Monthly Archives: April 2015

Slimey Limes

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I’ve been reading about the upcoming British elections. Unlike in America, British elections seem to go on forever. It seems that they have been talking about this election for years! I’m kidding, of course, but British election shows are following the same arc as American election shows. As soon as one ends, a new one starts up. I guess it keeps the political consultants off the streets.

For Americans, British elections are a good indication of where things are going in our own lands. Thatcher became the head of the Tories in ’75 and Reagan became the de facto leader of American conservatives in ’76. Thatcher became PM in ’79 and Reagan won the White House in ’80. It’s not a perfect bellwether, but it is useful. We elected the vulgarian Bill Clinton and the Brits followed that with the execrable Tony Blair.Sometimes America is the trend setter.

Even so, it’s worth noting what is going on in the mother country. The fraying of the political parties in Britain cannot have an analog in the US due to our system, but the general disgust with the political class is something we’re seeing on both sides of the Atlantic. That’s the point of this piece in the Guardian last week.

Public mistrust of government is high in Britain, and deference to the political elite has also collapsed as economic woes erode living standards. Amid all that, voters are deserting the Conservatives and Labour, Britain’s two main parties of the right and left since the 1920s, in droves.

In the 1951 election, Labour and the Conservatives – or Tories – shared 96% of the vote. By 2010 they could only manage 66% between them.

At the last election in 2010, Cameron – the first Tory leader since the 1960s to be educated at Eton college and Oxford University, an upper-class combination somewhat comparable to the Ivy League – successfully ousted Labour after 13 years of Blair and then Gordon Brown, but his 306 seats to Labour’s 258 left him 20 short of an outright majority.

The Conservative leader was forced into the first peacetime coalition since the Great Depression, his partners the middle-of-the-road Liberal Democrats who had staged a revival since near-extinction in the 50s and had won 57 seats. A coalition of some kind – or a minority government, rule by a party that does not have a majority of MPs – seems likely again this year.

From where I sit, the Tories look a lot like the GOP in that they have run out of reasons to exist. When you have caved on all of the important cultural arguments, what argument can you offer to voters other than you will wear a tighter fitting eye shade whilst managing the custodial state? How is Cameron different from Blair, other than being taller?

The other issue, of course, is the national question. That’s always the topic when discussing UKIP. It is the thrust of the party and the tool they are using to dig out the innards of the Tory party. I suppose you can add in a healthy bit of economic nationalism as well as economic populism. No national figure in the US has picked up this issue yet, but it is looking like Walker and Cruz are working on their conversion stories, in the hope of repeating what worked for Dave Brat.

It’s convenient to dismiss UKIP as the party of yahoos, just as it has been easy to dismiss Tea Party types in the US. The thing is, I wonder if the appeal of the Scottish Nation Party is really just a veiled and uniquely Scottish protest against immigration. There’s no economic reason for Scotland to break away. There’s not a language or cultural barrier that is big enough to warrant a split.

I looked up SNP’s position on immigration and it is nonsensical, therapeutic state gibberish.The national appeal is by definition exclusive and they make clear they intend to restrict immigration. On the other hand, they moan about being victims and having their feelings hurt by the mean men of Westminster. My hunch is the average Scot hears “Scotland for Scots” when he thinks of SNP.

Demographics certainly plays a role as we see in the US. Scotland is white, very white. The latest demographics say 96% white as a matter of fact. England, in contrast, is 85% white. In America, pasty regions up north love talking about diversity, while diverse parts of the country are more restrained. Diversity romanticism does not sell very well in the Southern states, for example, as everyone there has more than their fill of diversity.

I suspect something similar is at work in Britain. The SNP can wax romantic about immigration and pretend they are treated like foreigners by the English. They can afford such loose talk. Their brothers to the south have to navigate through Londonstan and have a very different view of the rainbow coalition. A couple of muzzies saw off the head of a Scottish soldier in Glasgow and I suspect we get a different tune from SNP.

The old divisions in the Anglosphere were mostly about economics. The Left embraced Fabian socialism and the Right embraced free market capitalism. Today, everyone agrees on economics. Global capitalism is the economic foundation of the ruling elite. Where they differ is on biological reality. The cultural globalism espoused by a Jeb Bush assumes nurture is everything and nature is nothing. At the heart of the nationalist appeal is the implicit assumption that nature, not nurture, is what defines us.

The nurture crowd still controls the high ground in the West. They press on with their program, despite the rumblings of discontent. The fact that these issues are part of the public debate is progress of sorts. I suspect American pols are watching what is happening in the UK with great interest. Gains by UKIP and SNP could change a few minds on this side of the Atlantic.

Iran, The Savage and The Borg

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The other day I saw this commercial on one of the news channels. It was on a talker show of some sort, I don’t remember which one, but the chattering skulls were taking turns being outraged by it. I was not quite sure why they were outraged and not all that interested. I think Taco Bell is on the unapproved list so they are not allowed to employ mockery. Alternatively, maybe they are not permitted to mock central planning.

Regardless, the thing that got my attention was the use of the Ramones song Blitzkrieg Bop. Eventually, anything and everything that is subversive or banned in western culture is absorbed into the Borg and turned into a tool of the Borg. Pop songs from the 60’s that celebrated the rejection of bourgeois society are used today to sell products made by global mega-corporations. Punk from the 70’s and 80’s is seeing the same thing.

The same is true of people. Conservative Inc gets their panties in a bunch when kids wear Che t-shirts or sport other symbols of communism, but they are mistaken. What it shows is that in the path of The Borg, there is no resistance. Everything will be absorbed and put to use in furtherance of The Borg. We are the Borg. You will be assimilated.

If you are reading this, odds are you are from the Anglosphere and you have some familiarity with the fictional Borg, as well as the real one, but the latter is taken for granted so you don’t think about it much. There’s no reason to think about it. Fish don’t think about the sea and birds don’t think about the air. English speaking humans don’t think much about the media in which we are suspended.

The rest of the world, however, thinks a lot about The Borg. They see it from the perspective of both outsiders and potential insiders – unwilling insiders. If you listen to the Islamic fundamentalist, they will tell you why they are so obsessed with killing the West, particularly America. That reason is they fear that their culture will become like that Ramones song in the commercial. It will be just another tool to move product.

The central planners of The Borg are already working on how to make Iran chic so they can move product. Once Obama gets his deal done with Iran, you can be sure Apple will have a Persian iPhone cover and the all-women’s auxiliary of the Cult of Modern Liberalism will be sporting swank hijabs.

In the novel Brave New World, the World State has come to terms with the fact there are parts of the world not conducive to easy living. These are set aside as reservations for the savages. They are not really left to their own devices as they are maintained as amusement parks for the World State citizens. You go there to watch the savages. It is not entirely different from how western tourists run around looking at ruins in third world countries.

The story of John the Savage in Brave New World is relevant here as it shows the torment of being in but not being of two worlds. In the novel, the Savage was never accepted by his fellow savages. Similarly, he was never accepted as anything other than a curiosity by the citizens of the World State. His “otherness” was incorporated as a novelty, like an animal in a zoo.

Muslims who have spent time in the West or been exposed to the West often have the same reaction. They can grow up in and immerse themselves in the West, but they are never truly Western. Islam is simply alien to Western culture. Unlike blacks, they cannot blame slavery. Instead, many come to blame the Borg and decide to make war on it as self-defense.

On the other hand, those in the Middle East often feel shame over their backwardness and inability to compete with the West. Without the West, the Arabs would be living in tents and riding camels. They would live and die as they did in the ninth century. At the same time, they adopt the material goods of the West and feel their culture being absorbed into the Borg, losing its vitality and utility.

In other words, to tie the two themes together, the Muslim Arabs stand facing two options, assimilate of die. It’s why Islamic fundamentalism has ticked up as exposure to the West has ticked up. The communications revolution along with the end of the Cold War brought The Borg to the Middle East and Islamic fanaticism has been the response. In the novel, John the Savage resolves this by hanging himself.

It’s why I think the Iranians will have no choice but to scuttle the deal, hang themselves, so to speak. Normalizing economic relations means a Starbucks across from the mosque, Western music on the radio, Western shows in the TV. It means The Borg is on every corner and in every home. Iran already struggles with the consequences of encroaching Western culture. Assimilation cannot possibly be an answer they accept.

Roman expansion was based on land. They seized the lands of others, held them by force and extracted what they could to profit themselves and maintain their grip on empire. Eventually, the math stopped working. Long before Alaric, the Western Roman Empire ceased to be an ongoing concern. But, the Romans did manage to export a great deal of their culture to the rest of the world.

America has never been a land based empire. Ours is a culture based empire. Instead of seizing the lands, we seize the culture and assimilate it into our own. Even our friends chafe at the stifling cultural hegemony. It is therefore no surprise that the fringes of human civilization would recoil in horror at our materialistic, homogenizing culture. It’s why, in the end, Iran can never make a deal with us. There’s no negotiating with The Borg.

Social Justice League Vexed By Rand Paul

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It’s not hard to see how this will play out in the general. Any opposition to Cankles will be off limits because, well, vagina.

Rand Paul’s first day on the campaign trail was marred by a high-profile fight with NBC’ “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie that raised questions about whether he is ready for primetime.

Video of Paul telling Guthrie how she should do her job went viral on social media, placing his attitude toward female reporters in the spotlight.

The Kentucky GOP senator was ultimately forced to give a partial mea culpa, even as he sought to dispel the notion that his earlier pushback was sexist.

But the damage may have already been done for Paul.

“If this were the first time this had happened, that would be one thing,” GOP strategist Ford O’Connell told The Hill. “But I’m not sure it is all that clear to Rand Paul that, when you’re running for president, it is not a good thing if you launch into a diatribe.”

The incident with Guthrie was reminiscent of a February interview with CNBC’s Kelly Evans when the senator “shushed” the TV host and told her to “calm down.”

I’m not much of a Ran Paul fan, but if the dingbat twat squad is against him, maybe he deserves a second look.

The Cost of Ferguson

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Steve Sailer likes to talk about how the liberal media picks very bad mascots to champion their latest causes. Michael Brown was a good example of it. A violent street thug killed attacking a cop is never going to elicit much sympathy from the public. The fact that smart people in the liberal press keep falling into this “trap” suggests something other than collective stupidity.

The thing that Steve misses is that burning Ferguson to the ground was a warning. Acts of senseless brutality are a type of display item intended to communicate a message to potential foes. The Mayans built increasing complex public structures using slave labor to show their wealth and power to rivals. ISIS beheads Christians on the Internet to show the rest of the Muslim world that they are the strongest horse in the barn. Obama burned Ferguson to warn flyover country that resistance is futile.

You can see that in the case of the cop who appears to have shot  a suspect in the back. It was caught on video and is certainly looks like a senseless killing. Whether or not it is murder, under the laws of the state of South Carolina is unknown. North Charleston, S.C is not taking any chances. They saw what happened to Ferguson. So, they have fired the cop and charged him with murder.

Since there is a possibility he could get off or there may be exculpatory evidence out there, they have released his entire personnel file to the public. What’s happening here is the city is washing its hands of the matter and turning it over to the mob. You can be sure the cop’s lawyers will ask for a change of venue and the City will not fight it. They want this case as far from them as possible.

You can be  sure that no one from the Social Justice League will be protesting this violation of the man’s rights or his privacy. While releasing video of Michael Brown beating a store clerk on his rampage was universally condemned, releasing this white guy’s file is celebrated. Everyone knows he is guilty so why get hung up on technicalities?

I’m fond of saying that you blancos better polish up on your Spanish. In all seriousness, you better study the history of Rhodesia. That’s what’s coming to America in the mid-21st century.

The Liar

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Red State has a great article up on Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the fabulist who made up the rape hoax story for Rolling Stone. I phrase it that way as the only other option is that Erdely and her coevals at Rolling Stone had some sort of collective psychotic episode. There’s simply no way people in possession of their faculties did not know it was a fake story.

It turns out, Erdely may have been guilty of the same journalistic errors she committed in reporting the UVA rape story on at least one other rape story that garnered national attention at the time. The story in question was published in 2013 and was titled “The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer.”

Erdely’s reporting of the Blumer story is eerily similar to her reporting of the UVA story. In each case, Erdely uses a central figure who has a similar tale to tell: she was a victim of a horrific rape, she reported the rape to authorities, and her concerns were ignored and/or used against her. The narrative in each case is used to advance the theory that the institution in question (college administrators in the UVA case, military command in the Blumer case) is indifferent to the problem of systemic sexual assault occurring right under their noses. In both cases, the stories read suspiciously as though Ms. Erdely arrived at her conclusion before writing her story, and simply set out to find the first person who would constitute a credible vehicle for the narrative she wanted to create, without regard to the factual accuracy of her story. Recall that during the initial investigation of the UVA story it was uncovered that Erdely had sent emails indicating that she was looking for a story that fit a particular fact pattern – it would be no surprise to discover that similar emails existed in this case.

RedState has now spoken with multiple members of Navy command who were either personally involved in the investigation of Ms. Blumer’s allegations or who had firsthand knowledge of the facts of this case. For obvious reasons, their names have been withheld to protect their identities. However, it seems clear that, if Ms. Erdely’s story concerning Petty Officer Blumer were subjected to the same scrutiny as the UVA story, it might well come unraveled just as quickly.

The key fact from these conversations is this: Everyone I spoke to in connection with this investigation was crystal clear that at no point did Sabrina Erdely or Rolling Stone ever contact them whatsoever, even to ask for background information. This is exactly the same lapse in journalistic standards that doomed the UVA story and ultimately led to its retraction. The fact that it occurred in this story is indication of a systemic problem with Rolling Stone and Sabrina Erdely’s reporting, not of a single lapse in judgment.

Frankly, the writer at Red State is being far too kind. There’s a pattern with these people that is well established. They steal a little here and a little there as a short cut. They eventually figure out that the editors are not checking their work that closely. That means they start doing fake reporting and fake research rather than the real thing as it is easier and tends to make for better copy.

The other thing we always see is it happens where the publication is uniformly progressive. The faker starts writing tales they wish were true, getting pats on the head from their coreligionists in management, because they want to believe these stories too. The reason no one upstream from Erdely questioned her work is the fake stories confirmed what they were inclined to believe.

That’s the piece not getting enough discussion. Erdely and her enablers either think this stuff is true, or they hate you so much they are wiling to accuse you of horrific crimes. It is not hard to understand why decent people volunteer to shove people into death camps. People like Erdely are far willing to declare others as outside the human family. That inevitably leads to monstrous acts.

Read the whole Red State piece. It is top notch stuff.

Patent Feudalism

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Feudalism is defined thusly: “the dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants (villeins or serfs) were obliged to live on their lord’s land and give him homage, labor, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection.”
If you reason through it, such a system requires certain things to be true. One is there is a finite amount of land and it has all been claimed by someone. The other is the land must be useful to the provision of food and shelter for humans. Feudalism in a desert would be pointless. The other is the feudal society must have enough complexity to support something greater than swidden farming. The peasants must produce more than they can consume in order to support the administrative apparatus overseeing them.
It’s not hard to see the vulnerabilities of such a system. A plague, for example, could wipe out a wide swath of peasants, thus dropping their productivity below what can sustain the feudal elite. A bad harvest could do the same. Alternatively, conflict between rival lords could escalate the cost of maintaining the system to the point of collapse. The Thirty Years War, for example, can be viewed as the collapse of a complex system of governance due to decreasing marginal returns.
Reading this story in the Financial Times, got me thinking that the patent system has evolved into a weird form of techno-feudalism, a system headed for a collapse of sorts.

A US appeals court is set to hear a landmark patent case on Wednesday that could change the way royalty rates are set for commonly used intellectual property in the tech industry.

The case, pitting Microsoft against Google, has already involved a lower court in setting patent rates for the first time, in a move that critics warn will upend the balance of power between leading tech companies.

Microsoft brought the case in 2010 against Motorola Mobility, the handset maker later acquired by Google. The search company sold Motorola’s operating business to Lenovo last year but kept its patents and has now taken the case to the court of appeals.

The dispute centres on so-called standard-essential patents, which cover technology that is included in industry-wide technology standards. Since others have to use the technology if they want their own products to meet an industry standard, the companies that submit their patents for approval by standards bodies are required to license them out on “reasonable and non-discriminatory”, or RAND, terms.

Microsoft sued Motorola after the handset maker asked for 2.25 per cent of the final product price for use of several of its patents that are included in standards for WiFi and video compression technology. Microsoft said the demand would have cost it $4bn a year. Judge James Robart, in a federal court in Seattle, laid out a different method for calculating the royalties that would instead cost Microsoft less than $2m a year.

If upheld, Judge Robart’s approach could tilt the balance of power in negotiations away from companies that own large portfolios of commonly used patents and instead favour those — like Microsoft or Apple — whose businesses are based more on implementing technology standards in their products.

“It’s going to be very significant indeed. Nobody quite understands what the term [RAND] means,” said Alexander Poltorak, chief executive of General Patent Corp, a US intellectual property firm.

In its appeal brought in Motorola’s name, Google has argued that the judge was wrong to take up Microsoft’s complaint in the first place, since the Motorola royalty demand was only the opening shot in a negotiation that should have been left to run its course. The court could have ruled on Microsoft’s breach of contract complaint without getting involved in the thorny issue of rate-setting, it claims.“The litigation set bad policy by encouraging parties to run to court rather than negotiate,” said David Balto, a former chief of competition policy at the Federal Trade Commission.

Some in the tech industry also argue that, if the ruling stands, companies will not be as willing to allow their technology to be included in industry standards, since it would rob them of much of their negotiating leverage.

The calculation method that Judge Robarts came up with “would conceivably apply to lower the reasonable royalty available to every single [standard-essential patent]”, the American Intellectual Property Law Association wrote in an amicus brief to the court.

Companies who have joined the opposition to the ruling include Qualcomm, many of whose patents cover mobile communications technologies that have been adopted in industry standards. The calculation method is a “one-sided directive that advances only implementers’ interests in obtaining licences at the lowest possible cost,” it said in a court filing supporting Motorola’s position.

We have technology companies racing to patent even the dumbest of ideas in the same way settlers claimed land in the West after the Homestead Act. Even crappy lands were claimed by someone in the hope of finding some value in them. We have companies making claims on DNA and mathematical calculations, things that exist independent of human intervention.

As most of the useful patents have been claimed, the patent wars have ensued in the court room. The cost of owning a patent is the cost of defending it. Presumably, the cost is less than the revenue from it, but escalating court battles drives up the cost of patent ownership. Thus, there is an incentive for small patent holders to sell to corporate giants with armies of lawyers.

Just as being a small lord became impossible, being a small patent holder may become impossible. The result will be a flood of nonsense patents by big companies intended to drive out smaller competitors. What follows that is a lack of innovation as the cost of invention becomes a barrier surmountable only by big firms. We already see this in medicine.

¡Viva los Republicanos!

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One of my hobbies is studying human belief. People, singularly and in groups, especially groups, will come to believe something to be true, no matter the facts. Their belief reaches a point where all dis-confirmation triggers a redoubling of their dedication to the cause. So much so it begins to look like madness.

So it is with the people running the Republican Party and their belief in winning the Hispanic vote. The math has been worked out for a long time now, but they persist in the belief that the party of gringos will be the party of the mestizos. It’s not just the party leaders, many of the rank and file buy it too. It’s what’s driving the Marco Rubio campaign.

Anyway, here’s a good example of it from Fox News Latino!

Congressman Mike Coffman has been studying Spanish for less than two years, but he launches into it with the seeming comfort and ability of a veteran speaker.

The Colorado Republican, who won re-election in 2014 in what was considered the most competitive House race in the country, drew some skepticism when he began taking Spanish and going to Latino neighborhoods and adopting a more moderate view of issues such as comprehensive immigration reform.

You see? He followed the Jeb Bush model and turned himself into El Jefe!

His district’s boundaries were redrawn in 2011, after the Census came out a year earlier, and suddenly the predominantly white, Republican area was ethnically diverse – including 20 percent Latino – and was winnable by a Democrat.

That made last year’s mid-term election, as Politico put it, “a proxy war for the national Democratic and Republican parties” in the battle for the growing Latino electorate.

Coffman, 60, does not deny that the need to reach out to Latinos, a community he concedes that he knew very little about, was non-negotiable if he was to remain in Congress.

But what began as a survival tactic, Coffman said, developed into a genuine interest and respect for Latinos and the Spanish language.

Just like Jeb Bush! What a coincidence!

I wrote about this last year. The facts tell a vastly different story. Sure, learning Spanish and soliciting votes from Latinos helped. The fact is he won because his opponent turned out to be a nut, the Latino and black votes were much lower than in previous elections and he did better amongst white voters. The telling fact is no one ever mentions his share of the Latino vote. The reason is he did no better than Republicans ever do with Hispanics.

To quote myself, the RINO fantasy is a world where pasty-faced blancos rule over a land of socially conservative brown people who enjoy authoritarian rule. The fact that California turned into la dictadura perfecta, to borrow Mario Vargas Llosa‘ description of the Mexican ruling party, never comes up. Maybe in addition to learning Spanish, the Jeb Bush GOP has some other transformation in mind.

Ellen Pao: Asian Al Sharpton

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I did not follow Ellen Pao’s attempt to shake down the Silicon Valley VC firm closely. I read the news reports toward the end summarizing the case and I concluded, like everyone else, that she was just shaking down her former employer. The employer decided not to blink, thus the court drama. The very average people in the jury apparently thought the same thing and ruled against her on all counts.

If you look at her bio, it is not hard to figure out what’s going on here. She is not very good at doing real work so she has focused on gaming the system. That seems to be the only thing she is good at doing. Her work history suggests she checks the right boxes and pushes the right buttons. When it comes time to do real work, she starts screaming about discrimination. It just goes to show that a high IQ does not trump a lack of scruples.

The news brings word that she is now installed as the interim CEO of Reddit. How or why she landed in this job is unknown to me, but I’m familiar with failing up, having spent enough time in the Imperial Capital. From what I gather, Reddit is just a group-sourcing site with a small staff. They claim 68 employees so you would assume even Ellen Pao is not going to screw that up. But, you would be wrong.

Ellen Pao is swiftly emerging as the new face of feminism in the U.S., despite losing a closely watched gender discrimination lawsuit against one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital firms last month. Pao, who has been interim CEO of Reddit since November, is now speaking out about how her experience has changed the way she manages her own employees.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published Monday, Pao says she decided to rewrite the rules of hiring at Reddit. In addition to hiring workplace diversity consultant Freada Kapor Klein, the company no longer allows new hires to negotiate their salaries. Pao defended her move based on studies that have shown that when women negotiate, they don’t fare as well as their male counterparts.

“We’ve got a lot of diversity on our team,” she told Yahoo’s Katie Couric in a separate interview. “We could use more, but we’re very excited to make sure we have different perspectives that represent the people we have using the site.” 

If I’m the owner of Reddit, I fire this stupid twat tomorrow. Her job is to run a profitable firm, not engage in social science experiments. But, Reddit is not a real company so the owners can afford to have her engage in the nonsense of the day. Reddit is a rich man’s hobby.

Although Pao doesn’t name specific research, there have been plenty of studies to back up her claims. One 2006 study led by Carnegie Mellon University professor Linda Babcock revealed that when women negotiate, both men and women are less likely to want to work with them. Men, on the other hand, are much more respected for their negotiation skills. For women, it’s generally a lose-lose situation. In another study published in 2014, researchers found that female negotiators are perceived as more easily misled than male negotiators and are more likely than men to be lied to in negotiations.

Sensible people would look at this data and conclude that men and women are different. Crazy people, like the social justice warriors now plaguing tech, think Harrison Bergeon is a true story.

Pao’s solution wouldn’t give hiring managers a chance to inadvertently discriminate against women who ask for more. “We come up with an offer that we think is fair,” Pao says. “If you want more equity, we’ll let you swap a little bit of your cash salary for equity, but we aren’t going to reward people who are better negotiators with more compensation.

We reached out to Reddit for comment but have not heard back yet.

This might sound like a good idea, in theory at least. It’s hard to argue with any move that might make the hiring process and salary decisions as democratic and equitable as possible.

Still, it’s hard to imagine a corporate world where salary offers are the final word. There are people whose entire careers are built upon the promise that they will help people (and women in particular) master the art of negotiating. In recent years, blockbuster books like “Lean In” and “Know Your Value,” penned by high-ranking women working in male-dominated industries, have focused on coaching women to negotiate in a gender-biased workplace.  And by removing the ability to negotiate, it’s possible some employees will feel disempowered knowing that they have no real control over their compensation.

It’s more likely that talented people will tell this goofy bitch to fuck off and take a different job. What they will end up with are the beta males and losers who worry about this nonsense. But, Reddit is a hobby and having a trophy like Ellen Pao burnishes the liberal credentials of Condé Nast.

Ellen Pao has figured out how take Reverend Al’s game into tech and give it an Asian flair.

The Homo Wars

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The last Great Progressive Awakening started in the 1950’s as American Progressives began looking for an alternative to Communism as their organizing religion. The Soviet Union, despite the attempts by major newspapers like the New York Times to normalize political murder, was an embarrassment to the American Left. If you read the accounts of David Horowitz, his generation of radicals were ashamed of the old CP-USA types, like his parents.

Radicals latched onto the Civil Rights Movement. What better way to freak out the squares, like their parents, than to invite the blacks in for dinner? So the New Left jumped into the cause, not to help blacks, but to harass white people like their parents. At the heart of radicalism is a tantrum against biological reality. Eventually, we all become our parents and radicals rail against that by indulging in juvenile and dangerous political causes well into adulthood.

This round of radical lunacy started in the 1990’s with the disappointment that was Bill Clinton. The Progressives really thought he was going to be JFK 2.0 and when he was basically JFK 2.0, rather than the imaginary version of JFK, Progressives began to radicalize again. The result has been a war against normal Americans for the last two decades.

Unlike the last wave, this one has been a bit more diverse. Blacks have proven to be unreliable victims. Like the Soviet Union, it is hard to ignore the bodies stacking up. The near total absence of demonstrable discrimination was also a problem. Whites have been reordering their lives to accommodate the sensibilities of black people for a long time now. A new civil right movement was just not practical.

Instead, they went for homosexuals, sexual deviants, immigrants and single white women. Blacks, as a voting block, have been taken for granted by Progressives for a long time now so there’s no reason to cater to them, other than when they can be used as a cudgel. Blacks have become just another bit of furniture in the Progressive fun house, so the Left could go after Hispanics and gays without fear of alienating blacks.

When building a coalition of bitter weirdos, the bitterest will always rise to the top. In the 60’s, the pasty-faced white kids in the student movements gave way to the bitter (and violent) weirdos of the black power movement. In the 90’s, the most bitter and deranged weirdos turned out to be the homosexuals. As a result, the Great Fag Wars have raged for close to two decades now.

Take a look at some recent skirmishes. Razib Khan gets hired and fired in one day by the NYTimes, allegedly for hanging out with people that say bad things about immigrants. The head of that lynch mob was a deranged homosexual working at the homosexualist site called Gawker. If McInnes is accurate, the Gawker guy just wanted to be an asshole.

Of course, the recent turmoil in Indiana, where very modest protections against predacious homosexuals were put in place, has been led by homosexual fanatics like Tim Cook, the gay ruler of the Apple cult. Homosexuals from around the country have been taking to the Internet, threatening anyone and everyone who supports protecting Christians from these rampaging mobs. ISIS has to be wondering why we care what they do to their Christians.

Even the rape hoax stuff on college campuses is being championed by homosexual activists. Rolling Stone is run by the flamboyant homosexual Jann Wenner. The homosexualist site Gawker got in on the act, defending what was clearly a fabricated story. The New Republic, run by the billionaire homosexual fascist Chris Hughes, was also on the case, trumpeting the veracity of the story, despite their history with the fabulist that wrote it.

Blacks, in the long run, turned out to be poor mascots for the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Government discrimination against blacks, however, was a real problem and overturning it was a good thing. Denying people full citizenship based solely on their ethnicity is no way to run a republic. The train load of other stuff that came along with overturning those laws may have been a disaster for the country, but it was right to overturn those laws.

No such dynamic exists here. This is a war on Christianity and a war on traditional Americans. There’s nothing that can be plucked from the tidal wave of sewage coming from the Left that one can hold up as a benefit. It’s all filth and the people riding the wave are the worst elements of society, the deviants.

I have no predictions as to how this ends. The last Great Progressive Wave collapsed in an orgy of drug abuse and violence. This wave will end similarly. The last time, however, American society had huge storehouses of surplus. Today, we are showing the signs of exhaustion, with limited reserves to blunt the denouement of this wave. My sense is the great homo wars will not end well.

The Twitter

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Back when “social media” was getting going, I was invited to Facebook by just about everyone I knew. I was familiar with the platform, but it is did not interest me. I’m just not that interesting nor am I all that interested in sharing my life with the world. I kept getting pestered so I relented and setup my page. I used fake information, of course, and set about friending all my friends, family and acquaintances. They, in turn, friended me and before long my “timeline” was full of the comings and goings of many people I know.

It did not take long to confirm my suspicions. Not only am I not very interesting, but my coevals are not that interesting either. Posts about gratifying bowel movements, pics of vacation trips, and updates on kids I did not know or care about got boring quickly. For fun I would find a moonbat page and harass the moonbats therein – until I was blocked, which happened quickly. A few years ago I shuttered my account and that was the end of it. A few friends asked why and I lied, saying I was spending too much time on it.

With the blog doing well, I signed up for twitter, thinking that a) I could get ideas and b) I could promote the blog. Plus, I thought I should take a closer examination of twitter. On the first point, I do get some post ideas on occasion. Of course, that means following people and things that I may not like. The NYTimes or TED Talks are two obvious examples. The second point has not produced much. I get some traffic from twitter, but not a whole lot. At least not a lot from my very modest efforts.

The thing about twitter, is it appears to be suffering from a tragedy of the commons. Because it is free to be on twitter, you have loads of people on twitter. They are there for content, presumably created by other users. Writers, bloggers, news sites, celebrities, weirdos, etc. post their stuff on twitter and you pick through it, like a hobo picking through the dumpsters. The standard model for the theory is that the number of takers will exceed the number of contributors. A cascading effect ensues where the takers increase geometrically and contributors abandon the project.

That’s not what’s happening with twitter. Instead, you have far too many contributors. Every nitwit with something on his mind is littering every post worth reading. One nugget of interest is therefore wrapped in a thick coating of stupid. To break through the noise, bloggers and news sites rat-a-tat-tat their twitter posts, usually promoting their site. Kathy Shaidle is some sort of twitter bot, sending dozens at one clip promoting her work. Multiply this over thousands and thousands of people and even a small twitter account like mine is a tidal wave of useless redundant data.

The worst offenders are the major news sites. I’m assuming they hire interns to feed a twitter bot of some sort. Maybe they have automated it from the content management systems. The redundancy suggest it is humans or really bad coding. I’ll get the same story from the NYTimes fifty times in a day. A site called TechCrunch was so bad I stopped following it, even though some of their stuff was of interest. This strikes me as a problem that can only get worse.

Initially, twitter was probably a great promotional vehicle. As more people piled on, however, the people using is had to invest more in promoting themselves through twitter. That just increases the noise leading to more and more people doing the same. Users will then be incentivized to follow far fewer people in order to minimize the traffic. I dropped quite a few sites for this reason.

The other thing I noticed that I think is worth mentioning is that some people seem to get hooked on twitter like people get hooked on exotic porn. Their posting gets increasingly manic and strange, like they are chasing some sort of unattainable high. They have these deranged 140 character interactions with other twitter-tweakers that are loaded with abbreviations and references to previous tweets. Some of it is alcohol fueled. Greg Gutfeld gets drunk and hits twitter, but there definitely seems to be some twitter induced psychosis that I’m not getting. I guess it is like gambling. Either you get the high from the spinning wheels or you don’t.

I don’t think I get it. There’s pretty much nothing I need to say that is under 140 characters. Those things can be handled with a nod or a grunt when someone asks me if I need more beer or pizza. Everything else exceeds those limits and I’m not interested in learning the weird pidgin language of twitter.