I Want a New Left

More on UFOs: A Plot by our Elites

This column by Andrew Anglin at the Unz Review suggests that the emphasis on UFOs is actually part of what I’d call a campaign by our elites to force world government on us. (Anglin talks in terms of the Pentagon and our government rather than our elites, but it amounts to the same thing.) Anglin worries that they will stage a fake event in which “aliens” who look just like us contact us in order to warn us about racism and global warming. I have to say that when I read that, I found it hilarious, maybe because that is exactly what our elites, living in their bubble, would like aliens to say. They want them to say this rather than to warn us about faked elections, social credit scores, the dangers of open borders, and the stupidity of saying that math is racist. Actually, I’d imagine that if real aliens had a message, it would be something that almost no one is talking about, such as the possibility of an asteroid’s hitting the earth in twenty years and how we need to figure out how to deal with it. Why give us a message that our elites are already pushing quite effectively? It would be pointless.

So, be forewarned. If there is some alleged contact with “aliens” who look just like us, expect them to warn us about racism and global warming.

UFOs

Being open-minded, I spent quite a bit of time when I was younger investigating and believing in UFOs (that is, believing they were alien spacecraft). Eventually, I changed my mind about this, but for some reason, the topic is now hot. See here for a report by a guy who is absolutely giddy about the topic. And see here for a more sober assessment.

The reason why I changed my mind I already spelled out nearly a decade ago here. Basically, as I learned more about ancient philosophy and history, I realized how unlikely it was that anything like science ever developed. Think about the Greek philosophers, whose development was very near the beginning of science, and notice that what they were doing was not done anywhere else. Nowhere else were these first baby steps even taken. So, it is easy to imagine that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe that simply never developed science at all and that the nearest technologically-advanced aliens are in the Andromeda galaxy. My earlier self would have been mighty depressed by this result, but that’s the way these things go.

Shareholder Voting Weirdness

We just got an email from our brokerage, TD Ameritrade, telling us we can vote at an annual meeting of IMV Inc. Presumably, this is because we own IMV stock. Except that we don’t own any IMV stock. Nor have we ever owned it, or if we have, it was bought and sold a couple years ago.

Does this make sense?

Blind Auditions and the Coddling of Blacks

Ever since I heard that the procedure of using blind auditions (auditions behind a curtain) for choosing new members of symphony orchestras was racist, I’ve been completely skeptical of the idea that anyone could possibly take this seriously. Or to use a British expression, I’ve been gobsmacked by this whole phenomenon. How could something designed to be race-neutral be racist? Did those promoting it think that the judges were clairvoyant or had x-ray vision? It didn’t make any sense.

But I myself had noted in a post from several days ago (here) that the left’s policy toward blacks has been one of coddling, and I simply didn’t take the logic of this policy to its conclusion. Being race-neutral is racist because it is not coddling. That is all there is to it. Or to put it differently, it’s not that somehow racist judges were detecting which candidates during auditions were blacks and were then rejecting them on that basis. No, it’s that the blind auditions don’t let the judges see which candidates are black so that they can coddle them by giving them a job..

Notice three things here. First, our elites (who are pushing all this coddling) no longer think that the judges might reject a black simply for being black; they now think that is unlikely and they want to allow the judges to pick people because they are black. Secondly, while the coddling theory explains why our elites think this way, at the same time they cannot get away from the absurdity of saying that a race-neutral procedure is somehow racist. Third, the natural result will be the hiring of performers who aren’t up to snuff, and presumably audiences will be able to tell.

More generally, the left’s view is that anyone who is against the coddling of blacks is racist, which is pretty far from the definition I heard back in the 1960s, which was that being racist was thinking of blacks as inferior to whites. Even a slightly different definition that says that one is racist if one hates blacks isn’t good enough for leftists. No, our new anti-racists insist that you must accept their policy for helping blacks, and if you don’t, then you are racist. You can’t argue with these people, of course. It is no good pointing out that this policy won’t help blacks very much and will hurt people who are innocent. No, you must accept this policy or be considered a racist.

An Interesting and Provocative Essay on the Wuhan Virus

Here. The author cites a recent study suggesting that 81% of the population already had natural immunity, so we were lied to when they told us the virus was “novel.” That is, of course, if this study is correct. I have no expertise in this area, so I can’t make any genuine assessment of the truth about the claims here (and I’ve only listed one of several claims that the author makes). All I know is that our ruling-class media very quickly settled on certain claims as true, long before (as far as I could tell) there was enough evidence for them.

Quote of the Day

From Kurt Schlichter (here):

Over the weekend, America cheered as the Israelis flattened the building housing the Associated Press in Gaza. This led to widespread laughter and high-fives among American patriots. And we were even happier when we later found out that the same high-rise had also housed some Hamas military Hqs.

Heh. I wish I had thought of this.

An Idea to Show Solidarity with Workers Hurt by the Lockdown

How about a button with the word lockdown with a bar through it? We know who is hurting these workers: it is all those people who insist that the lockdown should continue, possibly forever. But I’d like to show restaurant workers and the other people who have been hurt that I’m against it. Maybe with a button with this image:

Yes, it's virtue-signalling, but it's against the usual sort of virtue-signalling.

The Virus: It’s All Politics and Feelings and Not Science

As a result of various serious setbacks from what was supposed to be the calm of a new non-Trump administration – such as violence in the Middle East to a degree we haven’t seen in many years, a bad jobs report, the pipeline incident, and inflation – the powers-that-be decided to get everyone’s mind off of those troubling things and onto some good news. In short, they decided to do what the Science said they could have done months ago, namely open things up.

Immediately, voices on the left called out in panic. See here for a report from Legal Insurrection. They make it seem like it’s all about forcing a vaccination ID on us. Maybe so, but I prefer a different explanation: the left is neurotic compared with the sane and mentally healthy right.

These people actually like the lockdown. Plus, they weren’t financially affected by it. But mostly, they actually have liked it. Oh, they may say they don’t, but they really do seem to like it. Also, they are conformists who want to force everyone else to conform, including random strangers they can yell at (because the only ones not conforming would be those dreadful right-wingers). And of course none of this is based on the science, though they will call you a science-denier if you try to argue with them.

Let’s reject the policies of the neurotic.

Naive New Traders

Apparently, there are some newbies out there who use Robinhood to make trades who are shocked and horrified to learn that the free trades they indulge in aren’t really free. They are paying for it in a hidden way because Robinhood will use a service that compensates them (Robinhood) the most for sending trades their (the service’s) way, but the trade-off is that the service isn’t as fast as other services, with the result that traders may not get exactly the stock price they were expecting.

You get what you pay for, guys. It used to cost a lot in commissions to do a trade, so be grateful that things are now free.

Clueless Newpaper Guys Living in the Past of Fifty Years Ago

See here. This is a discussion between two guys in the media about how the media seems to be dying and whether that is good or bad. One is somewhat more reasonable than the other, but based on their remarks, it is clear that their model for the structure of society is that the Republicans represent powerful people and the Democrats represent marginalized people and that therefore the power represented by the Republicans must be attacked constantly. Accordingly, investigative reporting is always trying to uncover bad things that the Republicans have done, never bad things that the Democrats have done.

This is what was more or less true about American society fifty years ago when investigative reporting began. Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post and Seymour Hersh at the NY Times are the models for later reporters because they uncovered the bad things associated with the Republicans, Watergate for the former two and a massacre by our troops in the Vietnam War for the latter. Yet, even back then there were poor whites who had abandoned the Democrats and gone over to the Republican side. Nixon would not have won in 1968 if that hadn’t been the case. And since then there has been a steady drift of poor whites to the Republicans, especially during the Reagan and Trump administrations. And Trump even managed to attract more blacks in the 2020 election than he had before. And everyone who has drifted over to the Republican side has done it for the same reason I did, namely that we saw that what the liberals and leftists were doing was ineffective or even harmful. And over on the Republican side, we found people who were simply bad at marketing their ideas for helping the marginalized rather than people who were morally bad.

In short, the bottom isn’t unified the way it was when I was young. It is split. Poor whites are mostly on the Republican side, while poor minorities are mostly on the Democratic side. Our ruling-class media is in denial about this, and so they must make disparaging remarks about poor whites – they cling to guns and religion, they are deplorables, they are racist, they have white privilege – while bringing out the heavy guns for any blacks who go over to the Republican side – they are Uncle Toms, they are race-traitors.

The split among the marginalized is real, however. Many poor people now support the Republicans, and anyone who is truly interested in helping the marginalized has to take this fact into account. But our leftist elites still refuse to accept this fact. They still adhere to the old facts. Accordingly, our media’s insistence that they must investigate and attack one party rather than the other is not heroic and a strike for social justice but is instead unfair, meanspirited, and of course out of touch with reality. We who are marginalized and who are on the Republican side pay no attention to the “results” of their investigative reporting because we know it is biased against us. We know they will pay no attention to any scandals on the Dems’ side and that if they do, they will fail to even mention that those involved in the scandal are Dems. So, when they announced the results of some investigation into Trump’s taxes, of course it had little effect. As one commenter somewhere noted, they had such a steady-stream of attacks that the effect of just one more attack wasn’t going to much of an effect. And I’d like to think that lots of Republicans have taken up my position, which is to wonder why the Dems are so obsessed with getting rich individuals to pay their fair share of taxes while ignoring rich institutions like Harvard. Trump was trying to help the poor by creating jobs for them, while Harvard is an institution for the rich that is itself very rich. I and many others are smart enough to know which one we ought to prefer.

So, is the media dying? I don’t know, but for many of us that death if it ever happens will be a time for rejoicing.