Karl Denninger, who writes Market Ticker has--of late--descended into hyperbole. You cannot fault the man for his passion for liberty, for rule of law, and for justice; but the intensity he displays on his blog can be tiring after a while, and I think that's where I've gotten. He's still on the blogroll, though, because he's smart and consistent.
Vox Day has a penchant for conspiracy. His assertion is that the government has never told the truth about anything, and therefore the real story on 9/11 and the Moon landings and-and-and are not known. But again, he's intelligent and right-wing and has clear insights into a lot of things most people don't.
Here he discusses Patreon's self-immolation. The short form is that Patreon violated its own terms of service, and when users attempted to arbitrate the dispute (per their terms of service) Patreon changed the terms of service and tried to operate under the new ones as if nothing had happened, and--further--asked a judge to let them turn the multiple arbitrations into a class-action lawsuit, something their users were forbidden to do by those very same terms of service. (That request was denied.) Patreon keeps changing the terms of service, and every move is costing them more money, and they are in a very real danger of being bankrupted and going out of business entirely.
The initial problem was "deplatforming". Patreon was one of the first crowdfunding services to terminate user accounts based on their politics, and in some cases these terminations were handled...badly. The terminated accounts were always of users who were right-of-center, or perceived as such by the SJWs running Patreon. I don't know all the details but apparently at least one case was egregious enough to prompt arbitration by a large number of users; and since each case is handled individually, Patreon is looking at paying a lot of money for arbitration costs. That's why they wanted to convert the mass of arbitrations into a single class-action lawsuit. Problem is, their TOS said that lawsuits were off the table, that arbitration was the only way forward.
Twitter is thinking about turning itself into a subscription service. Did you hear that? Ad revenue is down, and apparently at least some of their upper echelons think that people will pay for their service. Of course, Twitter, too, deplatforms right-wing users for the slightest display of their politics while allowing left-wing users free rein.
I'd have to blockquote the whole damn article, just about, to capture what he says, so I'll try to summarize it:
1) Companies traditionally relied on retail customers for income, so "the customer is always right".Twiddle is in the former category; Patreon in the latter. Twigglet would not be talking about subscription models if they were doing fine, after all.
2) For technology companies like Twittle and Faceboob, their customers are other companies to whom they sell ad space. The users are the product for sale, and so these companies don't care what the users think of their "customer service". (It's kind of like a butcher caring about the cow's user experience.)
3) But these companies still have legal responsibilities toward their users, as defined in terms of service or other ways, that they cannot ignore.
4) And so while users are the product they sell to their real customers, they are nonetheless beholden to those users and their good will. If the users stop using your service, or take action against your company, it can hurt you a lot.
And what does it come down to? People leave Twitter (or don't subscribe in the first place, like me) because they know the feeds are policed by left-wing ideologues. A left-wing antifa jerk can announce his intention to pound someone's head with a cinder block on Tritter and be allowed to continue uninterrupted, but let a right-winger merely remind the antifa jerk that he probably won't get away with it unscathed, and Twitt will ban him for "threatening language".
Companies used to worry about alienating half their potential user base. Why they now do not is a mystery to me--except that the left has always assumed its politics to be the default position, and any variation from them to be deviant and possibly criminal.
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Second City Cop talks about the Cook County court clerk who says asking questions about her incompetence is racism.
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Six years later, the third grand jury said "no charges". Okay, the thug who resisted arrest on a charge of petty theft and got ventilated for it? For some dumb reason the government is still trying to send the cop who shot him to jail. This is the third time in six years that this cop has faced a grand jury for that horseshit.
This officer has been investigated, charged, and failed to be indicted by a grand jury three times. The third time in the middle of the BLM zeitgeist.Give it up already.
I think it's safe to say, he didn't murder Michael Brown and that the shoot was justified.
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That kind of horseshit is what Fred Reed was talking about that I quoted yesterday. "Bring it, bitch." I suppose I should have made it obvious that white suburbia is not looking at blacks and wanting to flatten them; the problem is bigger than that and a BLM attack on suburbia would just be the trigger:
But race is just the most explosive part of an unfunctioning polity. Other things ratchet up the fury. Add economic decay and you get more anger, more pressure. People live paycheck to paycheck, maxed out on credit cards. They don't have a thousand dollars, or five hundred, for an emergency. The young live in their parents' basements because they can't get jobs to buy houses and start families. People don't see doctors because medical care is both costly and wretched. Student loans crush the young. Grade schools are propaganda mills; parents know it, but can do nothing. Retirement programs vanish as employers turn employees into independent contractors, avoiding the expense of benefits. People see no hope. This makes them dangerous. Watch.White suburbia has patiently endured a great deal, because culturally it's hardworking, generous, patient, and forward-looking. None of the things Fred outlines above are really new in history and the hoi-polloi have always borne the brunt of it. But the problem is, now the proletariat has the upper-crust elites telling them that their own privilege is to blame for the ills of society, that they need to suffer even greater privation, that they must prostrate themselves before blacks and beg for forgiveness for being the racist descendents of slave owners.
Meanwhile, they don't see blacks doing what they do; they're treated to a smorgasbord of entertainment which celebrates rap music and black criminality; to news stories which talk about how much government largesse blacks receive, always in the context of it's not enough and they need more; and they watch as their children are taught from history books which describe in lurid detail every wrong ever committed by whites while replacing their major achievments with the minor achievements of blacks. "We're no longer going to teach that so-and-so invented four-part harmony; instead we'll examine how whatshisname brought four-part harmony to jazz." (Fictonal and lame example. I know.)
All of this against a backdrop of demands for reparations, set-asides, Affirmative Action, all sorts of preferential treatment for blacks based solely on their skin color, always because "raciss!" and because slavery and because Jim Crow and because white supremacy. The elites don't see what is brewing, think that the whites are easily cowed by accusations of "racist!" and fail to see how badly worn that is.
Meanwhile?
BLM is cocky, aware of its power, made overconfident by easy victory. It, and Antifa, have never met resistance. If things get really wild, though, they will. They will also find that food does not really grow in Safeway, and that a Safeway burned out does not necessarily return to be burned out again.They think that police with rubber bullets and tear gas are "resistance", but that isn't even the first step on the road. Real resistance is when you throw a molotov cocktail at the police and they, as a unit, start shooting...and suddenly your orderly advance turns into a mad scramble for cover with people screaming and you don't know where the bullets are and oh God I'm hit....
And you're in the middle of a city street where there is no real cover, so it's a freaking shooting gallery. On the news that night, the reporters (who were on your side but now are just as fed up with your bullshit as the white suburbanites) dryly report that some two hundred "insurgents" were killed in a pitched battle with police, after two police were killed and five hospitalized with severe burns from a molotov cocktail thrown by noted local criminal so-and-so. (You.)
It's not a place any sane person wants to go. Even the suburbanites softly asking, "You wanna go?" are not really enthusiastic about the fight. But there's a grim satisfaction in rolling up the sleeves and going to work doing what obviously must be done...and if BLM and antifa think that they can just roll over suburbia the way they steamroller the defanged police of the Democrat inner cities, they had best think again. So far, every time antifa has challenged the "well-regulated militia" it has backed down in the face of vastly and obviously superior firepower, which is all too ready to shoot back.
In the Aikido community there is a legend or myth about O-sensei, Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of the martial art. It's said he could actually defend himself against firearms with Aikido. Once he challenged a great hunter to shoot him. He'd challenged other marksmen before, moving only after the trigger was pulled, disarming the opponent and placing him in one kind of hold or another. But this particular hunter--after a few moments O-sensei yielded the match to him. Going by memory he said something like, "If he shoots, this man will kill me." O-sensei had seen that this particular marksman--having long practice at shooting animals--would hit the target before he could react. There's a big difference in shooting paper or metal targets and shooting a live one, and I'm told that animals can tell when you're hunting them. O-sensei could see that whatever cue it was that told him the marksman was about to pull the trigger, he was not going to get that cue from the hunter. The hunter had learned how to essentially erase his presence, or his intentions, or something, so that it could not be felt. (More on this in a moment.)
Rioters in the face of police who are hamstrung by their Democrat masters in city hall do not get a sense that they're in any real danger, because they are in fact not. Even if you get arrested, you'll be held long enough to be booked and let go again.
But when those same people face men with loaded guns who are protecting their own homes and their own businesses...it's going to be different. Antifa turns around when faced with this kind of display because they realize that these men will kill us.
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I'm going to talk about my own experiences with Aikido a bit, because it's germane to my discussion above.
I think I took classes for five months, maybe six? When I lived in Cedar Rapids the community college had an Aikido course. It was mostly women--I was one of two guys, and the other guy was an instructor--and I feel like I learned a lot, without really learning very much at all. Still, it was great exercise and I enjoyed it. It was such a shame when they cancelled the classes. *sigh*
...but what I did learn was that you can see how something's going to break, an instant before it happens. I can understand how, if you could train your body to react in that instant, fast enough, you could avoid a fatal shooting. I don't know if it's possible in fact--it would require a person who has exceptional reflexes to train constantly--but certainly the ordinary person can train his body to avoid a punch or a blow from a club. If you can see it coming.
I was never really any good at it. Perhaps if I'd had more time, if I'd taken up Aikido at the place in downtown Cedar Rapids which was, regrettably, mostly guys, I would have better developed this sense. But I had a few flashes of it, times when I saw exactly what was going to happen next before it happened.
The first was at an after-work gathering of techs from the Rockwell IT Hardware lab. We were playing pool, and one of the guys was really good and cleaning up a game. He went for one ball in particular, a difficult shot in the side pocket. The instant his cue hit the cue ball, it seemed like I could see the flow of energy down the cue, through the tip into the cue ball, and from there into the target ball to the pocket. Like an electrical circit in a computer, it formed for the briefest instant and lasted only as long as it took for the ball to be sunk--a tenth of a second, maybe. But as he first drew the cue back I knew he was going to make the shot effortlessly.
The other time was several years later, watching track day at a car show. The local Corvette club was doing individual laps at the local speedway. One guy went into the last turn, and the briefest moment before it happened I saw that he wasn't going to make it. And one moment the car was stuck to the pavement as if glued there, and in the next, the back end of the car stepped out and hit the barrier wall. The big styrofoam blocks there got caught under the car's rear bumper and flipped it over. And I'd felt it, the fact that the car was going to pop loose, the barest instant before it happened.
It's not some magic sense or special ability. It's just paying attention to what's going on and letting your subconscious notice the little things. It has to be trained and I'd wager anyone can do it, at least anyone who's capable of learning a martial art. I'd bet money that anyone who has been trained to fight has this ability. It might not manifest the same way for everyone that has it.
But in a fight, things happen fast and you don't have time to think through your moves. You need to react--and that brief flash of insight that I'm talking about is actually the last thing that happens when someone with training blocks a fist coming at his nose.
* * *
You do not need special training to anticipate how much of a fucking disaster this shit is going to be.
Seattle wants to replace its police force.
The organizations replacing the SPD will need to demonstrate several characteristics, including:"Okay, L'il Janky G, now, this is the fourth time you and I have had to talk about dealing meth on this corner. What's wrong? Did the interview at McDonald's not go well?"Culturally-relevant expertise rooted in community connections
Well versed in de-escalation skills and mental health support
Trauma-informed, gender-affirming, anti-racist praxis
Connected to resources like housing, food security, and other basic needs
"Naw, they jus' ain't payin' enough."
"The minimum wage is $15 an hour now."
"Dawg, that like $600 a week. I make a G a night, and I ain't payin' no taxes."
"Well, that might be so, but we've discussed the difference between a healthy work ethic and the criminal lifestyle. Do you think this is a healthy way to spend your late teens?"
"G, I ain't got no time for this! Get out my face."
...and then both L'il Janky G and his nameless social worker die in a hail of bullets from a drive-by shooting that leaves six other people wounded. Another social worker attempts to de-escalate the situation but fails, despite his culturally-relevant experience.
*sigh*
I am continually beseiged with a complex mix of emotions over all this. My main feeling is that the people who advocate this shit cannot possibly be that stupid as to think that replacing police with...whatever kind of enforcers come from the "Department of Community Safety & Violence Prevention"...can possibly work even half as well as a traditional police force can.
I think, "This is a deliberate attempt to get rid of police so that marxism can flourish," and in fact that's more or less correct in fact...but I feel like these idiots know it's going to lead to an explosion of crime and violence and are doing it specifically to allow that to happen. They want the crime rate to skyrocket, they want their city to become an unlivable hellhole of drugs and violence and theft and rape.
"Why" is "because that way the people will cede their civil rights to secure some safety".
...but then, it's so obviously and patently foolish that I can't believe anyone would try it.
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The COVID-19 numbers are garbage. It's about as bad as the seasonal flu is and all the number games are meant to hide that fact.
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20 inconvenient questions for the SJW/NPC crowd. I'd love to watch their heads explode while trying to handle these.
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I am so damned tired, still. It's a cool, cloudy day and there's nothing I want to do. My wife asked me--Wednesday or Thursday--"Can we just sleep on Saturday?"
I agreed we could. She's still in bed. Why am I not?