Madness

The only attacks worth listening to are the ones nobody hears

Last night I was checking out a #gamergate meetup where Milo Yiannopoulos and Christina Hoff Sommers were appearing at, taking place at a bar called Local 16. I walk up the stairs and see the crowd, and suddenly memories of Magic: the Gathering tournaments come rushing back to me. I leave early, only to find out that at 12:15 people are evacuated for a “fire drill” which turns out to be a bomb threat. The threat was made by a throwaway Twitter account and not by phone call.

A lot of people implicated Arthur Chu, who was making cryptic tweets beforehand:

He also sent a weird email to Local 16, trying to shame them for hosting what he calls “a right wing hate group.”

These are definitely the kinds of bizarre communications you’d expect from an ideological fanatic, but overheated rhetoric claiming that Arthur Chu made the bomb threat is ridiculous and everyone should know better. Almost as ridiculous is claiming that anyone would give their ideological opposition the much-coveted victim card to wear as a badge of martyrdom.

Someone who hates #gamergate making this bomb threat doesn’t make sense. Without specific knowledge, we can only deal with general knowledge of who has what kinds of incentives. I can see two possibilities. It was either a third-party prankster trying to stir up drama or a pro-gamergate figure trying to get a slice of his the victim pie for his comrades.

In either case, there is going to be a rude awakening. It’s going to be interesting to observe the complete asymmetry in mainstream coverage of this bomb threat. Even the least credible threats to anti-gamergate personalities get massive mainstream coverage. That just isn’t going to happen this time or any time that the ideologically misaligned are on the receiving end of such things. Bias isn’t always a conscious thing. It’s often expressed by what the editorial board isn’t thinking about. No amount of social media flailing is going to change that.

While everyone else on social media seem to take the most unfounded threats with the grace of a diving soccer player, what’s actually interesting are the quiet attacks. The website that I edit for, TechRaptor, has been DDoS’d four times. Nobody announced it. The only reason I know this is because the owner of the site told me privately. The perpetrators didn’t announce their evil intentions on social media. We also gets threats in the comments which are quickly and quietly removed. TechRaptor doesn’t malinger about it. That’s what it looks like when angry fanatics are genuinely trying to silence you. It looks like nothing.

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Put down your phone and stop and smell the flowers

How I admire Andy Crouch. The Christian author recently took a vacation from the hardest thing to escape: the digital realm. For two months, he eschewed the screens that keep us permanently attached to the internet. He didn’t succumb to the fear of “missing out.” Rather, he was able to live more fully in the moment, enjoy himself, and focus on much-neglected hobbies. He even experienced a real rarity in the hyper-connected world: “just quiet and an absence of hurry to get to the next thing.”

I thought about Crouch’s sojourn away from modernity while paying visit to D.C.’s annual blooming of the cherry blossoms. Situated around the Tidal Basin, the springtime event is a tradition that goes back over a century when Tokyo Mayor Yukio Ozaki gifted our country with prunus serrulata (Japanese cherry) trees to signify improving relations between the U.S. and Japan. Clearly, Franklin Roosevelt didn’t get the memo when he interned nearly 100,000 Japanese citizens and non-citizens following the Pearl Harbor attacks. But that’s neither here nor there.

Visiting the cherry blossoms trees is a pleasant experience if you can ignore one thing: rude, absentminded crowds. I can’t stand them. Running around without regard for rules, or basic decency, the typical tourist to the National Mall is the embodiment of modern America. Crude, self-centered, and wholly unconcerned with the well-being of everyone around them – this is the American ethos. Some call it a “me me me” pathology. I call it mass consumerism and individualism run amok.

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No, the “real victims” of false narratives are not the ones the narratives were made to serve

Are police officers are the real victims of unarmed black men being shot dead by the police? Of course not – that would be an insane thing to believe. Even though police officers might be coming under more scrutiny as a result of recent incidents, that’s not the same thing as actually being a the victim of those incidents.

The problem is that these incidents are probably facilitated by a police narrative. In the wake of the killing of Walter Scott, a Fox legal analyst revealed that planting weapons used to be standard procedure for cops. Does this mean that cops are pure evil? No. It means that within police culture there exists have a narrative that isn’t necessarily backed up by evidence specific to the relevant incident. The argument would go that criminals exist, and sometimes criminals get lucky and can get away with it due to a lack of evidence. It’s up to the police officers to tilt the scales in the favor of justice by bending the truth. And since black men commit a disproportionate amount of the crime, there is a problem that has to be solved with evidence-agnostic action that may break a few eggs to make the omelet.

Women actually facing harassment aren’t the “real victims” of Ellen Pao’s failure to achieve her dishonest shakedown of Silicon Valley. Businesses targeted by ideological profiteers are. The ideology is based on the specious claim of the culture of Silicon Valley is a “boy’s club.” Because Silicon Valley is like this, any specific Silicon Valley company is guilty by association. This claim that Pao’s company must have been guilty of discriminating against women was made by the media before they even had the evidence. They made an evidence-agnostic claim that if Silicon Valley is sexist in general, any charge of sexism made against any tech company must true. Every narrative like this demands that we make examples of those who embody its fears.

When UVA rape story broke, the media was already waiting for it to happen. After all, fraternities as institutions of white male privilege, and therefore “rape culture,” are a mainstay of fashionable progressive demonology. When the hysteria died down and the story came under scrutiny, it unraveled. It turned out that Rolling Stone just didn’t really check their facts on the ever so narrative-friendly incident. But while the story was eventually skewered by the media, there was no real desire to adjust the narrative of a rape crisis on campus. The “real victims” of the fanciful hoax were actually women on campus, since their claims will now be more easily dismissed. It’s not the men or fraternities that were falsely accused of rape. It can’t be. When the narrative has such an embarrassing failure, the only victims of such a failure can be those who the narrative was built to serve.

Thankfully, the media doesn’t have the same narrative in favor of police officers. Just because black people are overrepresented in crime doesn’t mean that every instance of a black man being shot dead means that he deserved it. Discrimination happening doesn’t mean that any given company is guilty of it and should be made an example of. Rape being a crime that happens doesn’t mean that every overheated story about it must be taken gospel. Evidence needs to come first in these kinds of situations, and victims need to be properly identified as the villains of an agenda-driven mythology.

Advice for conservatives: stop using liberal precrime narrative for your wars

War, the great American pastime.

Forget baseball; forget apple pie. Our country is no longer one that bonds over a shared language, religion, ethnicity, or tradition. No, what brings Americans together more than mass consumerism is a foreign hobgoblin that threatens our way of life.

How great is it then for the national spirit that many political figures in Washington are agitating for war with Iran? And how ironic is it that many of the bellicose voices are self-styled conservatives? I say ironic because the drumming for war is based not a direct threat but what Philip K. Dick called “precrime.” And the right-wingers imposing their precrime verdict of guilt on Iran are giving in to liberal ideology. If they continue, conservatives will only fuel the ambitious progressive agenda of eliminating free choice in everything from gun rights to health care. Oh, and they will lead us down the warpath in the Middle East again. Because we totally need another costly quagmire in the land where people can’t stop blowing each other up.

Let’s review. In the wake of a prospective deal with Iran over its nuclear program, Republicans are foaming at the mouth decrying the bargain. President Obama, they say, is unwittingly becoming the new Neville Chamberlain (there must be some variant of Godwin’s Law that that applies to Chamberlain references). They also allege Iran is a state run by full-fledged fanatics who want to commit suicide by threatening Israel and the West.

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Christians in the Closet

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Ace points us to this Rod Dreher account of his interview with a “deeply closeted” Christian professor at an “elite law school.” It’s long, but worth it, if you like that feeling of wanting to punch someone in the mouth.

“The sad thing,” he said, “is that the old ways of aspiring to truth, seeing all knowledge as part of learning about the nature of reality, they don’t hold. It’s all about power. They’ve got cultural power, and think they should use it for good, but their idea of good is not anchored in anything. They’ve got a lot of power in courts and in politics and in education. Their job is to challenge people to think critically, but thinking critically means thinking like them. They really do think that they know so much more than anybody did before, and there is no point in listening to anybody else, because they have all the answers, and believe that they are good.”

The rest might make one more and more depressed, the farther one gets into it: coming attacks on Christian schools, purging of professional organizations, removal of opportunities for Christians in the corporate world, etc. There are, naturally, references to The Benedict Option.

I believe Dreher and others are overlooking some key and unique cultural points about the United States. First, there are at least 200 million private firearms in the US, many if not most of them in the hands of cultural conservatives. Second, most “elites” can’t operate a gun, or even hold one in their hands without urinating in their pants suits. Third, the national government (“Feds”) hasn’t quite seized complete control of every aspect of life from the states.

Our good and faithful elite Christian law professor paints a picture of American Christians gradually giving in on all points, retreating from politics and the courts, and, especially, not getting fighting mad. Probably, he’s never been to a Knights of Columbus meeting.

fascisiti

Here’s my alternative scenario of the future: Certain elements in the  “red states” resist the liberal fascisiti. I think we now know that this isn’t going to be the Governors, considering the simpering performance of Pence and Hutchison, but some conservative legislative majorities would probably risk being boycotted by the NCAA in order to make a statement. More pressure, financial and legal, is brought to bear from DC and the Gay Corporate Mafia. Decent people from around the country rally ’round the besieged state(s). Some even move there, or at least camp out with rifles…and then, magically, an Enclave of Sanity independent of the Blue State sewers will be carved out of Flyover Country, the gays will go back to sodomizing each other in New York and Hollywood and everyone will live happily ever after…

Yeah, I’m not buying it, either.

I guess all I’m sure of is that America ain’t Rome under Nero, American progressives don’t have the moral certainty nor the backbone to actually kill American Christians, and American Christians aren’t as a body going to hide in the closet from sodomites and their “allies.”

The men who lie with men, the women who lie with women, the men who think they’re women, the ones who want to sodomize animals and children, and their elite enablers: Are threats of boycotts and Twitter hate campaigns and not getting hired at UCLA really going to cause American Christians to pretend to approve of this? To turn their faces away and pretend not to notice?

If so, it really is the End, and I’ll shut up and go in the closet and watch the show.

And sharpen my sword.

Noninterventionist Super Friends, assemble!

Is there anything Hillary Clinton doesn’t have?

Millions of dollars from speaking fees, a private email server, a beloved husband, undying respect from empty-headed women, and infinite political connections. Oh, and all that foreign money, of course.

For someone as popular and well-connected as Clinton, you’d think the only thing she’s missing is a diamond as big as the Ritz. But now, the former First Lady has been gifted with something new: her own Thought Police squadron. A group calling itself “HRC Super Volunteers” has pledged to uncover “coded sexism” as the 2016 race heats up. And here I thought that was Salon.com’s job.

The group is wasting being the Praetorian guard against misogyny. Here are the words, according to these high-strung ladies and beta men, that reveal inner sexism when used to describe Hillary: polarizing, calculating, disingenuous, insincere, ambitious, inevitable, entitled, overconfident, secretive, out of touch, will do anything to win, and represents the past.

How cute. HRC Super Volunteers think they’ll sway the debate in Hillary’s favor by harping about latent sexism. Good thing few people care about such nonsense. The only folks who will be persuaded are Hillary-loving progressives. Their minds won’t be changed, but their convictions will be further confirmed.

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