he will never get a Medieval History PhD unless he repudiates use of terms like White Genocide. So he writes this essay in coded language.

The NY Times would only publish this essay if he denounces Trump and nationalists. So he does that, and slips in phrases like "greatest assault on our own people" and "choice of embracing or rejecting our own people."

I think that we are being trolled again.

This next quote sounds like more trolling, but I don't think it is.

(((Donna Zuckerberg))), brother to the famous leftist Jewish Facebook founder, :

A specter is haunting the Internet?—?the specter of the “alt-right.” ...

The Alt-Right is hungry to learn more about the ancient world. It believes that the classics are integral to education. It is utterly convinced that classical antiquity is relevant to the world we live in today, a comfort to classicists who have spent decades worrying that the field may be sliding into irrelevance in the eyes of the public.

The next four years are going to be a very difficult time for many people. But if we’re not careful, it could be a dangerously easy time for those who study ancient Greece and Rome. Classics, supported by the worst men on the Internet, could experience a renaissance and be propelled to a position of ultimate prestige within the humanities during the Trump administration, as it was in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Classics made great again.

This is my call to arms for all classicists. ...

When you hear someone — be they a student, a colleague, or an amateur — say that they are interested in Classics because of “the Greek miracle” or because Classics is “the foundation of Western civilization and culture,” challenge that viewpoint respectfully but forcefully. Engage them on their assumed definitions of “foundation,” “Western,” “civilization,” and “culture.” Point out that such ideas are a slippery slope to white supremacy. Seek better reasons for studying Classics. ...

As the Alt-Right becomes more vocal and normalized, we may face pressure to frame our research and teaching in a way that will appeal to this new audience of Classics enthusiasts. Resist that pressure.

So I guess studying the Classics or praising Western Civilization is just code for Nazi white supremacy. And hating Trump is just code for wanting to tear down Western Civilization.

Update: If you think that academic freedom would allow the grad student to have any political opinions he wants, see this persecution of a philosophy PhD who supposedly has some views that gotten him called a neo-Nazi. He denies it, but here is how his views have been reported:

But a sampling of his recent public comments suggest, at least, a highly Indo-Eurocentric worldview and an antipathy toward Islam. He is Iranian-American. ...

He also described the “political ideologies of liberalism, democracy and universal human rights” as “ill conceived” and “bankrupt.”

Regarding Islam, he said that “Nearly everything allegedly glorious about Islam was parasitically appropriated by Arabs and Turks for the Caucasian civilizations of greater Iran. Moreover, this parasitic appropriation of a mutilated Iranian civilization took place in the wake of a murderous campaign of rape, plunder and destruction that can only be described as history’s first and greatest white genocide.”

Apparently he needs to start badmouthing white ppl if he wants a career in academia.

Are his statements about Islam and Iran true or not? It is difficult to find out, if addressing the issue gets PhD philosophers ostracized as neo-Nazis.

Update: Donna posts a Jezebel rant against the Alt right:

In this fight, the alt-right has found a useful ally in the Red Pill community, which is also invested in portraying itself as the inheritors of the Western tradition. The alt-right is, in fact, quite small: ...

I’ve been lurking on various Red Pill sites for over a year now to do research for a book about how these men talk about ancient Greece and Rome. (Which they do, much more than one might expect. They are especially obsessed with the concept of Stoicism.) In that time, I’ve been an almost-daily visitor to the r/theredpill and r/mensrights subreddits, along with A Voice For Men, Return of Kings, and the personal blogs of some of the men one might call “thought leaders” in the community. When I started my research, none of these sites explicitly identified as alt-right — but gradually, over the course of the constantly worsening nightmare that has been 2016, most of them have aligned themselves with the movement to varying degrees.

The article calls "Nazi" 22 times.

To these white civilization haters, the nightmare of 2016 was that they were unable to destroy Donald Trump by calling him a Nazi.

Besides the Nazi name-calling, her biggest complaint is that the Alt Right is a new coalition of diverse ideologies that have come together to stop the Leftist destruction of Western Civilization, and they have gained enuf power to elect Trump:

The only way to understand the alt-right is to stopping thinking of it as a single monolithic entity and realize that it is a fragile coalition of hateful ideologies, of deplorable men using the internet to perform white masculinity by playacting as Nazis to feed on our fear.

She needed to be trolled. Her book should be amusing.

The ideological opposition to biological truth

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist professor Jerry Coyne writes:

One distressing characteristic of the Left, at least as far as science is concerned, is to let our ideology trump scientific data; that is, some of us ignore biological data when it’s inimical to our political preferences. This plays out in several ways: the insistence that race doesn’t exist (and before you accuse me of saying that races do exist, read about what I’ve written here before: the issue is complex), that there are no evolutionarily-based innate (e.g., genetically based) behavioral or psychological differences between ethnic groups, and that there are no such differences, either, between males and females within humans.

These claims are based not on biological data, but on ideological fears of the Left: if we admit of such differences, it could foster racism and sexism.  Thus. any group differences we do observe, whether they reside in psychology, physiology, or morphology, are to be explained on first principle as resulting from culture rather than genes. (I do of course recognize that culture can interact with genes to produce behaviors.) This ideological blinkering leads to the conclusion that when we see a difference in performance between groups and genders, the obvious explanation is culture and oppression, and the remedy is equal outcomes rather than equal opportunities. Yet in areas like most sports, where everyone agrees that males are on average larger and stronger than females, it’s clear that the behavioral differences (i.e., performance) result from biological differences that are surely based on evolution (see below). In sports like track and field or judo, nobody would think of making males compete with females. ...

Thus, to claim, as does P.Z. Myers in a new post, that higher testosterone levels in males have minimal influence on their aggressiveness compared to the effects of culture, is a claim based not on data—which show that he’s wrong—but on ideology.

Yes, Coyne is right. Leftists nearly always deny biological truth.

Update: Coyne responds to feminist criticism, and promises another response.

Update: Here is Coyne, The evolution of sexual dimorphism in humans: Part 2.

Update: Here is a comment:

Its high time we declared there are two major ideological enemies of evolutionary biology, and Right-wing/creationism is now less dangerous than the Leftist/feminist one.

The ways they will get their Leftist ideologies past science is by
1. pushing postmodernist poisons – truth does not exist, science is white male whatever, facts are oppressive.
2. calling scientists who are looking at evidence, data and facts from the point of view of truth and intellectual honesty as racist, sexist, bigoted etc to silence them.
3. insist any criticism of THEIR theories is hate, harassment and, ironically, “ideology”.

How Europeans became suited for democracy

I previously argued that the Catholic Church banning cousin marriage greatly helped to civilize Europe. Now here is some supporting research:

countries with strong extended families as characterized by a high level of cousin marriages exhibit a weak rule of law and are more likely autocratic. ...

These findings point to a causal effect of marriage patterns on the proper functioning of formal institutions and democracy. The study further suggests that the Churches’ marriage rules – by destroying extended kin-groups – led Europe on its special path of institutional and democratic development.

Europeans became more individualistic, but I do not know if it is genetic or cultural.

Human evolution is tricky to measure in modern times. John Hawks reports:

One of the most obvious cases of recent human evolution is the increasing frequency with which individuals don’t develop third molars, what is called “M3 agenesis”. This condition is when the third molars, or wisdom teeth, don’t form at all – the individual never developed them. ...

So M3 agenesis is a fascinating example of recent biological change in human populations, and we know very little about how and why it has changed.

So we do not know for sure whether this is evolution is action.

Liberal woman rants about men

The NY Times has an essay on What Women Really Think of Men:

“Trump is a narcissist,” a middle-aged white woman in East Stroudsburg, Pa., told me in the early evening on Election Day. “I know,” she added, “because my husband is one, too.” She said she disliked both candidates, but she voted for Mr. Trump. ...

Barack Obama, who identifies as a feminist, even recently reflected on his own shortcomings as a husband at home: “I can look back now and see that, while I helped out, it was usually on my schedule and on my terms. The burden disproportionately and unfairly fell on Michelle.” Men taking responsibility, even retrospectively, is what it’s going to take for us to believe another world is possible, one in which we don’t romanticize female superiority to let men off the hook. ...

Irin Carmon is the co-author, with Shana Knizhnik, of “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”

This is female thinking.

A man might say that someone is a narcissist based on the symptoms and the diagnostic criteria. A woman will call someone a narcissist as a way of griping about her own husband. She probably only calls her husband a narcissist because some friend of hers called someone else a narcissist.

And then there is the belief that no man is ever good enuf. The man could be the President of the USA, but if he let running the country take priority over assisting his wife with child care, then he is not taking responsibility enuf.

The article has several examples of Trump voters who accept human nature, as opposed to others who are living in some fantasy world where women are more like men and men are more like women.

Yes, there is some truth to that. If you think that the President of the USA should be apologizing for his wife doing child care, then you might not be a Trump voter.

No Dutch free speech on immigration

Free speech law prof (and immigrant) E. Volokh reports:

“Should there be more or fewer immigrants from Muslim countries to the U.S.?” ...

Dutch politician Geert Wilders has just been criminally convicted for asking this very question in the Netherlands, with regard to Moroccan immigrants, and suggesting that the answer should be “fewer.” ...

This means that, according to the Dutch government, Dutch citizens aren’t allowed to forthrightly debate the matter, and to question egalitarian doctrine on the subject.

This is the Ctrl-left at work. Maybe most Dutch ppl want fewer Moroccan immigrants, but saying so is against the law.

One comment that is still legal in the USA:

The fewer the better. Zero is optimum. Their holy book is a war manual.

Here is another:

Once liberals take over the Supreme Court, this will eventually be coming to America.

Fortunately, Donald Trump has delayed the liberal takeover.

In the USA, it is common to hear the opinion that the radically increased non-white immigration is a good thing. It is Democrat Party policy. But as a practical matter, no reputable person is allowed to say that it is a bad thing. Any such person would be called a Nazi and a white supremacist, and be forced to apologize. He would not even be allowed to sell peanuts at the ball park.

Speaking of whites, an Atlantic mag article says:

So, are Jews white? “There’s really no conclusion except that it’s complicated,” said Goldstein.

And other questions about Jewish identity are complicated also.

Jews can identify any way they want. I just want to point out that when Jews attack white culture, they do not necessarily identify as white. They are just one group badmouthing another group.

The plan to invade California

Brenda Walker writes on VDARE:

In 1997, Presidente Ernesto Zedillo proclaimed to the National Council of La Raza in Chicago, “I have proudly affirmed that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders.”

Mexican American Legal Defense Fund founder Mario Obledo stated in 1998, “California is going to be a Hispanic state. Anyone who doesn’t like it should leave. Every constitutional office in California is going to be held by Hispanics in the next 20 years.” People who don’t like such demographic changes “should go back to Europe.” (Incidentally, Mr. Obledo was also the California Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Gov. Jerry Brown during his first reign.)

A Zogby poll in 2002 found that 58 percent of Mexicans agree with the statement, “The territory of the United States’ southwest rightfully belongs to Mexico,” as indicated in the photo below.

Another 20 year invasion plan was detailed in a 2006 New Yorker article:

Al Qaeda’s twenty-year plan began on September 11th, with a stage that Hussein calls “The Awakening.” ...

The third stage, “Arising and Standing Up,” will last from 2007 to 2010. Al Qaeda’s focus will be on Syria and Turkey, but it will also begin to directly confront Israel, in order to gain more credibility among the Muslim population.

In the fourth stage, lasting until 2013, Al Qaeda will bring about the demise of Arab governments. ...

Then an Islamic caliphate can be declared, inaugurating the fifth stage of Al Qaeda’s grand plan, which will last until 2016. “At this stage, the Western fist in the Arab region will loosen, and Israel will not be able to carry out preëmptive or precautionary strikes,” Hussein writes. “The international balance will change.” Al Qaeda and the Islamist movement will attract powerful new economic allies, such as China, and Europe will fall into disunity.

The sixth phase will be a period of “total confrontation.” The now established caliphate will form an Islamic Army and will instigate a worldwide fight between the “believers” and the “non-believers.” Hussein proclaims, “The world will realize the meaning of real terrorism.” By 2020, “definitive victory” will have been achieved. Victory, according to the Al Qaeda ideologues, means that “falsehood will come to an end. . . . The Islamic state will lead the human race once again to the shore of safety and the oasis of happiness.”

I guess most ppl did not believe these plans at the time, but the plans have been prophet. American policy has assisted these policies in every way. We have invited the invaders, and deposed the secular Arab leaders, just as in the plan.

Ten Reasons to Look Forward

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future is a new book making the case:

Drawing on a variety of social science data, Norberg points to ten ways the world has progressed over the last three centuries:

• Food is plentiful and cheap.
• Clean water and good sanitation are increasingly available.
• Life expectancy is longer.
• Poverty has fallen dramatically.
• War and violence blight fewer lives.
• Increasing wealth has benefited the environment.
• Literacy is widespread.
• People are increasingly free of arbitrary authority.
• Equality is increasingly experienced and demanded.

Some of these are overstated. (Not sure why only 9 ways are listed.)

The last two seem dubious. Ronald Reagan’s famous 1961 lament for lost American freedoms was: “We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free”.

It sure seems to me that we are more and more bound by arbitrary authority, and that the American middle class is being split into rich and poor classes.

Here is an example, from the day's news:

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Web giants YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft will step up efforts to remove extremist content from their websites by creating a common database.

The companies will share 'hashes' - unique digital fingerprints they automatically assign to videos or photos - of extremist content they have removed from their websites to enable their peers to identify the same content on their platforms.

This seems like censorship from an arbitrary authority to me, and coordinated censorship of this sort did not exist before now.

A few years ago ppl could buy medical services and send a kid to college, without supplying income tax returns.

From today's NY Times:

The real economy more than doubled in size; ...

Yet for half of all Americans, their share of the total economic pie has shrunk significantly, new research has found.

This group — the approximately 117 million adults stuck on the lower half of the income ladder — “has been completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s,” the team of economists found. “Even after taxes and transfers, there has been close to zero growth for working-age adults in the bottom 50 percent.”

I am not even sure that equality is increasingly demanded. I think that ppl are more accepting of economic inequality.

Pizzagate

The Hawaiian Libertarian writes:

The more you "take the red pill" and see how far the rabbit hole goes, the higher up you climb the allegorical pyramid of "illuminated" knowledge that enables you to literally and metaphysically SEE the satanic paradigm that rules this world. ...

Most of the poisonous fruits that will destroy us, are hidden in plain site and we are too blinded to see, because we've been imbibing of these fruits of deceit and deception for our entire lives. ...

This of course, is the sick, twisted stuff of nightmares that finally got some serious exposure with the revelations from WikiLeaks that we now know of as "Pizza Gate."

I haven't followed PizzaGate. It seems too bizarre and sick to be true. I think that someone is trolling us. If so, it is brilliant. If any of it is true, then the rabbit hole goes deeper than I thought.

I used to think that stories like this could not be true, or the mainstream news media would have reported it, and govt prosecutors would have acted. I don't believe that anymore.

The NY Times reports:

what is being called Pizzagate, an online conspiracy theory asserting, with no evidence, that the restaurant is somehow tied to a child abuse ring. ...

The misinformation campaign about Comet began when the email account of John D. Podesta, an aide to Hillary Clinton, was hacked and his emails were published by WikiLeaks during the presidential campaign. Days before the election, users on the online message board 4chan noticed that one of Mr. Podesta’s leaked emails contained communications with James Alefantis, Comet’s owner, discussing a fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton.

It is funny how leftists use the term "no evidence" to imply that something is false. It just tells me that someone is wearing blinders.

There is some intriguing evidence. It is weak, circumstantial, and implausible, unless you happen to believe that prominent Democrats are possessed by the Devil. Podesta does have some weird stuff in his house, and was invited to a Satanic ritual. Or so the story says.

NYT tries to define the Alt-right

The leftist news media does not know what to do with the Alt-right. They alternate between treating it as a handful of fringe radical and claiming that it is widespread and dangerous.

The NY Times prints its latest spin:

But since then, and certainly since the National Policy Institute event, alt-right has come more and more to mean white nationalist. ...

For example, the alt-right has an environmentalist component, centered on a neo-pagan group called the Wolves of Vinland. The Norwegian heavy-metal musician Varg Vikernes, after serving 16 years for murder, has an alt-right blog ...

At the National Policy Institute conference, the writer F. Roger Devlin gave a talk on why young Norwegian women in Groruddalen, outside Oslo, preferred dating Somali and Pakistani gang members to ethnic Norwegian boys-next-door. ...

Likewise, the common alt-right slur “cuckservative,” a portmanteau combining cuckold and conservative, is not just a colorful way of saying that establishment conservatives have been unmanly. According to Matthew Tait, a young ex-member of the far-right British National Party, the metaphor has a precise ornithological meaning. Like the reed-warbler hatching eggs that a cuckoo (from which the word “cuckold” comes) has dropped into its nest, cuckservatives are raising the offspring of their foes. One can apply the metaphor equally to progressive ideas or to the children of the foreign-born. ...

Last month, several alt-right writers, including Mr. Spencer, had their accounts suspended by Twitter. Mr. Spencer says he appreciates the “frenetic energy” of trolling but doesn’t do it himself. ...

The alt-right is small. It may remain so. And yet, while small, it is part of something this election showed to be much bigger: the emergence of white people, who evidently feel their identity is under attack, as a “minority”-style political bloc.

They are under attack, if their Twitter accounts are being suspended.

Ppl on the alt-right will continue to say outrageous things because that is what they have to do to get their points across and to push back against the censors.

Ppl on the ctrl-left will continue to try to shame them into silence because that is how they control the political discussion.

Rape is re-defined again

Law professor E. Volokh reports:

From the Clark University Dean of Students office: ...

Examples of some coercive statements include: “If you love me you would have sex with me.”, “If you don’t have sex with me I will find someone who will.”, and “I’m not sure I can be with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with me.” Coercive statements are often part of many campus acquaintance rapes. Being coerced into having sex or performing sexual acts is not consenting to having sex and is considered rape/sexual assault.

Some comments:

It gets worse: According to the U.S. Department of Justice (https://www.justice.gov/ovw/sexual-assault), sexual assault is defined as "any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs without the EXPLICIT consent of the recipient." ...

For a long time, a feminist goal has been to keep expanding the definition of rape until every man is a criminal. This is just the latest. Someday it will be rape if a man refuses to be castrated.

I am not the language police. I am just informing my readers about usage of the term. When you hear that someone committed rape, it might have been something that used to be called consensual sexual relations.

Speaking of colleges teaching nutty stuff, check out the Ohio State social justice class that helped radicalize the Moslem Somali refugee who went berserk stabbing ppl.

Disavowing the kooks

I get most of my news from the Leftist mainstream media, and now they talk about white supremacists a lot, and urge Trump to disavow them again.

Censorship and controlling the parameters of discussion are tools of the Ctrl-left. They try to shame anyone who says anything politically incorrect.

Twitter is even threatening to ban the US President.

To combat this, the Alt-right does a lot of trolling.

As an example, a Trump supporter recently used the German/Nazi word lugenpresse for "lying press". Republicans are being asked to disavow him and everyone else who uses the word.

It is foolish to let the Ctrl-left control your language, or who you associate with.

A good example of trolling is this anonymous London Guardian article:

‘Alt-right’ online poison nearly turned me into a racist ...

About a week before the US election, I heard one of these YouTubers use the phrase “red-pilled” – a term from the film The Matrix – in reference to people being awakened to the truth about the world and SJWs. Suddenly I thought: “This is exactly like a cult. What am I doing? I’m turning into an arsehole.”

I unsubscribed and unfollowed from everything, and told myself outright: “You’re becoming a racist. What you’re doing is turning you into a terrible, hateful person.” Until that moment I hadn’t even realised that “alt-right” was what I was becoming; I just thought I was a more open-minded person for tolerating these views.

It would take every swearword under the sun to describe how I now feel about tolerating such content and gradually accepting it as truth. I’ve spent every day since feeling shameful for being so blind and so easily coerced.

US election day rolled around, and I was filled with dread. Trump’s win felt like EU referendum morning all over again – magnified by a hundred. Although I never shared any of this rubbish with anybody, I feel partly responsible. It’s clear this terrible ideology has now gone mainstream.

The Guardian does not admit that it has been trolled, but it was apparently written by Godfrey Elfwick.

To get an Alt-right opinion published, he had to pretend to be an SJW denouncing the Alt-right.