Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Kapture1]

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[foxhopper]

Mind boggling the amount of brain washed dumb fuckers still in this world. And I'm not talking about the truckers.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Mind boggling the amount of brain washed dumb fuckers still in this world. And I'm not talking about the truckers.

Are you talking about Trump voters?

[THE_WIZARD_]

I see DSL and CGVT made a new friend...

[Dr. Strangelove]

I see DSL and CGVT made a new friend...

As Stanley said upon finding Dr. Livingstone, at long last:

STFU

[THE_WIZARD_]

shaddup and worship your Trudeau poster...

[foxhopper]

Are you talking about Trump voters?

And just like that you and CGVT expose yourselves.

[iam416]

A really good Substack entry on the ridiculousness of Modern Monetary Theory in response to a NYT article: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/th...-mmt-is-really

MMT is utter garbage -- so much so that even socialists like Sanders and Warren don't advocate it. However, that doesn't stop the NYT from running what is essentially a puff piece of the woman who wrote a book on MMT. And, in so doing, creates "misinformation" left and right. This is a perfect example of The Media pushing their narratives (in this case, unconstrained government spending has no drawbacks...at all). If it were a serious article they would have, as the Response notes, interviewed any of the almost every other economist who has issues with MMT.

Instead, the conclusion is that it's time to take a victory lap.

The NYT article is mostly harmless. There's so very little traction to be had because it's such a preposterously bad macroeconomic "theory." But it's entirely illustrative of The Media. Much like the countless puff pieces of the up and coming political candidates who, incidentally, all happen to be Ds. Much like their general approach to gun issues. And, now, much like their approach to crime issues (blame guns). And so on. The Media's elite worldview is always assumed to be right and that's the narrative it serves.

[iam416]

Also worth the read, Matt Taibbi burns the "effete pseudo-intellectual" Canuck PM to the ground.,,https://taibbi.substack.com/p/justin...ausescu-moment

I think it's a pay post, but you can read first half...last half is here:

The Russians must be fabulous organizers, as they not only managed to turn out big numbers to participate in the “Freedom Convoy,” but prevailed upon towing companies across the country to refuse orders to have the trucks removed from Ottawa. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) reportedly also tried to get such companies to remove trucks from another blockade in Alberta, and they were refused there, too.

The Canadian government had less resistance when, in an extraordinarily sleazy move, they asked GoFundMe to shut down a fundraiser for the protests. They succeeded at first in getting roughly $10 million frozen on the highly dubious grounds that “the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity.”

Ultimately GoFundMe offered to return the donations, and the truckers raised money via a different portal, GiveSendGo, helping the Canadian government and its backers complete a master class in how not to deal with a peaceful national protest. From underestimating to overreacting to needlessly insulting to trying to steal legitimate donations to fleeing the scene to leveling accusations of treason, sedition, “occupation,” and “insurrection” — there’s another ham-fisted facsimile of American hysteria — Canadian authorities did everything but the obvious move, meeting protesters head-on and negotiating with them in realistic terms. You don’t have to agree with them, but you do have to deal with them, which in this case means giving up the fantasy that your opposition is “small” or “fringe.”

The incredible thing about politicians like Trudeau is that they genuinely seem sure their opposition is limited to small extremist pockets. They simply don’t believe how many people hate them and are continually flabbergasted to discover that insults and authoritarian tactics don’t improve their situations.

There’s a Narcissistic Personality Disorder element to this, where some pols seem unable to imagine that any sane person would feel anything but admiration and respect toward them. This in turn means their detractors can’t be merely wrong, but must be abnormal or literally defective people somehow, seduced by foreign spies or driven by criminal or politically illegitimate impulses. This is how we get to a place where over half of America is reflexively denounced as racist or white supremacist —another brilliant American political fashion adopted by Trudeau, who last year denounced anti-vaxxers as “misogynists and racists” in a bold move, considering his own blackface history

This delusional blindness has been on display all over the world for at least six or seven years now. I first noticed it in 2016, when aides and reporters alike refused to believe there was anything newsworthy about Hillary Clinton’s small crowds. The Clinton campaign was doing what Democrats always do as a means of juicing turnout with “ordinary people,” rolling out celebrities like Eva Longoria and Lena Dunham, only this time they acted peevish when halls didn’t fill, like it was the crowd’s fault. The Onion captured the vibe:
The Onion @TheOnion
Hillary Clinton To Nation: ‘Do Not Fuck This Up For Me’ onion.com/1Ere5fk

April 12th 2015
3,552 Retweets3,904 Likes
When talking about Trump’s massive crowds, reporters would say things like, “That just proves he’s an amateur,” and, “He’s going to places where they already love him, you can’t win that way.” That sounded off to me, but what did I know? Even academics were chiming in to agree:

Lara Brown, an associate professor of political management at George Washington University, argues size doesn’t necessarily matter.

“Trump is a novelty and for some, to say that they went is like saying they went to a sporting event,” she argues. “Trump has also regularly been going to places where he is most beloved, not where the ground game is most competitive.”

For a while I thought this issue was specific to this candidate, that maybe Clinton reacted poorly to bad news and aides just came up with this Spinal Tap “our appeal is just becoming more selective” deal in order to chill her out. As time went on, though, it became clear that both Clinton aides and my colleagues in the press actually believed it. Campaign spokespeople would talk about how they picked less populous sites “for a reason,” and repeatedly sold reporters on the (unintentionally ironic) notion that she was a “silent majority kind of candidate,” who had a mysterious new kind of support that couldn’t be measured by crowds.

Then Trump won, and the excuses that piled up were legend. We were told the true victorious result had simply not been allowed to come out, thanks to a conspiracy of cheaters whose ranks kept growing as more truths were uncovered: it was the fault of the New York Times, Macedonian troll farms, James Comey, misogynists, “deplorables,” Wikileaks, Assad, suburban women lacking gender consciousness, Bernie Bros, Bernie himself (for not campaigning hard enough), Facebook, Twitter, and most importantly, Russians.* Yes, I know that Donald Trump has spent over a year now crisscrossing the country denying his 2020 electoral defeat, but that’s the point: supposedly smart people mock him for that when they spent years doing the same thing, and somehow don’t think that’s weird at all.

In the many related stories of populist uprisings, from Trump’s win to the ascent of Jeremy Corbyn to the gilets jaunes protests to Brexit, establishment politicians kept searching for the certainly illegitimate and probably foreign source of their problems. Meanwhile, the real issue was usually a simple two-step progression, in which people all over the planet first just disliked their leaders, then reacted badly to being called racist traitors for saying so.

From there, in a process that snowballed for years, the neoliberal commentariat gradually widened the definition of “deplorables” and “unacceptables,” to the point where you’re probably on the list right now if you’re not physically in the town of Davos snuggling with a NATO analyst as you read this. Their relentless propaganda campaigns have given most of the world an out-group identity by now, even a growing segment of the intellectual class, and like the Ceaușescus, their leaders still act like there’s a cellar somewhere in which all their detractors can be stuffed, instead of just treating them like legitimate political actors whose complaints need to be dealt with. They will need to reach that second conclusion eventually, but keep delaying, unable to get themselves to a place where they can see the “unacceptables” as members of their same species.

Even here in America, a Homeland Security alert this week ostensibly describing our own population instead reads like the last dispatches of alien occupiers waiting to be eaten by the earth-apes:

The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence.

Trudeau’s error was enormous. He gave the world graphic visual evidence of what happens when everyone in the current political scrum is forced to put their cards on the table. The “small fringe minority” turns out to be anyone who would answer a Trudeau phone call, and the giant pool of everyone else turns out to be the people with direct control over whether or not shelves are stocked, gas delivered, food harvested. Emboldened, another convoy is now organizing to descend on Washington. The hashtag #TruckersConvoy2022 already has millions of interactions and the main Facebook groups have gained 200,000 members in two weeks.

They’re coming, but it seems like the only thing our thinking classes can think to do in response is mass-produce news stories denouncing everyone involved as neo-Nazi QAnon loons, basically a repeat of Trudeau’s “fringe” approach. Those stories may be comforting to the Georgetown set, but it’s not going to help when 70 miles of trucks or whatever show up at the edge of the capital. By the time these people realize that what they’re dealing with is bigger than a caricature, it’ll be too late. If the Ceaușescus were around, they’d explain: politicians don’t always have the luxury of waiting to face reality.

* My all-time favorite excuse, popularized in New York Magazine, was that Clinton’s campaign was “too smart to win,” because the “iron self-confidence” of key aides in their prognostication models made them “largely impervious to feedback” about “danger signs” emanating from key states. Most of us would define this not as smartness but its opposite, but this was the kind of thing that prestige media ate up at the time.

[iam416]

Finally, pre-emptive STFU, EaBoD and ESAD to The Wizard.

That is all.

[Mike]

Cool. I haven't read a good Taibbi screed in a while. Looking forward to it.

[iam416]

It's astounding how tone deaf Trudeau is, but it also really isn't. Workers of the World unite!!!!....(unless we disagree with the workers!)

[Mike]

The double standard of how Dem/liberal governments react to protests among the Left and Right is on grand display again. I have seen absolutely NOTHING remotely close to violence from the truckers. Yet Go Fund Me yanked $10M in donations to the truckers on that basis. Trudeau invoked that very nonsense and in the SAME statement mentioned his participation in the BLM protests because that's... you know... actually an important cause. Not like that individual freedom nonsense.

[THE_WIZARD_]

Finally, pre-emptive STFU, EaBoD and ESAD to The Wizard.

That is all.

I feel the love...

"...I'm your huckleberry..."

[lineygoblue]

Those who are demonizing the truckers, but justified BLM and Antifa's actions are hypocrites of the highest degree. The trucker convoys have not torched one single building. They've not looted one single Target, CVS Pharmacy, or Mom and Pop grocery store. They haven't committed a single act of violence against anyone or anything. All they've done is park their trucks, and honk their horns as a PEACEFUL way to protest what they believe is wrongdoing by their government. What the truckers are doing is the epitome of peaceful protest. Yes, traffic is backed up. Yes, things aren't getting delivered. Yes, politicians are uncomfortable with the message of the truckers. Who was it among the Democrat elite who said, "Protests are supposed to make you uncomfortable"? None other than the heroine and future leader of the Democratic Party, AOC.

I'm hearing rumblings that a US trucker protest is coming in March.

These politicians better wise up fast. If the US supply chain gets shut down even for a few days, its not going to be good for anyone. They need to start listening to the flyover citizens that they love to ignore.