Since Richard Spencer is a hard target, and since the alt right will not disown him, “Love Lives Here” is now gunning for his mother.
I think it is time to show “Love Lives Here” a little tough love.
This Tanya Gersh is doing a great job at dispelling hostile stereotypes of Jews. </sarcasm>
fourteen months ago, I said that Aleppo would very shortly fall.
Eight months ago I said that it had fallen for certain values of fallen, and its fall indicates that asymmetric warfare only works when the stronger side is fighting with one hand tied behind its back – usually tied by the State Department. My prolific commenter B complained that Aleppo had not actually fallen yet, therefore this failed to demonstrate that asymmetric warfare is bunk.
OK.
Now it really has fallen, and asymmetric warfare really is bunk. The weaker side really was unable to go guerrilla.
Mao’s guerrilla warfare consisted of raiding China from across a border behind the protection of Soviet troops. The terrorists are heading to the Turkish border to repeat this form of guerrilla warfare.
Syria simply has no problem with terrorism in the sense of Somali guy attends college, gets training that white people are microagressing against him, then runs amuck killing white people at the college, then the college apologizes to Islam and the Somali community and gives white people further training in refraining from microagressing. The only terrorism problem in Syria is shells, mortars, and rockets raining down on civilians from terrorist controlled territories, and they have just cleaned up the last terrorist controlled area in or near a big city, after the style of the siege of Grozny.
If Syrians do not have to put up with fourth generation warfare style terrorism, then we do not have to put up with terrorism, with fourth generation warfare, either.
You kill Somali guy. Then you put everyone who encouraged or enabled Somali guy in the gulag. And you don’t let them out until many years have passed since the last terrorist act. You level his mosque and his college, then you put all the instigators at college and mosque in the Gulag, and you make sure no one associated with his mosque or his college ever gets a job preaching or teaching ever again. That is how you do it. And you keep an eye out for anyone who sounds like those who instigated Somali guy. Oh, and you deport everyone who looks like Somali guy. But deportation is only half the answer since those who enabled and encouraged Somali guy’s terrorism were generally white.
Early appointments hard core, and primarily directed at those departments that you need to prevent a coup by the permanent government against the president, or make a self coup by the president against the permanent government.
Later appointments softcore cuckservative, and directed at those departments that are irrelevant in the event of a coup.
A big exception to this is the Department of State, which applies semi soft power to overthrow foreign governments and manipulate political outcomes within America. It does not directly control anything that can be directly used to make a coup, except for organizations like the CIA for which Trump has already chosen an establishment figure who is nonetheless extremely hostile to the State Department, but it does control the NGOs that can send out a mob of protesters to delegitimize the government and provide justification for a coup. Trump’s plans for dealing with the State Department (coup central) are unclear. I conjecture he is going to promise them someone they are happy with, then change his mind a few weeks after becoming president, once he has his own men in the army, the FBI, and the justice department.
The Overton window has formed a bubble. People inside the bubble now refuse to have anything to do with those outside the bubble, refuse to hear, refuse to understand, refuse even to notice, react to them only with ignorant crazy hatred, and if anyone respectable shows signs of listening, he loses respectability and gets cast out of the bubble. No longer will respectable people have anything to do with him. He shall be friendless and alone. Except that so many people have been cast out of the bubble that he probably will not be friendless and alone.
This particular form of the left singularity, like many forms, leads inevitably to civil war. Unlike most forms of the left singularity, it will lead to civil war that the left is likely to lose.
Know your enemy and know yourself, win a hundred battles without jeopardy
Know yourself, but not your enemy, win some, lose some.
know neither yourself nor your enemy, always lose.
The left has weaponized self inflicted ignorance, symbolized by literally and physically turning their backs on their opponents. This weapon is apt to backfire. Not a good idea to show your opponent your back.
The back turning maneuver is a DHV (demonstration of higher value) It subcommnicates “You want our attention, but are beneath us, and are no threat to us”. It will be harder to pull off once Trump imprisons the officials of a few sanctuary cities and fires the Washington press core. (Which despite being a supposedly private enterprise organization works from government offices and receives the usual services and benefits provided by government employees to people in government offices, as do a great many politically critical supposedly private enterprise organizations. The phrase “NGO” has become a joke, with even NGO employees describing their work as government employment.)
A good reply to the physical back turning maneuver is to pour an iced drink over the offender. You have to respond to the “You are no threat” subcommunication by showing you are a threat.
He is not telling me, and it is risky to attempt to predict the actions of individuals, but Trump has a long history of picking up hundred dollar bills lying on the pavement that everyone else refuses to pick up.
And for the defeat of Isis, the hundred dollar bill lying on the pavement is:
Islamic State’s claim to be the Caliphate rests on it being a state, on it controlling territory, a capital, a uniformed army with proper chain of command, and wealth. If you are hiding in a cave on a mountainside, you cannot be the Caliph. So, to kill Islamic State, make it stop being a state. As yet another mere terrorist organization, has less appeal.
So cut a deal with Putin and Assad for a joint attack on the capital of Islamic State. Follow Assad’s brutal example by leafleting the place telling everyone to flee or die. Give them the opportunity to flee. Then kill everyone who has not fled. Level the capital to the ground. Utterly flatten everything. What the bombs leave standing roll over with mine clearing tanks followed by bulldozer tanks. Rebuild under the control of Sunnis who are in Assad’s pocket. Make sure any Sunnis not in his pocket are dead or fled, preferably dead. Repopulate with cooperative Sunnis so that your genocide does not look too much like genocide.
Islamic State will probably still be around as a terrorist organization, but they are, or recently were, committed to realist version of Islam. If they are not a state any more, will not call themselves “Islamic State”, will not claim their leader is the rightful Caliph, merely the future Caliph.
He is keeping the plan secret, because he needs to cut a deal and it will make it hard to bargain if he is precommitted to getting the deal.
Of course the left is going to scream genocide, but their humanitarian intervention in Syria was predicated on Alawites being genocided and Christians being expelled to Lebanon, and their humanitarian intervention in the Congo predictably resulted in many, probably most, Tutsi women in the Congo being vaginally impaled with objects as large as themselves. The left murdered about a hundred and seventy million people during the twentieth century, and we should just stop taking their pious cries of moral superiority seriously.
Leftists are weak people, are noisy women and weak men, who identify with power and cruelty, and thus identify with mass murderers and torturers like Che Guevera, Aristide, and Zapata. They loved the Khmer Rouge until the Khmer Rouge lost power by murdering each other until there were not enough competent Khmer Rouge left to uphold the regime. They loved the Khmer Rouge as long as the Khmer Rouge were successfully engaging in mass murder and mass torture, and hated them when, and only when, they lost, hated them not for mass murder and mass torture, but for weakness. As small boys identify with men who drive monster trucks, leftists identify with those who murder and torture. Hence the tendency of teenage boys to be radical leftists, and to cease being radical leftists when they reach their full growth and realize they need to be careful about getting into fights lest they kill someone with their bare hands.
So why are people reluctant to pick up this hundred dollar bill?
Because of an ideological left wing progressive belief in the potency of guerrilla warfare. In practice, guerrillas only succeed to the extent that they are backed by an outside power – usually the State Department. The Vietnam war with in part a proxy war between Russia and America with North and South Vietnam as proxies, but in larger part a proxy war between the State Department’s blue empire of the consulates, and the Pentagon’s red empire of the bases, as was increasingly obvious towards the end. Islamic state is largely a creation of the State Department, a part of their efforts to overthrown various Arab regimes, in particular Libya, Iraq, and Syria. Once they go back from State to State warfare down to guerrilla warfare and lose State Department backing, they will be insignificant.
Scott Alexander has published an essay calling on his fellow leftists to stop screaming racist-misogynist-homophobe-literally-Hitler at everyone all the time at maximum volume.
And a lot of gutless ladyboy cuckservatives are so traumatized at being unkindly treated by the left that they are citing it favorably.
I would unkindly interpret his essay has “Please do not set fire to the Reichstag while Trump has the army and the police, and stop being mean to the legacy Americans until we have imported enough brown allies to kill them all.”
What Scott fears is exactly what I hope for with every fiber of my being: That the left screaming racistsexisthomophobe at everyone all the time at maximum volume will eventually lead to a preference cascade where large numbers of manly men go around wearing t shirts saying “I am a proud racist misogynist etc”
If Scott actually wanted peace rather than democidal war, he would be willing to talk to the right, rather than patronizingly lecture them with formulaic repetitious hostile patronizing Stalinist boilerplate, and willing to listen to their reply, their reply invariably being it that we have heard that crap a thousand times before, and it is obviously untrue from scientific studies and everyone’s lived experience.
Scott’s essay is not an olive branch. It is advice to the left as to how to get in the best position for their coming war upon legacy Americans.
This post stolen wholesale from Steve Johnson’s excellent comment.
Trump is our leader, and Trump plans to do this in accord with the spirit of the constitution, which is to say, without helicopter rides to the Pacific. Maybe it can be made to work that way, and if can be made to work that way, its our duty to make it work that way.
But the left really are hateful horrible thoroughly nasty people. Notice for example that servants of the Clintons have a remarkable rate of “suicide” and “accidental” death. I rather think therefore it cannot be made to work that way, that helicopter rides are going to be needed. If you allow commies freedom of speech, you wind up without freedom of speech.
There are a lot of highly intelligent really nice people on the left, for example Scott Aaronson and Scott Alexander, who pat themselves on the back about their wonderful commitment to civil discourse and how they quietly disapprove of the worst extremes of Social Justice Warriors. But they refuse to hear anything that anyone to the right of them says, and refuse to engage in in intelligent rational discussion those to the right of them, instead engaging in casual, thoughtless and ignorant demonization. Their niceness manifests as willingness to be literally cuckolded, rather than willingness to notice that the US was backing the genocide the Alawites and the Tutsis, or willingness to engage in intelligent civilized conversation with their intelligent and civilized opponents, because to engage in intelligent civilized conversation with their intelligent and civilized opponents would involve thoughtcrime. There was a time when Scott Alexander would converse to those to his right, but he, and the entire left, have stopped doing so, probably due to the ever expanding definition of thoughtcrime. The entire left has shut down any conversation with the entire right, for fear of thought contamination.
If you will not talk, it is going to be war sooner or later.
If someone just flat refuses to talk to me or talk to anyone like me, he is an enemy. So genuine unironic Nazis are not enemies, merely friends that are mistaken about socialism and the role of Jews. They will talk with me in a civilized rational fashion, so seem unlikely to murder me. Theoretically they will murder Moldbug but they really just do not seem like the kind of people who would murder Moldbug. As soon as someone like Moldbug turns up, I figure they would turn into merely ironic Nazis. But the left will not talk with me except under my moderate prog identities, nor with anyone like me. Not even the high IQ and supposedly moderate and reasonable left, those that think themselves the sane, smart, and moderate left. Which makes resolution of conflicts impossible, and in the long run, war inevitable. In the long run, they are going to wind up unintentionally blundering into trying to kill the people that they have intemperately demonized and will not hear, and the people that they have demonized and that they will not hear will try to kill them.
And, given that war seems inevitable, we would be foolish to start the salami slicer on the unironic nazis. The cuckservative collapse occurred because in an endlessly unsuccessful effort to make themselves acceptable to the left they read one faction after another out of the conservative movement, as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, whatever, until there was hardly anyone remaining, until the salami slicer had consumed most of the salami.
I recently read how Nixon was supposedly a terrible horrible opponent of affirmative action. In actual fact Nixon enormously expanded affirmative action. He just did not go quite as far in making dissent from affirmative action a crime as some people wanted – which oversight was swiftly remedied by the justice department in a series of consent decrees, wherein employees committing thought crime constitutes proof of discrimination. Affirmative action under Nixon was the salami slicer moving into high gear, and recent events are the salami slicer running short of salami.
Trump has promised to drain the swamp.
Then in his acceptance speech, he promised not to drain the swamp.
This is less worrying than it might seem, since when you purge powerful people, you don’t want them to see it coming.
From now till the start of the purge, he is going to be playing his cards very close to his chest. Any predictions made from his behavior between now and the purge will be incorrect, because his behavior between now and the purge will be deceptively moderate. The start of the purge will itself be deceptively moderate. And then he will keep on purging. How far he will go, nobody knows. I don’t know.
I would guess the purge starts in March at the earliest. First he has to get his key people into position. Then suddenly, wham, he gets his enemies out of position.
He has for many years been psychologically preparing the American people for massive firings of the permanent government, which firings the courts will deem illegal, but the public will wonder what the hell the courts are maundering about. These firings will happen when those he is about to fire are least expecting it, when they think they have gotten the upper hand over Trump. And during the first months of a Trump government, it will look as if they have the upper hand over Trump.
There may well be a Reichstag fire moment, when something happens that dramatically symbolizes the resistance of the permanent government to the merely elected government. Expect the newspapers to return to their old form and triumphantly announce how Trump has been decisively and humiliatingly defeated, how his policy is in ruins, because impossible to implement. If, as is likely, they announce that, they are falling into his trap, as when the Comintern set fire to the conveniently unguarded Reichstag.
The big known unknown is how thoroughly he intends to drain the swamp.
What we would like Trump to do is purge the government of traitors, bribe takers, degenerates, people on the revolving door between regulators and regulated, enemies of America, and, of course, Satanists. The Ming Dynasty criminalized sects because of the propensity of sect members to attain political power, such as the Ming dynasty itself. Deem membership of a sect that does weird stuff moral turpitude. Then fix numerous consent judgments organized by the Justice Department that make political dissent a violation of the affirmative action laws. Generate a precedent that disparate impact is legal, and unambiguously legalize domain specific IQ tests of the Fizzbuzz type or domain appropriate physical tests of the Marine pull up type. If only 0.1% of female and black applicants pass your company’s Fizzbuzz, you should have a cast iron defense against discrimination charges, even if search of your emails reveal engineers saying hateful things about women and blacks. Generate the legal precedent that evidence of political dissent cannot be presented as evidence of discrimination, and may not be presented in court because it merely prejudices the judgment. Then reverse the degree inflation that forces ever increasing numbers of students to spend ever increasing time in educational institutions that do not educate but merely indoctrinate. then confiscate the endowments, burn Harvard to the ground and salt the earth where it stood. Or redevelop Harvard into shops, offices, and hotels, which is more Trump’s style.
And, of course, use state power over cable and broadcast television to encourage the companies to fire Colbert and replace him with someone with an actual sense of humor and willingness to puncture actual sacred cows, like Pax Dickinson.
But before he gets to making Saturday Night Live funny again, has to get to redevelop Harvard into shops, condos, hotels, and offices.
Currently we have an elaborate system where committees give grants to people who are on committees. This renders power and funding untraceable and difficult to control. To drain the swamp, has to run government money through a direct hierarchy operating on das Führerprinzip.
So the Dean of a university should be appointed by the board, the Dean should have the power to hire and fire professors, and all academic funding should go through university, which is to say through the dean. If the Pentagon wants a professor at MIT to research something, it should pay MIT, not the professor.
We should abolish tenure. Tenure was supposed to make professors proudly independent and capable of dissent, but instead every single academic at every single institution grovels. When the line changes, every professor changes his position and instantly forgets that the line was different yesterday. The line emerges from an amorphous mass of committees, obscuring who has power and who makes decisions.
Outside funding of academics should be seen as corrupting. Would Steve Jobs be happy if one of his executives received large payments from a committee containing people connected to a competing company? All funding should go directly through the board and Dean/CEO.
And when we have replaced hidden lines of authority with direct lines of authority, on das Führerprinzip, we can then hold those with that authority responsible for what they do with it.
After getting rid of committees and outside funding, which hides who has power and who makes decisions, then and only then can we purge academia.
That is what is needed to stop Cthulhu from always swimming left, that is what is needed to make Saturday Night Live funny again. Whether Trump is up to go all the way with this program is, of course, the big known unknown.
After a wonderful speech indicting American anarcho tyranny, Duterte announced the Philippines would no longer be a vassal of the US and would henceforth be a vassal of China. And how about a bilateral trade deal between the Philippines and China? He then went to China’s ancient, traditional, and natural enemy, Japan, and said the Philippines would not be anyone’s vassal, and how about a bilateral trade deal between the Philippines and Japan?
A little while ago the notoriously and outrageously corrupt US Justice Department, notorious for launching frivolous lawsuits against corporations with deep pockets, and suggesting that the corporations settle by handing out huge amounts of slush money to private individuals who are political allies of individuals in the Justice Department, launched criminal charges of corruption against the Prime Minister of Malaysia, as if Malaysia was some suburb of Washington.
Instead of coming to the US to be put in a US jail by a US court, for crimes committed entirely within Malaysia with absolutely no connection to the US, the Prime Minister of Malaysia headed off to China to do a Duterte.
The specific accusation made by the US Department of Justice against Najib is that he had his Malaysian government do a large favor for a private Malaysian corporation, which subsequently, surprise surprise, made a large private donation to his Malaysian private political campaign, as if this sort thing does not happen all the time in Clinton emails, and as if the US Department of Justice does not openly do far worse things every day.
My analysis is that the dominoes are falling as a result of Blue Empire defeat in Aleppo, as the dominoes fell after Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, or American defeat in Vietnam. But the incompetent, hostile and unpleasant behavior of the US government also pushes its subject states to do what the weakness of the US government allows them to do.
Hat Tip Spandrell, the reactionary and darkly enlightened expert on all things East Asian.
The US is theoretically aiding the “Moderate Muslims”, the free Syrian Army, the FSA, which theoretically controls a small and rapidly shrinking patch of Aleppo.
In actual practice, those that control Aleppo will murder any male non sunni Muslim on sight, regardless of age, which makes them less moderate than Islamic State. The US is, as Putin observes, aiding terrorists.
Stuart Ramsay was in Aleppo when those moderate Muslims of the Arab Spring, the movement to make the middle east democratic and progressive, took control, and was there when they almost immediately lost control. It seems that the FSA only existed for a few weeks or months, with rank and file FSA fighters swiftly going over to those fighting holy war for race and religion, and the FSA leadership mysteriously vanishing.
In retrospect it is clear that the Arab Spring was an act of aggression by the Cathedral against middle eastern regimes, no doubt genuinely inspired by the most noble sentiments, but entirely without real local roots.
The “moderates” were, it is now apparent, rootless cosmopolitans who identified ideologically and politically with the “ïnternational community” and expected to get quasi governmental jobs, for example NGO jobs, media jobs, academic jobs, and so forth, provided by the international community, in international places.
Ramsay reports that the FSA made no real effort to set up a governing structure in the areas they controlled, unlike the various groups waging tribal and holy war against various other Syrians minutely different from themselves. This is the typical problem with quislings. They don’t really care because they expect their foreign masters to do the heavy lifting. If they do nothing, maybe their foreign masters will pick up the slack, if they do something, their foreign masters will capture most of the benefit. And if everything goes bad, they expect to be working for an NGO some place else.
The FSA, like the rest of the Arab Springers, were rootless cosmopolitans who acted the way quislings serving a foreign master typically act. And now they are all dead or fled, mostly fled. And they fled four years ago, and are now doing international community jobs like section eighting refugees into your suburb.