Tag: pundits

Ice Spikes

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I’ve got guests this week and Camera Girl is killing the fatted calf and there will be much rejoicing.  And there is not as much time for writing.  But still enough.  Today I’m in an upbeat mood.  No doom and gloom today.

I went out and scraped some ice off the driveway and bought about five hundred pounds of tubesand (yes, that’s a real thing) and scratch it into the ice with a garden rake and voila! Traction.  And I’ve been exposed to the joys of ice spikes and chains that can be attached to boots or shoes.  With these wonder devices I can sneer at glass smooth ice fields.  I feel like some kind of winter super hero.  New vistas have opened up.  Even the dogs; those canine klutzes, are now in awe of my agility and speed on ice fields.  So yeah, I’ve fully adapted to winter and relish the next snowstorm.  But just in time for my new attitude I read that warmer weather and rain is due by Wednesday.  Bah.

Well, I listened to a bunch of lefty loons today.  Eric Holder, Joy Reid, Claire McCaskill, Gretchen Whitmer, Rachel Maddow, Kamala Harris, James Carville, David Axelrod and on and on and on.  And they’re all freaking out.  Trump’s Hitler and he’s going to open concentration camps and he’s going to force women to wear those funny costumes from the Handmaid’s Tale and travel around the country in Air Force One groping them randomly and he’s going to paint the White House gold.  And OUR DEMOCRACY!

Wonderful.  It’s wonderful to see them running in circles trying to figure out how to make Nikki Haley the Republican nominee for president.  And they can’t make up their minds whether Biden must get out of the race right now or that he must be the nominee but younger, smarter, faster and better than the doddering old doofus who keeps showing up at the White House podium announcing which airstrikes he’s approving against people whose name he can’t pronounce, never mind locate on a map.

Next Tuesday is the New Hampshire primary and presently it looks like Trump will win that too, even though so many Democrat ringers will be crossing the border from Massachusetts to vote that it might temporarily raise the IQ of Massachusetts by ten or twenty points.  It’s said that if he beats her by fifteen points the nomination is more or less decided.  And the prospect of this has Bill Kristol and the rest of the GOP establishment going crazier than the Democrats.  The Bulwark and the Atlantic have called in suicide prevention professionals to coax most of their RINO pundits off the ledge.

Now does all this mean Trump is a shoo-in to win the November election?  Oh, far from it.  States are trying to ban Trump from the ballots and you know the absentee ballots are being printed up by fraud squads in all the precincts of Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit and various other Democrat strongholds across the swing states.  There will be cheating on a scale that will make 2020 look fair and transparent.  No, there’s every chance they’ll cheat us again.

But today I don’t care.  I won’t borrow the trouble that’s due in ten months.  Why should I?  I’m just luxuriating in the agita and panic radiating off of these mental midgets.  They’re honestly scared and that’s just fine by me.  People do stupid things when they’re scared and that’s what we need.  They need to say stupid things, which they are.  That shows who they really are and that makes them look unhinged to moderates and independents.  And that’s a good look for them going into this election season.

The second half of January is starting pretty well.  Everyone’s healthy and working hard so what else can I ask for in this lunatic asylum called America?  Our enemies are scared.  We need to pay attention to our own affairs and stay alert to what is going on in the outside world.  It’s a dangerous place and requires a lot of careful thought to navigate safely.  Keep your balance and don’t slip on the ice.

The Trouble with Being a Pundit

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I follow Curtis Yarvin’s blog posts on his substack called graymirror@substack.com.  Yarvin is a neo-reactionary.  What that means is he believes democracy will be replaced by some kind of monarchy.  But the monarchy he imagines is more like a corporate state where the king is like a CEO.

Yarvin’s posts are enormously long and convoluted.  But he started his latest post with a short discussion of what he says are the three kinds of dissidents.

“There are three kinds of dissidents: (a) anons, (b) pundits who still care what people think, and (c) outsiders who DGAF. All these groups are great; real greatness can be achieved in any of them; and good friends I have in each. But each has its problems.

The problem with (c) is that it’s too hard. It takes a lot of luck to get there and stay there. It’s quite inconsistent with doing anything else with your life—and this under conditions of very mild repression, historically speaking. And the more you succeed, the more dangerous your position becomes. I would recommend the outside way to only one kind of young person: le trustafarian. And it has to really be your calling.

The problem with (a) is that it’s too easy—nothing binds you to reality. The dissident anons create the best art, yet never without some slight sense of playing tennis without the net. Yet this complete, even excessive, artistic freedom is balanced by challenges in opsec that compare only to general aviation. If you are not meticulous enough to fly a Cessna, you are not meticulous enough to shitpost.

The problem with (b) is that you are always policing yourself. Not only do your readers never really know what you really believe—you never really know yourself. In practice, it is much easier to police your own thoughts than your own words. When choosing between two ideas, the temptation to prefer the safer one is almost irresistible. This is a source of cognitive distortion which the anons and outsiders do not experience. (Though anons do suffer something of the opposite, a reflex to provoke.)”

I found this discussion of the problems with the various types of dissidents very helpful.  And it goes a long way to explaining why mainstream pundits are so careful.  There is so much fear of being canceled that they’d rather stand a hundred yards away from the edge of the Overton Window than risk being called a racist.  Surprisingly Tucker Carlson has been an exception.  He comes remarkably close to sounding like someone from the Dissident Right.

What this brings out is the fact that the pundits are aware of these lies.  They know the truth but are afraid to say it out loud.  Which is why as soon as the Overton Window shifts, as it did when Donald Trump spoke out against illegal immigration, these pundits will eventually move forward to somewhere slightly behind the edge.  And that is a cause for hope.  When a time comes when a man who is not afraid to speak the truth gets a platform that the Left can’t dynamite, we will see if the American people are ready to be led in a new direction.

Another interesting thing that Yarvin discusses is what it would take to beat the Deep State at its own game.  Being a monarchist Yarvin sees the solution as the appearance of a strongman.  He hedges a little about what that would look like.  But the names he mentions as historical examples are Cromwell, Caesar and Charlemagne.  Well, none of those names were peaceful characters who worked within the system and made small changes around the edges.  So, he’s talking revolution.  That’s bold talk.  But he says anything less will fail because the Left isn’t kidding around.  That’s something to think about.  His proof is what happened to Donald Trump.  Trump had popular support.  So, the Deep State worked around that support and used a combination of fraud and propaganda to retake the government.  It does show that it will take more than popular support to eliminate the Deep State.  It will take force.  To purge the intelligence agency will take force.  To purge the armed forces will take force.  Not violence but power politics.  You will have to buy off powerful people and then get rid of those powerful people next.  Machiavelli will be the rule book for an operation like this and plenty of people will end up in prison even if things go well.

So, do I think it will take a strongman?  Yeah, I guess I do.  Do I think it would require the end of the republic?  Currently I’m not sure.  I hope not, but I’m not sure.  If a leader arises to displace the Left, would he feel safe only leading for eight years?   Wouldn’t he fear revenge once he left office.  Is it too late for republicanism?  That’s the question.