Slate Star Codex on SJWs Eating Their Own

The Slate Star Codex blogger, Scott Alexander, is an inconsistent, all-over-the-place dude, but he does have some good insights every now and then, when he drops the nootropic pharmaceuticals and phasic sleep experiments.

Case in point: A good post at SSC about Social Justice Warriors, the modern Stalinists, attacking each other.

Alexander discusses an episode of SJWs eviscerating one of their own. The basic structure of the episode was as follows. Some SJW man adult male spread some particularly harmful feminist lies, presumably in an attempt to curry favor with feminists. (Facepalm. Dude… seriously?) Of course this bought him no leeway whatsoever when they decided later that he’d said something politically incorrect. Their attacks on him were as vicious as we’ve come to expect from this sort of incident, and occasionally so extreme that they were funny. E.g., when the victim (a guy named Clymer) took their “criticisms” to heart and changed his behavior accordingly, one SJW tweeted,

Reading @cmclymer’s latest tweets makes me sick. He is taking all the critique and adapting behavior, which is what abusers do. #StopClymer

LOL.

Alexander discusses all this, and the general tendency of SJWs to attack their own, then says,

I think all of this touches on a much more important question: why don’t whales get cancer more often?

Keep reading; this actually is the first sentence of a vividly-exposited insight. (BTW, I’m dispensing with blockquotes in this post in favor of bold font, on the technical grounds that blockquote is as annoying as fuck when you have a lot of quotes.) He continues,

Cancer results from a series of mutations occurring by chance in a single cell. …If a whale is a thousand times bigger than a person, it should have a thousand times more cells and therefore get cancer a thousand times more often.

But apparently that doesn’t happen. One explanation:

Whales are very big, so in order to threaten a whale, a cancer must also grow very big. In order to grow very big, a cancer must evolve a complicated internal structure determining which cells expand where and who’s going to secrete the factors necessary for blood vessels to grow and so on… But as tumors grow bigger and more intricate, and cells have to spend more and more time altruistically working for the good of the tumor rather than just reproducing, some cells will inevitably defect from the plan and just divide uncontrollably.

That is, since by hypothesis these cells have defected from the body’s mutual cooperation agreement, it’s not surprising that they also defect from the cancer tumor’s mutual cooperation agreement.

In other words, the theory is that whales survive because they are so big that their cancers get cancer and die. … a good definition for “social cancer” might be any group that breaks the rules of cooperative behavior that bind society together in order to spread more quickly than it could legitimately achieve.

Like, e.g., doxxing, electoral fraud, violent thuggery, firing people from their jobs for having different political opinions, taking over academia and the media and engaging in censorship, launching personal attacks at people who disagree with them, using law in blatantly one-sided ways, etc.

Does any of that sound familiar?

Long before a group can take over society, it reaches a size where it needs to develop internal structure and rules about interaction between group members. If you collect a bunch of people and tell them to abandon all the social norms like honesty, politeness, respect, charity, and reason in favor of a cause – then the most likely result is that when your cause tries to develop some internal structure, it will be overrun by a swarm of people who have abandoned honesty, politeness, respect, charity, and reason.

Ya think? First, if you set up your movement to ignore common decency and attack people, it attracts those who like ignoring decency and attacking people. Second, not only have you disproportionately recruited people like that, but you then further train them (along with any decent people you may have recruited) to ignore common decency and attack people. So in both the kind of personalities you initially attract, and in the ways that you encourage people to behave once you’ve attracted them, you’ve done what? Filled your movement with people who reject any kind of decency toward those they disagree with, and instead viciously attack them. And when they disagree with you…?

If you elevate jerkishness into a principle, if you try to undermine the rules that keep niceness, community, and civilization going, the defenses against social cancer – then your movement will fracture, it will be hugely embarrassing, the atmosphere will become toxic, unpopular people will be thrown to the mob, everyone but the thickest-skinned will bow out, the people you need to convince will view you with a mixture of terror and loathing…

…you’ll constantly be in conflict with your own so-called allies, your energy will be largely diverted to attacking them and defending yourself from their attacks, and overall you’ll doom yourself to an irrelevant strife-ridden hell of your own making.

And it couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of people.

Socialism Turns 100

This year is the hundredth anniversary of socialism as a significant political force in the modern world. The horrifying evil began in 1917 with Russia’s Soviet revolution.

One hundred years of peace, prosperity, and freedom!

Hi to all the prosperous and free people in Venezuela, Cuba, the USSR, Cambodia, and North Korea!

(Yes, I’m aware that the USSR doesn’t exist any more. Thank God.)

Memo to leftists: Even though it’s a hundred years old, don’t forget to claim that it’s “progressive” and “revolutionary.”

Really, socialism only had a run of 72 years as an aggressive, expanding force in world history: From Russia’s revolution in 1917 to Germans attacking the Berlin Wall with sledgehammers in November 1989. If we allow ourselves a little poetic license, though, we might say that socialism had a hundred-year run: from the Russian revolution of 1917 to the collapse of Venezuelan socialism in 2017.

I remember that when Venezuelan socialism was just getting off the ground, a newspaper interviewed some moronic young western leftist who supported Chavez. His rationale for supporting a system that always leads to genocide-scale mass murder: “We need alternatives to neoliberalism.”

Global body count of this “alternative to neoliberalism”: At least 100 million people murdered.

The Godfather

I just saw The Godfather again. I finally understand the reputation of Marlon Brando. God, he’s good. He absolutely disappears into Vito Corleone.

You almost have to pity Al Pacino, whose performance probably would have gotten him the Best Actor Oscar, if not for Brando’s astounding performance, not only in the same year, but in the same film! I think what makes it more impressive to me now is that I understand that Brando was already a star, was already MARLON BRANDO!!! when this movie came out. Given that, it must have been hard, or so one would think, to make himself disappear into a role. When I’ve seen this before, I just thought of Brando as that guy who played the godfather (and Jor-El in Superman), so seeing him as the godfather didn’t seem especially noteworthy. But making 65-year-old mob boss exist is even more impressive when it also requires making FAMOUS MOVIE STAR go away.

This is what people mean when they talk about an iconic performance.

It was also fun watching it with my son, who has never seen it before, and who suddenly started to get certain pop culture references – e.g., Mr. Big in Zootopia – that had never registered before. And “This movie,” I told him, “is why whenever there’s a mob movie now, at least one of the characters has to talk in a rasp.” It’s unavoidable somehow; Brando just permanently changed the way that that kind of character is done. A mob boss that doesn’t speak with a wheeze!? Impossible! He can’t really be a mob boss! THAT’S how iconic this performance was: It changed the territory.

Let’s not forget that Pacino is awesome as Michael Corleone. He sells it perfectly; it’s as if the script was written for him. The film opens in the second half of 1945. Michael is a veteran of World War II who has just returned from the fighting. We are told that he is regarded as a war hero. At first Michael intends to stay out of the mob stuff. Early in the movie his girlfriend asks him about a business deal his father conducted. When Michael’s attempt to dodge the question fails, he tells her: “Luca Brazi held a gun to the man’s head and my father told him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract.” (This is the first time we hear the phrase, “made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”) She is appalled, of course, but he tells her, “That’s my family, Kay, not me.”

That resolve doesn’t last. After another mafia family makes an attempt on his father’s life, Michael is switched on.

Visiting his father at the hospital one night after his father is shot, he realizes that the bodyguards have all mysteriously vanished. He calls for backup and conscripts the lone nurse on duty to help him move the bed in which his father is lying to another room. When a well-wisher shows up, Michael presses him into service to stand at the hospital’s front door with Michael. “Put your hand in your pocket,” he instructs the man, “as if you have a gun.” Soon a car full of what are obviously assassins slowly rolls up to the entrance, sees Michael and the other man standing alertly, watching them, apparently armed, and rolls past.

When it’s over the well-wisher tries to light a cigarette. He can’t; his hands are shaking too much. Michael helps him light it. His hands are rock steady.

This is the first time we see Michael handling a stressful, high-stakes situation with calm and competence. It is perfectly believable because his father’s life is at stake, pressing him to rise to the occasion. The extra detail of his backstory as a veteran isn’t necessary, but makes it even more plausible.

During this episode Michael learns that a Police Captain is cooperating with the rival mafia family to kill Vito Corleone.

Later Michael confers with other Corleone family members and urges killing the cop and the head of the other family, Sollozzo. “If we can get a weapon into a meeting with them,” he says, “I’ll kill them both.”

They laugh.

“Where does it say you can’t kill a cop?” Michael asks.

“Come on, Mikey,” says consigliere Tom Hagan.

“No, seriously,” Michael responds. “A corrupt cop. ‘A cop who got mixed up with the mob and got what he deserved.’ That’s a good story. We have newspapers on our payroll, right?”

And suddenly everyone realizes that Michael has seen an aspect of the situation that they missed. This is another key moment. We’ve just seen Michael be cool and courageous under pressure. Now we see him out-thinking everyone else, and people who are more experienced with this sort of thing than him. And though it’s not obvious, since they’re not present, Michael is also out-thinking Sollozzo and the cop, who plainly think they’re untouchable due to the cop’s involvement. They find out otherwise.

A meeting is arranged, a weapon smuggled in, and Michael kills the cop and Sollozzo.

This precipitates a gang war. Meanwhile Michael flees to Italy to escape retaliation and possible arrest. In Italy not much important happens, for the purposes of this review. But there is one subtle little stiletto of a line of dialogue that will slip right by you if you’re not careful. In Italy, Michael has two bodyguards. As they walk through one sparsely-populated Italian town, Michael asks them where all the men are. The casual reply is,

“They’re all dead from vendettas.”

Given what is going on back home in the US, this is an ominous sentence.

Years later, Michael has returned to the US and gotten involved in the family business. While this review is not one of my “red pill in fiction” posts, I have to note that the writers show some intriguing red-pill awareness in these scenes. In particular, they show an alpha male crashing through everyone else’s frame and forcing them to respond to his frame.

Here are a couple of examples:

Michael wants to take the Corleone Family legit within five years. Part of this plan involves moving the family from New York to Nevada. He assigns Tom Hagan to head to Nevada first to start moving on the business arrangements. Tom wants to stay with the rest of the family in New York, but the tail effects of the gang war are still occurring, and Michael tells him, “You’re not a war time consigliere.”

Hagan: “Maybe I could help here.”
Michael: “You’re out, Tom.”

Boom! This is how it is. Michael doesn’t try to convince, persuade, argue, or debate. He just uses his authority. Hagan doesn’t argue. He can’t, really.

Later Michael himself travels to Nevada. He meets with Moe Greene, an old long-distance business partner of the Corleones. Greene owns a casino that the Corleones bankrolled years before. Michael tells Greene he’s going to buy the casino from him.

Greene can’t freakin’ believe it: “You don’t buy me out; I buy you out! I know you got chased out of New York by the other families and that’s why you’re here in Vegas.”

This is not true, as we later see very vividly, but Michael doesn’t argue. His response:

“We’ll meet again tomorrow. Think about a price.”

And he leaves.

That’s alpha frame. NB: don’t try to use this in your own life unless you actually have the ability to have people killed if they oppose you. In order to act that alpha and get away with it, you actually have to have that kind of power.

Cave in to Campus SJWs, Lose Enrollment

You might recall the horrid U. Missouri prof Melissa Click who tried, in 2015, to exclude reporters from campus protestors and called for “some muscle” to remove them.

(She also did this on video, suggesting she’s not too bright. Speaking of which… trying to exclude reporters from a protest, that’s interesting. Last time I checked, the entire point of a protest is to get publicity for your cause. But not in Click’s mind! In her mind, it’s “We’re having a demonstration! Make sure no one knows!”)

Well this was too much, and she had charges filed against her and eventually got fired.

But Ol’ Mizzou should never have hired someone like this in the first place, and it should have dealt with Click with firmer measures when it first happened. You see, there’s this thing called the Internet now. Yes, that’s actually real! Not science fiction! Students thinking about applying to your college will, get this, punch its name into a search engine. Turns out, people aren’t too amped about attending a Stalinist boot camp. Who knew!?

Mizzou scrambled to find enough students…

…but couldn’t do it: Mizzou likely to cut hundreds of positions amid expected 7 percent enrollment drop.

“Mizzou has already said it is expecting its smallest freshman class in two decades. The enrollment drop discussed Monday is the first estimate pertaining to the school’s entire enrollment. The loss of students would result in about $16.6 million less in revenue.”

In fact, it turned out to be much, much worse than a 7% drop in enrollment: Mizzou enrollment down 38.5% from 2015!

It will be fascinating to see how colleges and universities deal with the New Transparency. Either they’ll start limiting the ultra-left extremism of their faculty, or they’ll slide into irrelevance. Either way, it’s looking better for people on the right.

Another example: The Evergreen College BS from May 2017. This is the Washington state college that wanted to have a No Whites On Campus Day. Yes, seriously. When one white prof objected and actually dared to show up on campus, all hell broke loose.

http://dailycaller.com/2017/05/31/lawmakers-want-to-privatize-evergreen-state-plan-civil-rights-investigation-over-day-without-whites/

Follow-on incidents at Evergreen provided great examples of SJWs eating their own, in that a wussy college administrator was verbally attacked by the very minority SJWs he enabled, and a mixed Hispanic/ Native American student was threatened/borderline assaulted by a(t least one) black student.

That link also contains this very funny bit:

The thugs targeted the police and the student code for inhibiting their abuses. They lobbed bizarre politically correct charges at the police. “Black trans disabled students are actively being sought out and confronted by campus police constantly.”

Uh-huh. Right.

Of course, every High School Junior and Senior starting their college search will see this when they punch Evergreen College into a search engine from now on. Congrats, Evergreen! You’ve just reduced your potential clientele, from now on, to SJW minorities!

Right on schedule, Evergreen experiences a “slight decline” in attendance after the racist thugs rioted. Inter alia, “On Monday, staff and volunteers began calling about 1,200 students who were admitted and haven’t enrolled in classes yet.”

How “slight” was the decline? We need to know the number of students, but I couldn’t find that directly at the school’s web site. So I had to figure it out indirectly. According to this page at Evergreen’s web site, Evergreen’s undergraduate student–to–faculty ratio is 23 to 1. That page also refers to “Evergreen’s 232 faculty members.”

So if all faculty teach at least one undergrad class, and there are 232 faculty, then the number of undergrads is 232 x 23 = 5,336. So a reduction of 1,200 is 1,200/5336 = 22.5% of the (undergrad) student body! The enrollment decline is midway between a fifth and a fourth of the student body!

And it’s going to get even worse… because some students no doubt hate the place but just have another one or two semesters and have decided to stick it out. Once they’ve gone through the pipeline, Evergreen’s enrollment situation will get even worse.

Not to mention the effects of all this on recruiting faculty. Imagine Evergreen trying to hire any white faculty member now that job candidates can see video of a professor being all but physically assaulted for showing up to do his job.

Have fun, Evergreen!

Red Pill in Fiction: Every Rose Has Its Thorn

The female porn Romance novel Every Rose has its Thorn has the following description:

Amanda has a problem: She’s attracted to a guy who is all wrong for her! Why does this keep happening!?

Amanda always seems to attract the wrong kind of man. She’s a leather-clad biker chick who deals drugs for a living. Bob is a mild-mannered actuary in a life insurance company. But Amanda just can’t resist HOLD IT.

You’ve never read anything like that on the back of a “Romance” novel, nor will you. (I made it up.) If you’re a red pill denier, ask yourself why.

Women being attracted to bad boys, to dangerous men, is a real thing. It’s not a crazy theory that some nutter PUAs made up. Thus we have the standard Romance description that is, of course, the reverse of the way I wrote it, something like

Amanda has a problem: She’s attracted to a guy who is all wrong for her! Why does this keep happening!?

Amanda always seems to attract the wrong kind of man. She’s a mild-mannered actuary in a life insurance company. Bob is a leather-clad biker who deals drugs for a living. But Amanda just can’t resist his rugged good looks and aura of excitement.

But things come to a head when Bob is accused of killing a rival drug dealer. He swears to Amanda that he’s innocent and was framed. But Amanda’s not sure she can trust him, especially after he cheated on her and lied about it.

The police don’t believe him either, due to his previous arrests, and now Bob says he needs Amanda’s help to prove his innocence.

Is Amanda’s lover a killer? The stakes are the highest as she is unwittingly drawn into a world of increasingly dangerous blah blah.

Anyway, you get the point. You could write this stuff in your sleep. One of these fictional book descriptions speaks the truth about what attracts women. The other is so far off that when you read it you blurted “Wait, what?”

This is why the red pill will become the conventional wisdom sooner or later (it’s already made huge strides in that direction). Sooner or later, the truth will out.

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ADDENDUM SEPTEMBER 2019:

Just happened across this:

Jess, Rising by D.M. Guay

One town’s secret. One girl’s transformation. One love’s fatal burn.

A supernatural love story with deadly consequences, for fans of Beautiful Creatures and Twilight.

Seventeen-year-old Jess Flowers sees the killer in visions. He slaughters the helpless with fire and lightning. And she’s next on the kill list.

Billy Combs is the gorgeous outcast with the electrifying secret. He’s stolen Jess’ heart, but his own past may be darker than he’s let on.

As the body count ticks higher, a growing pile of evidence links Billy to the crimes. Jess’ heart says no. But she’s the new kid in isolated Salt Creek, Ohio, a town with a life-changing secret, a town where people aren’t what they seem, a town where it’s hard to know who to trust… Can she tame the mysterious powers surging within her and identify the real killer before it’s her turn to die?

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Index page for my Red Pill in Fiction posts:
https://neurotoxinweb.wordpress.com/2017/11/25/red-pill-in-fiction-index/

The Budget: Why Trump Should Never Back Down on Border Defense

Why Trump should face down Congress if necessary to insist that the next federal budget include funding for the Wall and other anti-immigration measures:

1) The future of our country depends on it so there’s no reason not to. There’s nothing to lose. You understand, God-Emperor? Even if the Left doesn’t back down, even in some worst-case scenario in which their constituencies riot in the streets, that’s not as remotely as bad as what will happen to our nation if we let immigration continue. And they’re already rioting in the streets and shooting at Republican Congressmen. Besides, as the Left gets more violent, as the Berkeley incidents show, the Right gets more violent in response. Violence doesn’t work well for the Left in this country.

2) The Left will be forced to say to Middle America, “We’re holding firm on the budget because we insist on undefended borders,” while Trump says, “I’m holding firm on the budget because I insist on defending our nation’s borders.”

Middle America loves the Trump position. The only people who like the Left’s position already vote for the Left anyway. So again, nothing to lose for us. It’s a losing position for the Left.

3) The Left has to cave in because the longer federal money is held up, the more people who currently benefit from federal money will find other sources of income and realize they’re not dependent on federal money.

That realization will be a political disaster for the Dems. It will liberate a significant set of voters who are currently in thrall to the Dems due to fear. That is, they vote Dem because they fear that if the federal money tap were turned off, their lives would be upended. Once the money tap is turned off, people will find other ways to do what they need to do. People are resourceful and creative. Welfare dependents will get jobs. Single Moms who need day care will convince their bosses to let them bring their kids to work, or start day care collectives with other local parents, etc. Academic biologists who get federal funding for their latest decode-the-genome project will just give up and move on to other research topics. Etc., etc. Of course, not all these people will stop voting Dem, but some will. Some will vote GOP, some will vote for third-party candidates, some will just have no motive to vote at all, etc.

The Dems simply can’t let this happen. Not if they want to survive politically. They can’t afford to lose some of their voters who are currently held captive to them by fear of the unknown. And if the Dems are too stupid to realize that, and they don’t cave in, then so much the better. Then they won’t survive politically!

Note: State government spending can substitute for federal spending to an extent, but not totally. State budgets are already under stress, especially in blue states, exactly the states that would like to keep the money tap flowing. In other words, state spending is supported, directly or indirectly, by federal spending. This fact is relevant for my next point too.

4) Some immigrants only remain in the country due to “welfare” largesse from the federal or state government. Those immigrants will leave when the money tap stops… and Dems can’t have that.

I know what you’re thinking: But if the Dems cave, they lose on immigration anyway. The answer is Yes, but it’s a question of the long term versus the short term. If they cave on the budget they lose the immigration wars slowly over time due to the Wall, increased enforcement, etc. If they don’t cave, and welfare dries up, those marginal immigrants self-deport in a hurry; weeks to months. (We’ve already seen this happen within months of Trump assuming the Presidency.) And once they’re settled back in Mexico are they really going to come North again? Just to possibly have to go back home to Mexico all over again? Doubt it.

For this to matter, it’s not necessary that all or even half of welfare-gobbling immigrants will leave. I don’t know how many will. But many elections are decided pretty closely. Even ten percent of invaders self-deporting could be an immediate political disaster for the Dems.

And remember, we’re talking about the Left here. What wins in a Leftist’s mind when it comes to the short run versus the long run?

Yup.

And it gets better. Because Lefties mostly don’t care about their “movement.” They’re mostly narcissists who care about themselves. Now it’s one thing to stay in Congress and have your support eroded over time by a gradually smaller fraction of immigrants in the population. (And you can deal with that by simply modifying your positions anyway.) But it’s another thing to lose your seat in Congress in the next election due to a sudden surge in illegals self-deporting. To deal with that, you have to try to win your seat back, against the new incumbent, all over again!

Observations on Rhetoric and Dialectic

Vox Day distinguishes between rhetoric and dialectic. As Day uses the terms, dialectic is what most people would loosely call “reason,” i.e., it’s basically noting facts and reasoning about them to draw conclusions.* He defines rhetoric here as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”

In practice, the latter often means pushing people’s emotional buttons. This sounds like a Dark Art if you just leave it at that, but of course like any art or science it can be used for good or evil. And if a person has shown himself to be immune to fact or logic, what else is there to do? Day quoting Aristotle: “argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct.”

(* Day has said that “Dialectic is based on the construction of syllogisms,” but that’s too narrow, if by syllogism one means to include only deductive arguments. Day’s use allows for the inclusion of inductive arguments, I’m pretty sure. E.g., “Every gorpf I’ve ever seen was green, so I conclude, probabilistically, that all gorpfs are green.”)

Having been aware of the Rhetoric-vs.-Dialectic distinction for more than a year now, I offer this report to the world, based on Internet interactions with leftists, SJWs, and other varieties of scumbags, liars, and anti-civilization shills:

(1) The Rhetoric-vs.-Dialectic distinction is very real. It’s not something some guy made up; it’s definitely a piece of reality. Once you’re tuned for it you perceive it easily.

I am a regular commenter on a forum in which politics comes up frequently. That people on the left are more inclined to rhetoric and less to dialectic than people on the right is immediately noticeable. Indeed, in retrospect this is not surprising, since we tried dialectic , i.e., facts and logic, on the left for fifty years and that had zero effect on them. (In our defense, dialectic does in fact persuade many people who aren’t already committed leftists. So it’s not like that was a wasted fifty years.)

So you say something, and the lefties on the forum respond with (a) an insult, and (b) often, an insult that is weirdly orthogonal to the topic at hand. (Projection is obviously playing a role here; more on that below.)

For example, you’ll cite stats on the proportion of terrorist acts committed by Muslims compared to members of other religions, and the response will either be something like, “You’re an asshole,” or something like “You’re just angry because you’re suffering from diabetes.” When you don’t have diabetes and have never mentioned the subject of diabetes before. It’s weird. It’s so completely out of left field, it can only be projection, because how else did that topic even enter their head? This is a weird but useful aspect of the left. They reveal so much about themselves with their weird projective insults.

Remember Elizabeth Warren’s bizarre response to Trump calling her “goofy” and “Pocahontas”? Her tweeted response was, “We get it, @realDonaldTrump: When a woman stands up to you, you’re going to call her a basket case. Hormonal. Ugly.” So completely bizarre in that it had no connection to Trump’s tweet. She was obviously just spewing her own insecurities about her appearance or whatever into her Twitter account. This theme is recurrent in interactions with lefties.

(2) That said, there is an aspect of the Rhetoric-vs.-Dialectic dichotomy that should be tweaked. It comes from this observation:

The thing that makes leftists enraged at me is when I use facts to refute their claims.

When they call me a racist and I call them douchebags or whatever, they just laconically call me a racist again or whatever. But when they say that rapes have been steadily increasing over the last two decades, and then I link to an FBI page showing that in fact they’ve been dropping during a large part of that time, I get sheer hatred in response. The level of rage spikes. It goes from a phoned-in “You’re racist (yawn)” to “You goddam motherfucking shit-eating sub-human bucket of puke!!!” So judging by their reactions, they actually are more sensitive to their lies being dialectically proven false than one would think, if one thinks of leftists as being pure rhetoric-bots.

This is not a call to abandon the RvD distinction – as I said, it’s quite useful – but we need to sort out a little more carefully the way it works empirically. Yeah, most leftists are more rhetoric than dialectic, but they are also sensitive to the propaganda value of their outright lies about matters of fact. They know that refuting their lies is a devastating thing you can do to them and they freak out when you do.

I think the key distinction is this: While they don’t care about the truth, they are aware that there are people who do care. So they freak when you definitively refute their lies.

Other thoughts:

(3) The main forum in which I participate has an option to Ignore another poster (i.e., so that his posts are hidden from you) and there are ways to tell when someone has Ignored someone else. Lefties tend to put people on Ignore not when those people insult the lefties, but when they refute the leftists’ claims using facts. Call a leftist a douchebag, and it’s very unlikely that he’ll put you on Ignore. Basically never happens. Refute his cherished assertions about racism or sexism or whatever, and you stand a small but non-trivial chance of being Ignored. Obviously this is related to point (2).

So this buttresses my foregoing point, that lefties are Rhetoric in that they’re more focused on that compared to righties. But they’re not totally blind and deaf to Dialectic; they have enough awareness of it to realize when their important propaganda points are being proven false, and to feel the threat. As Anonymous Conservative would say, it triggers their amygdalae.

(4) A significant fraction of them are absolute pussies – they attack you only after others have started attacking you. This is fascinating to observe. There are lefties who basically never interact with me, who, if two or three other lefties come at me, will suddenly swarm in and add their own little insults. It’s rare to be attacked by just two or three lefties; usually if it’s two or three, it’s instantly five or six. They really are cowardly swarm attackers by nature. And this is so instinctual that it affects their behavior even in an Internet forum in which we can’t physically attack each other, so there’s no meaningful danger. The only-attack-when-others-are-attacking thing is not based on threat assessment. It’s reflexive; it’s how they’re wired. That rabbity herd instinct is a huge deal with these people.

See my post SJW Mobs and Coordination Mechanisms. It is, of course, the same behavior by the same kind of person.

Another way this herd mentality manifests is the oft-observed fact that when they really want to crush you, they tell you that you’re out of step with the herd. This is blazingly obvious projection. You cite some statistic from the Census Bureau, and their response (if it isn’t “You shit-bag!”) is “Everyone else disagrees with you!” It’s obvious that they regard this as the nuclear bomb of debate. They think it’s a crusher. Of course, it doesn’t affect our tribe at all, since we care about truth, not staying in step with the herd. So we’re just baffled. I was mystified for years whenever I encountered this line from leftists, to the point that I wondered if they were actually making some other, more subtle point that I was missing. Nope. Nothing subtle here; it’s just what it seems to be on the surface: They expect you to care about what the herd says, not about reality. Bizarre.

Notice that both tribes generally misunderstand each other: We tried for fifty years to sway them using logic and facts, and have been puzzled and irritated that it all just bounced off them with no effect. No doubt they’ve been just as mystified that they keep telling us that we’re out of step with the herd (whether that’s true or not), without any effect on us.

Moving the Russian Goalposts Redux

Some miscellaneous thoughts following my last post on the Case of the Mysteriously Mobile Russian Goalposts.

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Priceless quote from the Carlos Slim blog, I mean the New York Times:

It is unclear whether the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, actually produced the promised compromising information about Mrs. Clinton.

No kidding. LOL. This is like the hundred and twelfth paragraph, after they’ve spent the first hundred and eleven paragraphs trying to get their readers all riled up over this “story.”

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In fact it’s not “unclear.” If the Trump campaign had learned any “compromising information about Mrs. Clinton” and used it against Clinton during the election season, the media would have provided a link to such a Trump speech or tweet by now. So Trump Jr. received no such information. But the leftist media (pardon the redundancy) is trying to suggest that he did. And the narrative is:

“Russia helped American voters to be more informed before voting!

And that’s horrible!”

At first I was going to say that this illustrates how intellectually dishonest the Left is. But then it occurred to me that there’s another possibility: Maybe they really do think it’s horrible for voters to be informed before voting. After all, it’s the left, for whom informed voters are a catastrophe.

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Hillary! tried to get dirt on Trump via Russia, LOL:

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/10/forgetting-the-dirty-dossier-on-trump/

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Question:
If an American campaign hearing facts from a Russian would have been treasonous foreign influence on our elections (WTF?) then what is encouraging illegals to actually vote in US elections?

Here’s a video of Obama encouraging illegals to vote. He tells some self-righteous little asshole, who admits that she’s an illegal, “When you vote, then you are a citizen.”

God, that man is evil.

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And what was this non-existent info allegedly about? Check out this buried nuclear bomb from the above-linked NYT article:

“After pleasantries were exchanged,” he [Trump Jr.] said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Mrs. Clinton.”

Holy shit! The promised info was that the Clinton campaign, or at least the Democratic party, was being funded by Russia! Now that would be undue foreign influence!

The Left is saying, “A Dem candidate being funded by Russia would be no big deal, but if the GOP candidate learned about this from a Russian and exposed it, THAT would be a big deal.” How DARE you expose Hillary’s funding from Russia!

(NeverTrumper Megan McArdle: “People who love their country do not help rival powers intervene in their country’s elections, even if that intervention might have the lovely side effect of getting them elected.” Heh heh. Where “intervene in” means, “expose intervention in.”)

Or to put it even more tersely, “If we call out foreign contacts we’re being patriotic; if Trump had called out foreign contacts that not only wouldn’t be patriotic; it would be treasonous.”

This exemplifies what some of us mean when we say the Left has gone crazy.

Now. Based on all this we may make a confident prediction about how the Old Media will try to develop this story: They will continue to say, “It is unclear whether there was actually any compromising information about Clinton.” They HAVE to say this. Why? Because if they admit there was no information produced, the story goes away. But if they say there was information, they have to state what it was: And what it was, according to Veselnitskaya, was proof that the Clinton campaign was being funded by the Russian government.

So if they want to damage Trump, they have to leave the whole thing in a gray area, so they can keep saying, “There may have been some dirt on Clinton” …while hoping no one inquires too closely what that possible dirt would have been.

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There’s something else remarkable: The brazen, in-your-face dishonesty of the Times. (Well, okay, NYT dishonesty hasn’t been remarkable for decades.) Bear with me through an extended quote here; there’s a reason for it:

When he was first asked about the meeting on Saturday, Donald Trump Jr. said that it was primarily about adoptions and mentioned nothing about Mrs. Clinton.

But on Sunday, presented with The Times’s findings, he offered a new account. In a statement, he said he had met with the Russian lawyer… “After pleasantries were exchanged,” he said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Mrs. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”

He said she then turned the conversation to adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers… “It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,” Mr. Trump said.

In other words, he did not change his account of what happened. First he said it was primarily about adoptions, and then he again said it was primarily about adoptions.

The NYT, having presented its readers with the same account, then just brazenly says it was a different account.

This is something new. This is, “Here is what he said, plainly the same thing both times, and we are simply going to assert that they’re different things, even though you yourself can read, on this very same page, us informing you that it’s the same thing.” Wow. The left-wing press is now deliberately schlonging its own leftist readers.

Moving Goalposts: Russia Edition

The moving of the goalposts on the Russia thing has been astonishing, even for the Left. Each failed narrative, instead of inducing them to give up, only seems to intensify their psychological need for another narrative.

First it was, “Russia hacked Dem computers, and not Trump’s computers, and that’s not fair!”

Then it was “…and I’ll bet Trump knew about it!”

The phrasing was often “Russia hacked the election!” meaning, see above. Note the interesting use of the word “hack” to try to suggest that Russia accessed US voting machines.

Then they actually embraced that idiocy and tried to run with it, briefly trying to suggest that “Russia hacked the election” in the literal sense of Russia somehow flipping votes in the election. Even the Left didn’t actually assert this one outright, for the most part, but they tried to imply it. Unfortunately for this line of BS, the head of DHS has admitted that there is no evidence that even one vote was changed by Russia.

Let alone any votes being changed by Russia with the knowledge or cooperation of the Trump campaign.

Then it was, “Trump’s firing of Comey – whose departure we leftists were demanding yesterday – is obstruction of justice because Trump was not being investigated, and this constitutes an attempt to thwart that non-existent investigation!”

(Trump accused of murdering centaurs, hobbits, and unicorns. Film at eleven.)

Then it was, “OK, well, someone who used to be connected to Trump, and no longer is, was being investigated, and we’re sure Trump fired Comey to stop this investigation (and not for other reasons e.g. Comey’s blatant pro-Clinton corruption). Also, the fact that this didn’t actually hinder the investigation, as the FBI itself has said, proves that, um, let’s talk about something else now.”

Now it’s, “Trump’s son met with a Russian lawyer who told him she had some dirt on Hillary Clinton.” Yeah, so? Obviously all candidates try to get dirt on their opponents. God knows the Dems do. What’s the problem?

“This information was from a foreign source!”

Yeah, so?

“A foreign government, even!”

Yeah, so?

How is the government of another country telling us the truth a bad thing? Hillary broke national security laws. If we became aware of this because the Russian government told us, good. The appropriate response is, “Thank you, Russia.”

But that’s not what happened anyway.

Trump Jr. claims no such info was revealed during that meeting; the Russian lawyer just wanted to trick him into meeting with her so she could argue for a change in Russia-US child adoption laws. She didn’t actually have any damaging info on Clinton. More’s the pity.

So the claim now is, Trump’s son tried to get some dirt on Clinton, but failed to do so.

Seriously, lefties? That’s the claim you’re running with?

Making it more funny is the attempt to say that this “may have” broken campaign finance laws. That is, learning things from foreign sources is illegal. LOL. Even through your computer screen, you can smell the Left’s desperation.

Furthermore, Trump Jr.’s claim that there was no Clinton dirt is provably true, unless the Left can identify a piece of info about Clinton that (1) the Trump camp used during the campaign, and (2) that the Trump camp could not have received from any other source.

So what Clinton revelation, exactly, did they get from Russia that they used in the campaign and that they couldn’t have gotten anywhere else?

(Crickets chirping.)

Red Pill in Fiction: Bridget Jones’s Diary

That mouth is… inviting. But bad boys only!

The “bad boy” thing from the horse’s mouth, in this case Helen Fielding, in Bridget Jones’s Diary:

• Sunday 15 October: Bridget and one of her friends compare Mark Darcy to the fictional Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice: “…we had a long discussion…both agreeing that Mr. Darcy was more attractive because he was ruder…”

• Saturday 11 November: “…Jerome, henceforth to be known as Creepy Jerome (it was going to be Heartless Jerome but we all agreed that sounded too interesting).”

• Monday 25 December: “Every time I’ve met Julio he has been clean and coiffed beyond all sense and carrying a gentleman’s handbag. Now he was wild, drunk, unkempt and, frankly, just the type I usually fall for.”

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Index page for my Red Pill in Fiction posts:
https://neurotoxinweb.wordpress.com/2017/11/25/red-pill-in-fiction-index/