The First Stone Throwers

 

The tech monopolies like Twitter make their money and increase their power by making people hate and attack each other.  That's their business model.  It's not a bug, it's a fundamental feature. 

Jack Dorsey who owns Twitter needs and wants you to hate each other.  It's not a game to him, it's the way he makes his money.  And that's the reason why appeals to "fairness" are so totally beside the point.  If things were fair and conversation polite, Twitter would fail as a business.

All it takes is for certain people with a low threshold for violence to start the process of creating a violent mob.  And there are always people who are willing to throw the first stone, and then the rest of the mob is empowered to throw the next,and the next and the next.

Because people are mimetic, meaning they imitate both the behaviors and desires they observe in others, they can be prompted most easily to perform an action by others doing so. As a result, Girard says, “the first stone is the most difficult to throw ... Because it is the only one without a model.” Contagious violence can be forestalled if the crowd lacks a model to follow. 

"Threshold models” developed by sociologists complement Girard’s “first stone” theory. For instance, Mark Granovetter concludes that for a riot to occur, there must be one or more individuals in a crowd with low “thresholds” for engaging in risky or antisocial behavior. Once they start the process, individuals with higher thresholds, who are less predisposed to such acts, will be more likely to join in. The mimetic chain goes from the lowest-threshold actors, who are least in need of a model, to the highest-threshold ones who will only join the riot once many others are already participating. Just a few individuals with low thresholds suffice.

Like their archaic counterparts, these modern priests grasp that “collective effervescence” is a powerful force that needs to be channeled and circumscribed. But the essential goal of today’s priests is not control, although that is an effect. Nor is it social cohesion and the greater good of the community. It is profit. The gamified mechanisms that precipitate us toward indignation against enemies also drive our continued use of the platforms. The more of us that are transfixed by spectacles of victimization, the greater the revenue the platform brings in. Like a bloodthirsty god, the platform business feeds off of sacrifice.

 

 Stifled debate may present an immediate political loss, but the far greater risk is the subjugation of all realms of human life to the sacrificial profit-driven logic dictated by the digital platform god and its priests. Many of those who defend participating in these cruel rites seem to regard them as a vehicle of progress. But sacrifice is cyclical, never progressive. It permits a temporary substitutive crisis resolution, in which individual victims stand in symbolically for vast, multifaceted problems. The punishment and expulsion of the victim occasions a cathartic transference of responsibility and an ephemeral relief of pressure. But the platform god and its priests will keep stoking the resentments that precipitated us toward this harsh resolution. That’s the game they need us to play.

Is This What Peaceful Protests Look Like? Here's the Portland Courthouse After Night 61

Yale’s dean of public health defends right to argue hydroxychloroquine could save lives

The dean of Yale’s public health department, Dr. Sten Vermund, has come out in defense of his colleague’s right to explore and promote hydroxychloroquine as a viable treatment for coronavirus. Yale epidemiologist and public health professor Dr. Harvey Risch has come under heavy fire recently for arguing that hydroxychloroquine, if used to treat coronavirus, could save up to 100,000 lives.

Scott Adams on the logic of HCL, Zinc, & Azythromycin

I tell you why Trump is medically correct and CNN might be killing tens-of-thousands https://t.co/trfDfkx4TF

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) July 30, 2020

The Current State of World War III

Jim Jordan's full opening statement about the Russia Hoax and "Peaceful Protests"

Dems: The Antifa Party (This is not the first time Republican presidents have had to deal with terrorist-supporting Democrats. It probably won’t be the last.)

— “These soldiers are disregarding and overriding the elementary rights of American citizens by applying tactics which must have been copied from the manual issued the officers of Hitler’s storm troopers.”

— The president is substituting “military dictatorship for the Constitution of the United States.”

— “My fellow citizens, we are now an occupied territory.”

All this because, after 50 days of raging violence, President Trump has finally sent federal agents to restore order in Portland, Oregon.

No — wait. Different Democrats and different president.

Although all those quotes are indeed from Democrats about a Republican president, it wasn’t Trump. They were Democrats Richard Russell, George Wallace and Orval Faubus, denouncing President Dwight Eisenhower for sending troops to enforce desegregation at a schoolhouse in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Why Black Lives Matter is a Lie

Black Deaths 2019

Abortion: 380 000
Black on black violence: 7000
Police: 9

Guess which one the media has people marching, screaming & tearing down the country over.

It’s called mind control

— Melissa Tate (@TheRightMelissa) July 27, 2020

The rioting and destruction are the point. George Floyd, at this point, is barely even an excuse.

Mark Steyn on Mike Adams - RIP

At the time of his death Mike Adams was a professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington - although not a very popular one with the administration. You will generally see him described in the media as "Controversial Professor Mike Adams", as if it's the subject he teaches: Mike Adams, Head of the Department of Controversy. It wasn't always so. A two-time "Faculty Member of the Year" winner at the turn of the century, Adams grew more "controversial" as the university got more "woke". He got a book deal with Regnery (publishers of America Alone), and was quoted favorably by Rush:

What American university wants a prof who's published by Regnery and getting raves on the Rush Limbaugh show? The Deputy Assistant Under-Deans of Diversity all frosted him out, and Adams spent seven years in a lawsuit with UNCW - which he won, but it's still seven years of your life you'll never get back.

Then came the Covid. He Tweeted energetically through the lockdown, including at his governor:

Massa Cooper, let my people go!

And on the education lockdown in particular:

Don't shut down the universities. Shut down the non-essential majors. Like Women's studies.

The left isn’t fighting against fascism. Instead, they are fighting FOR authoritarianism.

The left isn’t fighting against fascism. Instead, they are fighting FOR authoritarianism.

They claim that their political message transcends the law; that it allows them to control cities; that it allows them to destroy property; that it justifies their designs on canceling heretics; that it permits them to block roads, create no-go zones for non-rioters, prosecute those who stand against them while themselves avoiding persecution.

Leftist-run cities have shown what happens when police and federal law enforcement are demonized and unsupported by elected leaders; when local leadership can seize “emergency powers” — then pick and choose who to punish: rioters are exempt from lockdowns; you can sing in the streets but not in churches; masks are required, but not for them.

They can tell you what counts as a substantive meal, essentially holding businesses hostage to their arbitrary and incoherent edicts: pot dispensaries and large warehouse stores can open; gyms and restaurants cannot.

They decide what hate is; what racism is; who is unclean; who is deserving of both punishment and reverence. They presume to control and police every narrative, and in that way, control and police every person.

They reduce you to your skin color, your “gender” — but mostly, to your politics: individualism, respect for rule of law, constitutional order and the color-blind equanimity that comes with it — all of these things are reduced to the cancer of “whiteness.” “Systemic racism” is their empty catechism; it creates a Kafka trap in which you are defined by your original sin of birth, but you can neither receive absolution or forgiveness.

In short, you are defined by your birth, your color, your sex — and there is no escape: either you are born an oppressor who must be fought, or you are born a victim entitled to perpetual grievance, regardless of how much power you actually enjoy.

This is the very structure of authoritarianism run through populist fascism.

It is where the left always takes you. The left has brought back segregation as “racial separatism”; they’ve stoked racial and class division; they’ve sought to control speech, which controls thought which ultimately, is meant to constrain you.

While the left riots in the streets, pulls down statues, demands the sacrificial death of pancake salespeople & rice peddlers; calls for UNEQUAL treatment under the law, with special dispensation for favored identity groups they bellow the self-righteous claim that it is THEY who are fighting fascism.

But know this: fascism is what they ARE. And they prefer that system because they have presumed to be its leadership class, its enforcement mechanism, and its performative philosophers.  Either “moderates” or those who aren’t especially political wake up to these truisms, or our country as founded will fall.

Resist the conformists. The corporate enablers.

Remember this: in the fight against fascism, YOU are the outlaws, the true guerrilla warriors.

So fight

Liberty and individualism are our birthrights.

Refuse — ever — to surrender either.

WSJ Reporters Follow NYT, Tell Publisher To Crack Down On ‘Misinformation’ In Opinion Section

A group of more than 280 WSJ reporters, editors, and other staff sent a letter to Latour on Tuesday calling for more separation between the paper’s news and opinion sections online. The letter also asked for more freedom for reporters to critique opinion articles online and said the opinion staff should be more restrictive in what it chooses to publish, according to WSJ which reported on the letter.

The letter also pointed to a June 2 op-ed by The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald titled “The Myth of Systemic Police Racism.” Mac Donald argued that the “charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. … A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.”

While the article has not been updated with a correction, the letter accuses Mac Donald of cherry-picking data and drawing an “erroneous conclusion.”

“Employees of color publicly spoke out about the pain this Opinion piece caused them during company-held discussions surrounding diversity initiatives,” the letter continues, adding if the “company is serious about better supporting its employees of color, at a bare minimum it should raise Opinion’s standards so that misinformation about racism isn’t published.”

Fire them.

Time For Trump To Start Kicking Aspiration

PROSPERITY:

1. Using the same pro-growth policies that gave us America’s best economy ever, we will be back to 5% unemployment by April 2021. A year from now, we will be back where we were when the pandemic hit, 3.5%, and we will again have the lowest minority unemployment rates ever. Then we’ll do even better.

2. We’re going to make China and other countries trade with us fairly or not at all. We see China as an opponent, and we will compete instead of capitulate. No more outsourcing American jobs!

3. And no more insourcing foreigners to take American jobs – not only will we tighten the H1B visa process to ensure no American can do the job before we import someone, but we will give any employee the right to sue his employer for punitive damages if his job is taken by a foreigner on a work visa. No more American workers training their replacements!

4. Sleepy Joe tried to co-opt “Buy American,” but he’s faking it. We will double down on revitalizing American industry, with tariffs as necessary and emplace tough rules relocating critical industries (medicine, masks, electronics) to the US of A. No more relying on the Red Chinese to decide if your kids can have penicillin.

5. The greedy tech titans are too powerful, so we’ll regulate them to ensure the internet remains free to all and that no one can be silenced.

6. We will have a massive infrastructure re-build where the money goes not to bike lanes, railroads to nowhere, and other nonsense, but to actual freeways and airports and high-speed internet that will make our lives better.

7. We will finish building the wall and keep deporting illegals – we need our jobs to be for our people and to keep drugs and crime out.

8. We’ll need money for this, so we’ll tax those with over $10 million in earnings. Most of the super-rich are now Democrats, so too bad.

SECURITY:

9. Crime, particularly in Democrat cities is out of control. We’ll crack down on violent criminals. Law and order!

10. Fund the police! We back the blue. Law and order is non-negotiable.

11. People fear cancellation – so we’ll outlaw it. There will be no more firing someone over his political views. California and other states have such laws, but we can expand them to ensure that families don’t have to worry that some misconstrued word will let a bunch of bad-haired and dumb-tatted little SJW brats ruin them.

12. Also, we will make it a federal crime to block an interstate, and harshly prosecute those who riot, loot, and destroy.

13. We will support law enforcement by making it a federal hate crime to attack police officers for being cops.

14. We will enforce federal hate crime laws against anyone of any race who attacks anyone of any race equally, and within the federal government people will be treated with absolute colorblindness. We won’t tolerate discrimination against anyone on account of their race!

15. We will also make it a federal crime to prosecute someone for defending himself and his family from a mob. Yeah, there may be some federalism challenges in court. So what?

16. We will protect the future of young people by rethinking higher education, which is too expensive, too pointless, and too unresponsive to the needs of American families, largely by draining the current cesspool and reimagining it. There are plenty of ideas here, including taxing endowments, outlawing political persecution and kangaroo courts that harass our kids, and making student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy (the schools can guarantee them!).

17. We will aggressively prosecute and jail rioters and deny federal funds to cities and states whose Democrat dictators won’t.

18. We will reform the CDC bureaucracy to ensure that it focuses on epidemics and not politics and so that next time it’s ready to protect us.

19. We will reform the immigration systems to focus on merit and on the potential to contribute to our country so that the best and brightest can come to America and become Americans.

20. We will end the Middle East wars and have our troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq by the end of 2021. If those countries can’t fight their own battles after 20 years, then we cannot help them anymore. Also, we’ll pull our troops out of Europe if the Euroweenies don’t open their wallets and pay their fair shares.

21. Finally, we will continue to protect your rights and freedoms with judges who follow the Constitution and are not affected by whatever hallucinogen they put in the Hawaiian drinking water.

There, an affirmative, positive vision for a second term…backed up with the supporting effort of ruthlessly gutting Hoover Biden’s Daddy and whatever hack he picks as Real President. Time to aspire to victory!

This weeks funnies

Shock Poll Shows Trump on Track to Win Reelection

News you won't see in the MSM

A new poll conducted by the Washington based Democracy Institute for the Sunday Express shows President Trump tied with his rival Joe Biden at 47 percent, but surpassing him in the electoral college 309 to 229.

These positive results for Trump come amid a constant drumbeat of negative media coverage in recent weeks that paints his electoral chances in November as virtually nil.

According to the shock poll, Trump is “on course to win the crucial swing states including Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin where he outpolls Vice President Biden by 48 percent to 44 percent.”

According to David Maddox, the political editor of the Sunday Express, the poll indicates that the Black Lives Matter riots have created a backlash that is helping Trump.

It's all about November 3

Roger Kimball:

The unremitting, monolithic wall of noise that has been crashing against Donald Trump since election day 2016 has gotten louder and louder, more cacophonous, more furious, more irrational. Everything is what it is, and not another thing. But the one thing that takes precedence over everything now is defeating Trump, which means defeating not only Trump himself but what he stands for—those 63 million voters who put him in office, for starters.

...

And just about now, a great chasm is opening up. The choice, they see, is not so much between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It is between the America they love—that Donald Trump celebrates—and the out-of-control forces of anti-American hatred that, though he does not understand them, Joe Biden manages to blink and nod and gibber around.

Everything that is happening between now and November 3 is about November 3. But the fundamental choice is not really Donald Trump or Joe Biden. It is civilization and America on one side, anarchy and woke tyranny on the other. The Democrats thought they could ride the tiger to victory. Instead, they will be consumed by the monster they created but could not control.

Why are pro sports such hellholes of bigotry and hate?

Mitch Albom: Anti-Semitic posts — and tepid reactions — should enrage us

But they don't because Black trump Jew. The pampered multimillionaire pets of the NFL and NBA can do anything, say anything and get away with anything because White Liberals are sick, self-loathing bastards.

Black Lives Matter is a Marxist, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian movement dressed up in bumper sticker Social Justice finery.

Twitter roll of truth by Protein Wisdom.

Mulder’s Rugged and Impenetrable White Fragility

As a .@Broncos fan, it is beyond disturbing to me that anti-Semitic / Farrakhan-fluffing language has been defended and repeated by .@ShannonSharpe and Malik Jackson.

When everyone in the Denver sports media was falling all over themselves to bow at the altar of BLM ...
I Tweeted many of them and warned that they were tethering themselves to a Marxist, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian movement dressed up in bumper sticker Social Justice finery.

One of these people wrote back telling me I was a racist; another huffed, “we have Jews on staff!
The fact is, many of those — if not most — who run sites covering teams, are all either fairly recent graduates of our academic indoctrination mills, or else are terribly afraid of clapping back at empty platitudes and would rather just mouth the SJW liturgy...
...than potentially risk their livelihoods.

Let me put this bluntly: showing “solidarity” with BLM Inc is the EASIEST FUCKING THING IN AMERICA TO DO RIGHT NOW.

It buys you the cheapest of grace, and serves as a kind of verbal lambs blood smeared on a door jamb...
...with expectation that the Angel of Cancel Culture will skip your house.

I have heard weak condemnation of the anti-Semitic rants of those in the National Farrakhan League from a few of these erstwhile woke Uber-prog scolds; others have been largely silent.
As Mitch Albom points out in a column today, this very conspicuous variance in responses is not only troubling, it’s terrifying.

What it says to Jews is this: “stop whining. We progressives are trying to help black folk!”

It is paternalistic, but hardly surprising....


The subtext is that Jews, who have been the most scapegoated people in history (and who aren’t even a race, outside Hitler and Farrakhan’s desires to proclaim it such), have done well-enough that hatred turned on them, when even acknowledged, “distracts” from the REAL hatred....
...supposedly still aimed at blacks.

This is rank nonsense: hate crimes against Jews are very real — and are now rolling into the rhetoric of BLM marches.

Meanwhile, hate crimes against blacks — coming out of 2 terms with a black president — are so rare...
...that hoaxes seem to exceed real cases.

Bakke opened up affirmative action programs for certain minorities but not others; Jews and Asians don’t really count.

We’ve had a Civil Rights Act, the Great Society, the War on Poverty, criminal justice reform, opportunity zones...
— and yet here we are, at a time when — pre-Covid — blacks, Hispanics, women, etc., all enjoyed historical low rates of unemployment. Wages were rising for lower-income groups more than they were for higher income brackets. And so the great irony of BLM...
...and the pasty-white woke progs who are it’s most rabid — yet self-neutered — foot soldiers, is that they were called to war *to fight real and demonstrable progress*, mostly through a siren call of wealthy, relatively young, black athletes whose understanding of history...
...seems to come largely from critical race theory, Howard Zinn, Louis Farrakhan, and the Tweets of Colin Kaepernick and Lebron James — each of whom makes bank off of communist China or child labor or some other human rights abuse that is hidden safely from daily view.
Meanwhile, Hasidic Jews are beaten in Brooklyn; synagogues are routinely defaced in LA and other major cities; BLM protesters chant against “Jewish aggression”; and a bunch of risk-averse, talking-head eunuch sports babblers routinely glom on to the latest approved woke trend.
We see the double standard. We recognize the profound cowardice. We despise the diminishment of what they see but pretend not to see — save for a few perfunctory words about all hate being bad.

It’s puerile relativism masquerading as social justice.

It’s anything but.
So, @CodyRoarkNFL, @ChadNJensen @NickKendellMHH @NickiJhabvala @dmac1043 @NickFerguson_25 @JoRo_NFL @redwardsradio @AllbrightNFL @markschlereth @MaseDenver @RyanKoenigsberg @byesline @ZacStevensDNVR — how about some greater consideration to how WE feel when you celebrate...
...and lionize those whose path to adopting the racial supremacist tropes of Hitler and Farrakhan and Stalin and Angela Davis happen to fall within the bailiwick of your coverage?
How about you stop slobbering over AOC and other hard leftists who promote Hamas, Hezbollah, BDS, and the delegitimization of Israel?

How about instead of gaslighting listeners with the BS narrative that Kaepernick’s kneeling was “never about the flag,” you read his own words.
— or is it best just to interpret for him — or Desean Jackson, or Shannon Sharpe, or Malik Jackson, or Malcolm Jenkins — and let us know what they * really meant* from your perches, where you are a necessary translator for people who maybe you believe ....
...just aren’t very articulate.

I am not now, nor have I ever been a special pleader for hatred aimed at Jews.

But it’s real. And a lot of it is coming from a movement you RUSHED to stand with.

9 unarmed black men were killed last year. In only a handful of cases...
...were the shootings deemed unjustified. Charges were brought against those officers.

Blacks and Hispanics make up a significant percentage of police forces — which are now being cut or defunded on a lie, with literal peer-reviewed studies being *retracted*...
...for reaching the “wrong” conclusions based on actual, empirical data.

You want to stan for anti-bigotry? Do some research into where that bigotry truly becomes manifest — not in Kafka-trap junk theories about “systemic racism” or “white fragility,” but in looting...
...& vandalism & arson & unprovoked beatings & stabbings & shootings.

Or don’t.

But I needed you all to know that, while you may think the culture is on your side, a big core of it isn’t.

You won’t be eaten last by the crocodile; but I’m sure it’s a pleasing fiction.

When Black Lives Matter throws a block party

It seems that the Hilldale Shopping Center in Madison Wisconsin offered itself up to BLM for a block party.

It did not meet the organizer's expectations.

Organizers in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in Madison and Milwaukee said they came together at the shopping center in an effort to educate patrons on the plight faced by Black people in America. But the normally bustling shopping center was void of customers as businesses shut their doors at about 2:30 p.m., prior to the kickoff of the event....

Organizers said they were told by shopping center management that the stores were closed to accommodate the block party, but organizers were skeptical. They said shopping center security tried to block them from setting up a sound system and grill outside the Apple Store.

Oh! They felt unwelcome. And the customers of the stores didn't work as a captive audience for this proffered "education." They all went home! There was even free food... but who would eat protester-prepared food in the time of social-distancing?!

Nothing says fun like a shopping trip involving a suspect food, is a confrontation, perhaps violent, and a Conversation on the Black Experience in America brought to you by people who probably want you to pay them for something you didn’t do and they didn’t experience.

When Did You First Notice The Left’s ‘Epistemic Breach’?

When did you first realize that reality - and the way reality was distorted by the leftist press - were not even close?  That funhouse mirrors were more real?

The Travon Martin story?

Hands up don't shoot?

The Covington kids?

The Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax?

 The Bubba Wallace "racist" noose?

 And the endless examples of racism, sexism, and bigotry that turns out to have been manufactured by the "victims" themselves?

Author Jesse Singal made a statement last night about the moment he first noticed what he calls an “epistemic breach” on the left. In context, he means the moment when it became obvious that people on the left could maintain opinions that were verifiably false by simply opening their eyes. For Singal, the moment he noticed it was the Covington kids

Read the whole thing.