Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[THE_WIZARD_]

The Progs are Frauds.

End of Story.

[Dr. Strangelove]

This is just objectively funny. Suck it up, snowflakes.

Happy first real football saturday from Chicago, American hellhole full of non-Real Americans.

[CGVT]

This is just objectively funny. Suck it up, snowflakes.

Happy first real football saturday from Chicago, American hellhole full of non-Real Americans.

Exactly

[THE_WIZARD_]

Democracy. Heh. Funny shit. Joe and the Progs wouldn't know democracy if it was taped to the inside of his aviators...

[iam416]

The Progs are Frauds.

End of Story.

I’m not sure if they’re frauds. They are openly authoritarian. They openly hate the Constitution. They openly denounce anyone who dares disagree with The Party.

They seem like very genuine Leftists.

[Obi-Jon]

Talent's childhood friends trying to prevent his future asshat postings..



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[Dr. Strangelove]

Part of Allahpundit's final post at Hot Air. He was the last founding member of the conservative site to still be there.

*******************

That’s one reason why, when I’ve been forced to choose, I preferred to be a traitor than a propagandist. Here’s another: What is the right’s “cause” at this point? What cause does the Republican Party presently serve? It has no meaningful policy agenda. It literally has no platform. The closest thing it has to a cause is justifying abuses of state power to own the libs and defending whatever Trump’s latest boorish or corrupt thought-fart happens to be. Imagine being a propagandist for a cause as impoverished as that. Many don’t need to imagine.

The GOP does have a cause. The cause is consolidating power. Overturn the rigged elections, purge the disloyal bureaucrats, smash the corrupt institutions that stand in the way. Give the leader a free hand. It’s plain as day to those who are willing to see where this is going, what the highest ambitions of this personality cult are. Those who support it without insisting on reform should at least stop pretending that they’re voting for anything else.

I agree with others who say that, fundamentally, the last six years have been a character test. Some conservatives became earnest converts to Trumpism, whatever that is. But too many who ditched their civic convictions did so for the most banal reasons, because there was something in it for them — profit, influence, proximity to power, the brainless tribalism required by audience capture. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket,” Eric Hoffer wrote. We’ve all gotten to see who the racketeers are.

I would rather fail as a writer than succeed if success means being some demagogue’s footstool. To the extent my work at Hot Air has made that clear, I’m happy with it.

Never forget, it’s not the 30 percent of Trump worshipers within the party who brought the GOP to what it is. It’s the next 50 percent, the look-what-the-libs-made-me-do zombie partisans, who could have said no but didn’t. I said no. Put it on my tombstone.

https://hotair.com/allahpundit/2022/09/02/farewell-to-hot-air-n494121

[Jeff Buchanan]

In the vein of casting disipersions on one party or the other, on one set of political ideologies or the other Ross Douthat authored an opinion piece, in the NYTs no less, that acknowledges the insanity of the GOP but at the same time offers that the democratic party is equally dangerous as a threat to democracy through leveraging of moderate D's to align with the Democrats most extreme leftist ideologies. It's paywalled of course, but within the next few days this essay will make it into the pay free domain. It's a must read read for DSL, CGVT and Obi-Jon.

I thought one of talent's post above was a good one in pointing out the dangers posed to democracy and the federal republic by the Biden administration and its suuporters/followers of his ideologies. Douthat echos it in more detail.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/03/o...b2da6e075b25bf

[THE_WIZARD_]

STFU

[Jeff Buchanan]

Update on this weekend's War in Ukraine news: Ukraine has imposed tough restrictions on journalists wrt access to the Kherson region for obvious regions. The Kremlin propagandists have filled the vacuum with massive and unsubstantiated reports across multiple media and social platforms of the failure of Ukrainian operations there. No telling if ground is being gained or lost by either side. But the Russians are ahead in the information war that shapes alternate reality.

Russia is successfully leveraging western Europe's ill-fated reliance, built over decades of a foolish one-sided detante with Putin, on Russian gas supplies via Nordstream. It's pure evil in it's intent and impact but brilliant as a means of advancing Putin's historic goals for his restoration of Russian Empire. I have serious doubts that European unity of sticking with Ukraine and the Zelenski government will persist over the short and especially the mid and long term. This is likely to be a brutal winter in Europe if climate change doesn't elevate the usual cold temperatures of the winter months. In the US, a shitty economy, receding markets and the value of investments held by the spending class of Americans and the concomitant decline in consumer confidence/spending, along with the increased costs of operating cars and heating homes is going to take a toll on US support for Ukraine. It's already happening.

It is odd however, if not entirely predictable, that the Biden administration is fully disconnected from what the folks actually think about all of this. Perhaps fortunate for Ukraine because Biden will pursue a supportive and costly policy toward Ukraine at least through the winter despite rising sentiment in the US that support for Ukraine is too costly and diverts spending to Ukraine that might take care of working Americans. It is not easy for the folks to grasp what is at stake in reaching the end point, whatever that is going to be, of Putin's dangerous aggression against western values and ideologies. Russia, and Chiina for that matter, have to be loving the political polarization present in the US over many issues not including Ukraine.

Speaking of the coming winter, various analysts are predicting that the Russian Army, already disillusioned about it's slow progress and heavy losses, and with low morale is going to suffer encamped outside, during a Ukrainian winter. Morale is predicted to get worse affecting Putin's ability to sustain any kind of offensive operations to obtain more territorial gains or defensive operations to hold on to what they already have. There are clear signs that all kinds of war fighting materials are becoming hard to get inside Russia then delivered to the battle space. These are required to sustain the scope of military operations Putin has undertaken. A recent article in the public domain provided by an organization that studies captured electornic components of Russian military equipment stated that the circuit boards in high tech weapons that rely on GPS guidance are of the pre-late 90s vintage. What amazed analysts was that these kinds of components are being used over large segments of the weapons producing industry in Russia.

This discovery leads to several conclusions, two of them are (1) Overall the technical capabilities of so called Russian high tech/precision weapons is poor and that helps explain the poor accuracy of what the Kremlin routinely reports as "High precision" weapons strikes intended to avoid civilian casualties. (2) The low tech component's repeated and wide spread use across multiple weapons systems foretells of supply shortages now that are only going to get worse. A neat aspect of how to make it harder for Russia to obtain high tech components is that the ones that are being captured and analysed are coming from just a few manufactureres that appear to be sliding by sanctions. Knowing who these manufacturers are makes it easier for the western alliance to stop them from flowing into Russia's military supply chain choking off Putin's capacity to supply his armed forces in Ukraine.

IOW, this war is becoming a conflict between the western alliance's willingness to stay committed to stopping Putin's aggression in the face of his stranglehold on EU energy supplies and Putin's ability to sustain his military operations in Ukraine in the face of western sanctions that are at some point going to make it impossible for Putin to do that.

[Jeff Buchanan]

As I posted up thread, it is nearly impossible to assess the success or failure of Ukraine's operation in SW Ukraine. Of course the Kremlin's propagandists have already labeled it a failure with the Ukrainian forces suffering huge combat losses.

The Economist did a piece yesterday featuring an interview of people who would have a pretty good feel for success or failure of this operation based on hospital and mortuary staff expereineces in Mykoliv - a city just N of Kherson and right on the front lines. Casualties and deaths among both Ukrainian soldiers and civilians haven't changed over the last two weeks since it became common knowledge that Ukrainian armed forces had launched a counter offensive in the Kherson region.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Former British Secretary of State and leader of the Conservative Party, Liz Truss, will replace Boris Johnson as UK's PM.

[Da Geezer]

WSJ today:

The Democrats have the “fascist” business wrong.

Donald Trump isn’t a fascist, or even a semi-fascist, in President Biden’s term. Mr. Trump is an opportunist. His ideology is coextensive with his temperament: In both, he is an anarcho-narcissist. He is Elmer Gantry, or the Music Man, if Harold Hill had been trained in the black arts by Roy Cohn. He is what you might get by crossing the Wizard of Oz with Willie Sutton, who explained that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.”

As for Mr. Trump’s followers, they belong to the Church of American Nostalgia. They are Norman Rockwellians, or Eisenhowerites. They regard themselves, not without reason, as the last sane Americans. You might think of them as American masculinity in exile; like James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, living in the forest has made their manners rough.

If there are fascists in America these days, they are apt to be found among the tribes of the left. They are Mr. Biden and his people (including the lion’s share of the media), whose opinions have, since Jan. 6, 2021, hardened into absolute faith that any party or political belief system except their own is illegitimate—impermissible, inhuman, monstrous and (a nice touch) a threat to democracy. The evolution of their overprivileged emotions—their sentimentality gone fanatic—has led them, in 2022, to embrace Mussolini’s formula: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Or against the party. (People forget, if they ever knew it, that both Hitler and Mussolini began as socialists). The state and the Democratic Party must speak and act as one, suppressing all dissent. America must conform to the orthodoxy—to the Chinese finger-traps of diversity-or-else and open borders—and rejoice in mandatory drag shows and all such theater of “gender.” Meantime, their man in the White House invokes emergency powers to forgive student debt and their thinkers wonder whether the Constitution and the separation of powers are all they’re cracked up to be.

Mr. Trump and his followers, believe it or not, are essentially antifascists: They want the state to stand aside, to impose the least possible interference and allow market forces and entrepreneurial energies to work. Freedom isn’t fascism. Mr. Biden and his vast tribe are essentially enemies of freedom, although most of them haven’t thought the matter through. Freedom, the essential American value, isn’t on their minds. They desire maximum—that is, total—state or party control of all aspects of American life, including what people say and think. Seventy-four years after George Orwell wrote “1984,” such control (by way of surveillance cameras, social-media companies and the Internal Revenue Service, now to be shockingly augmented by 87,000 new employees) is entirely feasible. The left yearns for power and authoritarian order. It is Faust’s bargain; freedom is forfeit.

Mr. Trump, the canniest showman in the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt, introduced into 21st-century politics what seemed to be new idioms of hatred, a freestyle candor of the id. Doing so, he provoked his enemies—and finally Mr. Biden—to respond in kind: a big mistake. In the early 1950s, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy was loose in the land, and roughly half the country supported his anticommunist inquisition, President Eisenhower wisely decided, “I will not get into the gutter with this guy.” It took a while for McCarthy to implode.

When Mr. Biden spoke in Philadelphia the other night, he might have been thinking of FDR’s speech at Madison Square Garden on the night of Oct. 31, 1936, at the end of his presidential campaign against Alf Landon—and, by the way, three months before he tried to pack the Supreme Court. That night, Roosevelt boasted that his enemies (Republicans, plutocrats, et al.) “are unanimous in their hate for me.” With a flourish, he added, “I welcome their hatred!” That night in 1936, Roosevelt, warming to the language of hatred, suggested that his enemies should get out of the country: “Let them emigrate and try their lot under some foreign flag.” Mr. Biden—who, as he spoke in Philadelphia, was bathed in a lurid red light that seemed, as it were, ineptly theological—was content to cast his foes into outer darkness.

[Hannibal]

Heh. Your "feel good" story of the day.

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[Hannibal]

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