Category Archives: Culture Wars/Current Controversies

Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism

As I have long suspected, PC is primarily the domain of the left-wing of the upper middle class (roughly the same socioeconomic demographic that Jacobinism and Communism came from).

By Yascha Mounk

The Atlantic

Demonstrator at pro-Trump rally for free speech

On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps: Call them the woke and the resentful. Team Resentment is manned—pun very much intended—by people who are predominantly old and almost exclusively white. Team Woke is young, likely to be female, and predominantly black, brown, or Asian (though white “allies” do their dutiful part). These teams are roughly equal in number, and they disagree most vehemently, as well as most routinely, about the catchall known as political correctness.

Reality is nothing like this. As scholars Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon argue in a report published Wednesday, “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,” most Americans don’t fit into either of these camps. They also share more common ground than the daily fights on social media might suggest—including a general aversion to PC culture.

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Voluntary Tribalism: Why Not? Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I’ve always found it absurd that white nationalists bitch the loudest about identity politics when they’re the winy snowflakes who fucking invented the goddamn concept. White isn’t even a race for Christ sake. There is no Whitestan. There is no traditional white tribe. It’s a class concept designed to justify an oligarchy without a royal bloodline. I’m pretty sure that the first “white” guys were just a bunch of slave owners who settled on the superiority of their lack of melanin after they finished taking inventory on eye color and penis size and came to the conclusion that skin was the one thing they had in common that the field hands couldn’t lay claim to. In today’s divided states of America identity politics are mostly used to keep different genres of poor people at each others throats while the one percent rapes their wives (often literally) and pollutes their land.

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What an Audacious Hoax Reveals About Academia 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Education, Uncategorized

By Yascha Mounk

The Atlantic

James A. Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian, the scholars behind the hoaxJames A. Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian, the scholars behind the hoax.

Over the past 12 months, three scholars—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions, and tried to get them placed in high-profile journals in fields including gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. Their success rate was remarkable: By the time they took their experiment public late on Tuesday, seven of their articles had been accepted for publication by ostensibly serious peer-reviewed journals. Seven more were still going through various stages of the review process. Only six had been rejected.

We’ve been here before.

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The Kavangaugh Debacle Was a Shit Show All Around 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right • Tags: ,

The best take on the Kavanaugh mess I’ve seen to date.

By Avens O’Brien

I haven’t commented much on the whole Kavanaugh issue. I have so many thoughts, and they aren’t perfectly organized or suitable for an article. I wrote this rant out last night while really exhausted, I made minor edits this afternoon and I’m just posting it, because it’s burning a hole in my mind and I’m actually like… angry/sad/disappointed, which isn’t very common for me. And yeah, I’m bothered by his confirmation, but more so about the entire process. About how we got here.

Here goes…

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Taiwanese authorities arrest Cody Wilson, intend to deport him Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized • Tags:

A friend writes concerning the Cody Wilson case.

“I’m sure feminists and left libertarians are now focused on the character flaw of his paying for sex. Christians have no interest in defending his vice. Southern Nationalists and the alt right suddenly checked out because “LOL, another damn libertarian”. The NRA isn’t likely to even discuss the issue. It’s like someone knows the chatter of all of these groups and picked an option most likely to sever his base of support.”

This is why radicals fail. Solidarity against the common enemy, whether you prefer to call it globalism, capitalism, imperialism, Wall Street, banksters, NWO, ZOG, the Illuminati or the lizard people, is completely absent among most radicals.

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Keith Preston: Trump and “Moderate Dog” Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized • Tags: , ,

Press TV. Watch the interview here.

Image result for trump mattis

Trump considering dismissal of Mattis There had been speculations for long that US President Donald Trump does not see eye to eye with his Defense Secretary James Mattis on a series of issues.

They include US ties with NATO, US military presence in South Korea and Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal.

The media in Washington are now quoting informed sources as saying that President Trump is considering a decision to fire his defense chief.

Keith Preston: Trump’s opposition include ‘inside’ members Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized • Tags: , ,

Press TV. Listen here.

US President Donald Trump has many enemies among fellow members of the Republican Party and his own administration, an American journalist and analyst says.

Keith Preston, the chief editor of AttacktheSystem, told  Press TV in an interview on Thursday that Trump has many enemies, not only among media and the Democrats, but also, in his own party and his staff.

The media depicted Secretary of Defense James Mattis as one of the senior members of the Trump administration who opposed the president and called him an “idiot”.

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The Establishment Hates a Sloppy Imperialist 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Regardless of how you feel about the son of a bitch (or his apparently abortion-shy bitch mother), it’s becoming pretty hard to ignore the fact that the establishment, personified by both major parties, the legacy media, and the so called intelligence community, fucking hates President Donald J. Trump. With the New York Times latest revelation of an inter-administration resistance and Bob Woodword’s latest tabloid airport flyswatter, the movement to remove or contain our red-headed stepchild of an Electoral College despot has never been more vibrant. This puts me in a pretty weird position, not just because I’ve devoted my life to bitch slapping bigots like the Donald and upsetting the fanged mandarins of the establishment who so oppose him but because I find it strange that these fellow swamp critters despise each other so damn much.

Some of this is obviously theater. Donald Trump ran a successful campaign largely on trashing the Fourth Estate that Middle-America has come to despise for their impressive track record of fooling them into unwinnable wars and shitty trade deals. And the Fourth Estate made this campaign possible with their round the clock coverage of the free-wheeling MAGA circus. Every time the press attacks Trump he gets to play the role of the anti-establishment victim that his fans identify with. And every time Trump makes some vaguely fascist empty threat against the mass media they get to play the role of the embattled crusaders for truth. In both cases, Trump sees his approval numbers go up and the press sees their ratings go up with them. It’s a mutually abusive, codependent relationship straight out of a Dr. Phil rerun.
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A Politically Incorrect Guide To Not Being a Dick 2

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Uncategorized • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Land

Political correctness is a fucking bust. It may have started with the best of intentions but so was the Russian Revolution and both ended in bourgeois tyranny. Political correctness has been more or less the law of the zeitgeist since the early Eighties when the radical feminists teamed up with the puritanical Reaganites to poop the raucous party of the Seventies, after the CIA unleashed AIDS to kill all the fun faggots (I’m only half-kidding). And in the proceeding decades the PC revolution has achieved absolutely nothing. Black and brown people are still poor as dirt. Women and femmes are still roundly violated on a daily basis. And the prison state has never been stronger.

The only thing political correctness really achieved was making it easier for bigots to hide behind the facade of good manners. Based on policy alone, the Clintonian Democrats clearly despise brown and queer people as much as those knuckle-draggers in the alt-right, they just know how to cover their ass with careful newspeak like “super-predators” and empty gestures to people who disgusted them three weeks ago when they weren’t politically viable. Personally, I’ll take an open bigot like David Duke over some squishy closet-basher like Alec Baldwin any day of the week. At least that silicone supremacist will call me faggot to my face.

So the current backlash against the malign influence of political correctness in not only totally natural, it’s also totally necessary. But that doesn’t mean you have to be a fucking dick. The reality is that marginalized individuals such as myself do have plenty of reasons to be pissed off and straight white cis-folk could strongly benefit from learning why and realizing that their mainstream cache does afford them some privileges that the rest of us don’t have. I’m willing to bet that most of you can enter a public restroom without having to seriously consider the possibility that somebody might set you on fire for having the wrong genitalia. But nothing gets solved without conversation, so I’ve decided to put together a few suggestions on how to be politically incorrect without being a total dick.

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Keith Preston: Trump’s opposition include ‘inside’ members Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags: ,

Press TV. Listen here.

US President Donald Trump has many enemies among fellow members of the Republican Party and his own administration, an American journalist and analyst says.

Keith Preston, the chief editor of AttacktheSystem, told  Press TV in an interview on Thursday that Trump has many enemies, not only among media and the Democrats, but also, in his own party and his staff.

The media depicted Secretary of Defense James Mattis as one of the senior members of the Trump administration who opposed the president and called him an “idiot”.

The journalist cited a new book by renowned investigative journalist Bob Woodward in which Mattis was quoted by his unnamed co-workers as describing Trump as an “idiot’ who “acted like — and had the understanding of — ‘a fifth- or sixth-grader’.”

Following the Tuesday release of excerpts of Woodward’s book “Fear: Trump in the White House,” there were speculations that due to the insults addressed to the president, Mattis would be forced to resign from office.

Preston, who has been interviewed on numerous television, radio and internet programs, said it remained to be legally confirmed whether Mattis had truly insulted Trump.

“At this point there is no way of knowing how the situation with Mattis would play out … it’s never been confirmed that Mattis made the comment.”

Earlier this year, Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson amid reports saying the former top diplomat had described the president as a “moron”.

‘Officials working to frustrate Trump agenda’

An op-ed in the New York Times (NYT) reveals that senior members of the Trump administration are so worried about the president’s impulsive behavior that they actively make efforts to undermine his threatening agenda.

The Wednesday report entitled, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” is based on the information relayed by an anonymous source.

The anonymous source in the report claims that Trump’s own staff see him as a national threat and take it upon themselves to safeguard the republic against the president.

“We believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic,” the anonymous source said in the NYT op-ed.

“Many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

Trump described the article as a “gutless editorial”. He said the NYT newspaper was a “dishonest” medium used for fake news dissemination

Fear of Russia and the rise of the Left Birchers 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Uncategorized • Tags: , ,

By Caleb Maupin

imagesrace mixing communism2

In being defined merely by its opponents and fixating on a fear of Russia, a large chunk of the far-left has usurped the role held by the far-right during the Cold War.

In 1963, folk singer Bob Dylan, whose left-leaning lyrics seemed to define the liberal politics of the era, composed a song which was a  mockery of the right-wing anti-Communist organization known as the John Birch Society. He wrote:

Well, I was feelin’ sad and feelin’ blue

I didn’t know what in the world I was gonna do

Them Communists they was comin’ around

They was in the air

They was on the ground

They wouldn’t gimme no peace

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Is Safetyism Destroying a Generation? Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Uncategorized

By Matthew Lesh

By Quillette

A review of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, Penguin Press (September 4, 2018) 352 pages.

In recent years behaviours on university campuses have created widespread unease. Safe spaces, trigger warnings, and speech codes. Demands for speakers to be disinvited. Words construed as violence and liberalism described as ‘white supremacy’. Students walking on eggshells, too scared to speak their minds. Controversial speakers violently rebuked – from conservative provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulos to serious sociologists such as Charles Murray, to left-leaning academics such as Bret Weinstein.

Historically, campus censorship was enacted by zealous university administrators. Students were radicals who pushed the boundaries of acceptability, like during the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. Today, however, students work in tandem with administrators to make their campus ‘safe’ from threatening ideas.

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Keith Preston: Trump may face impeachment if Democrats gain majority Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags: ,

Press TV. Listen here.

 

US President Donald Trump may face impeachment proceedings in Congress if the Democratic Party gains the majority after November’s midterm congressional elections, an American analyst in Virginia says.

“The crucial issue is the degree to which the Democrats are going to be able to maintain or obtain a substantial majority in the Congress,” said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.

“If the Democrats are able to gain a lot of seats in the Congress, it’s possible that they could move towards the impeachment of the president,” Preston told Press TV on Tuesday.

“That would of course be extremely controversial,” similar to the impeachment efforts against former US President Richard Nixon in 1974, which led to his resignation, Preston said.

About half of Americans want the US Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against Trump, according to a new poll.

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Jeremy Corbyn: A Comment from the Right Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

By Sean Gabb

Seen from my point of view, on the libertarian right, there are at least three ways of looking at the alleged or real anti-semitism of Jeremy Corbyn. The first is that it is very, very funny. Since the 1970s, he and his friends have been whining about the horrors of racial prejudice. Now, every time he opens his mouth, he says something that upsets Jews – and that may legitimately be of concern to them. You tell me it is uncharitable if I fail to keep a straight face. The second is that the scandal is a distraction from the real issue in British politics. Next March, we are supposed to leave the European Union. Whether we shall or ought to leave with some kind of agreement is arguably more important than with whom Mr Corbyn shared a platform at the Conway Hall in 1987. These first two being noted, I will focus on the third, which is what impact he will have on the so far arrested realignment of English politics.

Part of Mr Corbyn’s general appeal lies in the belief that he is Old Labour. If we define this as the opinions and policies of Keir Hardie, of the Webbs, and of Clement Attlee and Aneurin Bevan – that is, as the consensus that described the Labour Party into the 1960s – he is not Old Labour. This was a movement probably sincere in its concern for the welfare of the British working classes, though mistaken in its chosen means for advancing that welfare. Mr Corbyn is a creature of the “rainbow coalition” – a coalition within which white heterosexual working class men have at best an auxiliary place. The points of difference between him and New Labour are important, but small. He has no objection to a politically correct police state, none to omnipresent surveillance and regulation, none to the war on both liberty and tradition waged by the Blair and Brown Governments. His dissent from New Labour lies in his desire for a greater direct economic management by the State, and his dislike of the military-economic complex and of the wars that legitimise and fund it. This latter seems to explain his alleged anti-semitism. When someone on the right denounces Zionism, he is almost certainly talking about Jews, but worried about our police state laws. When Mr Corbyn does, I have no doubt he is thinking about white colonialists who are giving a hard time to brown people. I say again – the look on his face when he is called another Hitler is very, very funny.

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Rejecting Progress in the Name of ‘Cultural Appropriation’ Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized

By Neema Parvini

Another week, another set of manufactured outrages. New absurdities have been discovered recently in the UK as the Labour politician, Dawn Butler, has criticised the TV chef, and self-appointed guardian of the nation’s sugar levels, Jamie Oliver, for ‘cultural appropriation.’ His crime? Launching a product called ‘Punchy Jerk Rice,’ which, according to Butler, is ‘appropriation from Jamaica’ and ‘needs to stop.’

Until fairly recently the availability of global cuisines was seen as one of the few marked triumphs of multiculturalism. The idea of curry being a ‘National Dish’ for the UK was, as late as 2015, widely celebrated by left-leaning publications such as The Guardian and The Independent. This week, these publications signalled the illiberal transformation of their thinking by joining Butler in condemning Oliver. One eagerly awaits manufactured outrage from the British Italian community when they discover that Mr Oliver has a chain of restaurants called ‘Jamie’s Italian’ while, shock and horror, not actually being Italian.

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Alt-Right Showdown: We can do better than this… Hard times in USA 4

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right

It’s interesting to see people from the Communist Left like Caleb Maupin and Jason Unruhe saying the things that I have been saying for 20 years, e.g. that progressive liberalism is simply the self-legitimating ideology of imperialism, that “social justice” activists are just middle class and college student hobbyists, that the “Left” in its present incarnation views the traditional working class as its primary enemy, that the “far right” comes closer to being an actual opposition force, that the working class is being reproletarianized, that the “anti-fascist” left has become the new McCarthyites, that the antifa and anarcho-leftoids are the shock troops of the liberal establishment, etc etc.

First They Came For the Douche-Bags 2

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Censorship has never been more hip. All the kids are doing it, all the cool ones anyway. Someone tweets something spicy and they go running to Big Brother to set things straight. And why not? The adults are doing it too, or at least the people who call themselves adults in the legacy media do. After centuries of covering civil wars, Red Scares, and Nixonian scandals, our gilded Fourth Estate has rendered themselves to the status of a bunch of snot-nosed, apple snitching kids crying foul whenever some pedestrian steps on their feelings or questions their inalienable right to zeitgeist supremacy. I speak of coarse of the latest Stalinist purges being undertaken on social media juggernauts like Facebook and Twitter in the name of protecting our precious bodily fluids from a dastardly Slavic midterm conspiracy that everyone is apparently too terrified to prove exists.

So far the victims of this purge have mostly been douche-bags like that rambling boil with teeth, Alex Jones. But that’s how it starts and we’ve already gotten a taste of how it ends. After verbally spanking one too many corporate news jackass (some chickenshit stringer from the New York Times), State Department whistle-blower and fifth degree black belt smart-ass, Peter Van Buren was given the Twitter death penalty and permanently removed from the sites recorded history, just as easy as clipping Yezhov from a photograph. In a rampant spree of crypto-fascist overkill a couple of other fine upstanding civil libertarians, Scott Horton who still refuses to publish me at antiwar.com (not that I’m pissed about it!) and Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute, where slapped in the purgatory penalty box just for coming to the poor bastards defense.

This all suites the virtue signalling martyrs of the “free” press just fine. Guys like Peter have devoted their lives to debunking their bullshit. At the time of his expulsion Peter was crashing the pity party being thrown by those self-fellating imbeciles in the wake of our techno-Tourette’s stricken president’s latest tweet lashing the mainstream media as the “enemy of the people” (Stalin’s wraith seems to be quite active these days). Peter was not-so-politely reminding these perpetual victims that our dear leader made one accurate point- that you motherfuckers start wars with your propaganda. The righteous indignation of these very war-whores, caught with their hand in the hypocrisy jar, was almost laughably absurd. As was their total stone-blindness to the fact that this kind of obnoxiously clueless behavior is precisely what allows morons like Donald Trump and Alex Jones to prosper from its blowback. I’d probably still be fucking laughing if a hadn’t read 1984 in 8th grade.

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Antifa Still Wants to Punch the Two Dozen Damp, Sad Nazis Who Showed Up at Unite the Right II 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Uncategorized • Tags:

At this point, the Alt-Right is just the latest wave of “far right” loser groups in the tradition of the Klan and neo-Nazi groups from the 1980s as one of the antifa’s leading “intellectuals” admits. In the less than 10 years since it began, the Alt-Right has degenerated from a high-brow intellectual movement oriented toward meta-politics and influenced by thinkers such as Alain De Benoist, to becoming a retrograde 1920s style white nationalist movement, to becoming a collection of Internet trolls and Alex Jones-wannabes, to becoming a reworking of 1980s neo-Nazism.

The Alt-Right is dead, not so much through either public opposition or system cooptation, as much as through internal incompetence. For instance, the Antifa counter actions against the Alt-Right are largely the one thing that continues to legitimize the Alt-Right in the eyes of the Alt-Right’s own adherents by simply making Alt-Rightists think they are more important than they actually are.

In reality, far from serving  as a genuine counter force to the “far right” the Antifa-types would be faced with a literal massacre in a genuine showdown with, shall we say, “hard men” (which the Alt-Right are not). And far from coopting the Alt-Right, the Trump presidency has actually marginalized the Alt-Right by seemingly giving a voice to those with overlapping issues (such as immigration opponents) but who do not wish to be associated with the Alt-Right’s extremism. Strategically, it would have been in the Alt-Right’s best interests to vote for Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump.

The story of the Alt-Right is a case study in how NOT to build a revolutionary or radical oppositional movement.

By Joe Seyton

Reason

“I really think we should just ignore them,” counterprotester Glen Hellman told Reason outside the Vienna Metro station this morning, where Unite the Right II rally participants boarded a subway headed into downtown D.C. “We’re validating them, and that is a problem,” he added, describing himself as “torn” over whether to ignore the rally or protest it.

As expected, it was a chaotic scene outside the White House on this rainy Sunday, as white nationalists staged a rally in the nation’s capital.

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