Tyrants don’t care about their people

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m up to episode number five of Jordan Peterson’s series on the Book of Exodus. It’s on YouTube, and it’s a fascinating in-depth analysis of the Biblical story in tremendous detail, along with philosophical and even political ramifications. I haven’t finished that particular video yet, but this part stood out when I heard it. It’s a discussion of the orientation of tyrants towards the people in their own countries, and it rang true to me. Here’s the clip:

And then later I read this observation from commenter “JJ” on the post about Biden’s non-remarks concerning the fire victims in Maui:

I’s really hard to believe that Biden isn’t trying to make some political capital for himself by leading the charge to get help to Maui. He doesn’t care. Not enough Democrat votes to worry about in Maui.

The I realized that they want this to be really bad. They can claim that climate change is responsible, and it demonstrates that climate change is an existential crisis. Cunning and despicable.

The Democrats really are the deplorables.
No compassion, no morals, and only a lust for power. When will the moderates and low information voters wake up?

When the power of corrupt men and women becomes entrenched, they can take their masks off and end the pretense of caring. In Joe Biden’s case, it’s probably helped along by his cognitive issues. But for Joe it’s not just an effect of creeping senility, and maybe not even primarily that.

My reading of Biden is that his motivation to become a politician has always been to get power and perks. Politics is pretty much the only adult life he’s ever known, and even in his early 20s he said he intended to become president, but that desire didn’t seem to have been in the service of any special goal involving the US and its destiny. That’s why he’s the perfect vessel for the leftists who control the Democratic Party these days.

But say what you will about the flaws of Trump, I don’t think it’s ever been in doubt that he cares deeply about America and Americans. Yes, he’s also a narcissist, but he was living a great (and narcissistic) adult life for a long long time before entering politics. He didn’t have to do run for the presidency to become famous or to earn tons of money or to marry a beautiful woman; he already had all of that and more. He became a presidential candidate because he felt America and Americans were sinking, and he thought he could make things better – could make America great again.

The worm turns

The New Neo Posted on by

This is straight out of science fiction:

Scientists have revived a worm that was frozen 46,000 years ago — at a time when woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers and giant elks still roamed the Earth.

The roundworm, of a previously unknown species, survived 40 meters (131.2 feet) below the surface in the Siberian permafrost in a dormant state known as cryptobiosis, according to Teymuras Kurzchalia, professor emeritus at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden and one of the scientists involved in the research …

Five years ago, scientists from the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science in Russia found two roundworm species in the Siberian permafrost.

One of the researchers, Anastasia Shatilovich, revived two of the worms at the institute by simply rehydrating them with water, before taking around 100 worms to labs in Germany for further analysis, transporting them in her pocket.

After thawing the worms, the scientists used radiocarbon analysis of the plant material in the sample to establish that the deposits had not been thawed since between 45,839 and 47,769 years ago.

This also reminds me of a recurrent nightmare I used to have years ago. In the dream, I would open a drawer and find some sort of desiccated creature there, all shriveled up and almost recognizable. Sometimes it was a pet I’d forgotten to care for, or a couple of times (particularly horrifying) a baby I’d somehow forgotten. Once it was an elderly person. I would hydrate the thing and try to revive it, but I never really learned whether these efforts were successful because I’d usually wake up in horror before that point.

Another repellent thing about this science story was that Shatilovich transported the worms to Germany in her pocket. Was there no better way to do it?

But you gotta hand it to those worms for survival strategies.

Mothers and sons and masculinity – and Barbie

The New Neo Posted on by

As part of the war against masculinity, we have this sort of essay. Here’s part of the start of the piece, in which the author establishes her virtue-signaling bona fides:

I’ve been inoculating my son against hate for years. On the morning of Nov. 9, 2016, my then 8-year-old son found me sobbing on our family room couch in a suburb outside Washington, D.C. Right then and there, I gave him a gargantuan task that amounted to “don’t sit by and let people bully others.” I implored him to use his privilege to help. It was a huge ask and perhaps an inappropriate burden for a kid that age, but I’d already put some scaffold in place.

Up to that point, I’d tried to model this behavior by doing whatever I could – and using my own privileges – to help those around me.

As part of her ongoing reaction to the trauma of all the awful things she sees happening in the US (some of which she lists in her essay; I suggest you follow the link if you’re curious), author Wendy Besel Hahn decides to take her 16-year-old son to see the movie Barbie, of course. Here’s her reasoning:

Analyzing the “Barbie” film is as foreign to my son as reading Shakespeare’s comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was last year in ninth grade. It requires a guide who can explain that Ken’s inferior position in Barbieland is a mere inversion of the patriarchal American society we live in today. I was thrilled to be given the chance to provide that guidance.

This is not satire. At least, it does not appear to be.

More:

The experience of sitting in a theater with my son and watching Ken ask Stereotypical Barbie (played by Margot Robbie) if she wants to have a sleepover offered me the opportunity to point out that consent is important and needs to be honored.

We discussed how the frustration Ken feels at being left out of fun in Barbieland mirrors how women and other minorities feel in America today. Together, we laughed about Barbie and Ken’s trip to the “real world” and the Mattel corporate headquarters, where only men sit in the boardroom. I assured my son that it’s OK to feel slighted and want to be in charge. It’s understandable that after his return, Ken leads a revolt and tries to rewrite the Constitution to put Kens in power. I get it: I’m pretty mad there are only four female Supreme Court justices and a female vice president.

Only four out of nine? Oh, the horror!

More:

In the spirit of cooperation, my son signed off on this essay about our excursion. It’s just one instance in an ongoing process of negotiations between parent and child. I’m grateful to see glimmers of the man he is becoming, even wrapped in a sometimes surly exterior.

Can’t imagine why this kid would ever be surly. This mother is fortunate he still talks to her at all. But then again, he might be quite in sync with the program – after all, it’s what he’s known since he was born. I don’t know if there’s a father in the mix, but there certainly isn’t one mentioned.

The comments I read – only about the first 20 or so – were uniformly negative. But I think this mother, while somewhat extreme, is presenting an attitude that’s not all that uncommon.

I also reflected, when I read the piece, on something I’ve noticed in many of the interviews with male detransitioners to which I’ve listened on YouTube.

That may seem like a bit of a leap, but please hear me out. Youthful female-to-male transitioners are the most common variety these days, and they (that is, the return to identifying as female, their biological sex) are also most common among detransitioners. But male-to-female transitioners and back-to-male detransitioners nevertheless still exist, and I’ve noticed a pattern among the latter. They very often say that, growing up as boys, they received a relentless message that men are evil – aggressive and hostile, trampling on other people along the way – and that being a man necessarily entails behaving like that. As they entered adolescence, the force of their own sexual drives frightened and confuse them. Will they come on too strong? Will they end up abusing someone, as they think is almost inevitable for men?

And so their flight towards becoming a woman was mostly a flight from a male identity that they had been indoctrinated to hate and fear. Sometimes they have also had direct personal experience of mistreatment at the hands of a man, sometimes an abusive father. And so when these teenagers found an online community that pushes becoming a woman as a solution to the problem of being a supposedly inevitably toxic man, they embraced that as a way out of their dilemma.

Many have ended up regretting that decision, sometimes when they’ve already had irreversible surgeries. It is a tragedy that is at least partly engendered by this war against men.

Biden’s “no comment”

The New Neo Posted on by

Biden had this to say about the disastrous Maui fires:

Biden on Sunday morning, during a bike ride in Rehoboth, replied, “We’re looking at it,” when asked about whether he would go to Maui. Later on Sunday, following a stop at the beach, he responded “no comment” when asked about the rising death toll in Maui.

Jean-Pierre was pressed again by Tausche about the White House response to critics who suggested that the president should not have been vacationing during the wildfire.

She responded that the president is “deeply concerned” to the point that he has mobilized a whole-of-government response. She pointed to the 300 FEMA personnel on the ground, 50,000 meals brought in and thousands of cots and blankets.

And yet Biden himself didn’t even manage to say that he is deeply concerned – a statement which even he, with all his cognitive challenges, ought to have been able to grind out.

It gets dull and repetitive to ask: can you imagine if Trump had responded to a disaster in that way? It yet the contrast in responses of the press would obviously have been immense. Nothing Biden says or doesn’t say or does or doesn’t do will change the fact that, if he runs in 2024, just about everyone who supported him in 2020 will vote for him again, and the Democrats and the left (redundancy?) will move heaven and earth to make sure he wins.

Biden could answer “no comment” to every single question he is asked from now till November of 2024, and it would not change things.

[ADDENDUM: Apparently, Biden’s “no comment” comment was accompanied by a grin.]

Plisetskaya dances

The New Neo Posted on by

A nice change from gloomy news can be found in this 1964 documentary on ballet dancer Maya Plisetskaya. I saw it in a movie theater when I was young, and it made a tremendous impression on me. Despite the more recent advances in empty technique, no one since has even come close to her sheer dance ability, her fluidity, her smoldering sexiness, the power of her jump, her boneless-seeming port de bras (arms), and the excitement she brought to the stage with her every movement. And all this was accomplished with a body of relatively ordinary proportions compared to the hyper-flexible very slender and long-limbed dancers so commonly found today.

A movie, especially an old black-and-white one, can’t quite capture her dancing in its 3-D entirety, but it’s the next best thing and at this point it’s all that’s left – that, and memories. I saw her in person many times when I was a child, and she tore up the stage in a manner that was absolutely thrilling.

NOTE: Plisetskaya was great in many roles, especially as a swan with her liquid port de bras. But my favorite role of hers, which I saw her dance several times in person, was the Bacchante in Walpurgis Nacht. In the above documentary, it begins around minute 58:00 and goes on for two and three quarter minutes. The sideways leap into her partner’s arms, which occurs from around 1:00:13 to 1:00:17, caused the audiences of my youth to gasp in delighted shock.

Andrew C. McCarthy: Weiss’ appointment as special counsel is a farce and a joke

The New Neo Posted on by

McCarthy doesn’t mince words:

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of the Biden Justice Department’s Delaware U.S. attorney, David Weiss, as a special counsel is a joke.

To begin with, Weiss is not eligible to be a special counsel under the special-counsel regulations. To be clear, the attorney general has all the authority he needs to assign Weiss to the case (and, indeed, Weiss has been assigned to it throughout Garland’s tenure). But under the regulations that Garland purports to be applying, what makes a special counsel special is that he or she is a lawyer brought in from outside the government, not just outside the Justice Department. …

Of course, if he were to deign to answer questions (as he declined to do today), Garland would point out that that last of the regulations, Section 600.10, makes clear that no one can sue him for refusing to follow the regulations. And that’s right: This is all theater. He is pretending to follow regulations while not following them, hoping you don’t notice but aware that even if you do notice there’s nothing you can do about it. Got that? …

Weiss is the vehicle by which the Biden Justice Department intends to maintain tight control over the so-called Biden investigation.

No surprise there. Weiss has all along compliantly acted as the vehicle by which the Biden Justice Department protects the president, and thus the president’s son, from a credible investigation.

McCarthy goes on to say that another advantage of appointing Weiss as special counsel is that in that capacity he will get to write a report saying that Biden is completely clean.

What Garland did in appointing Weiss is really rather creative in a Machiavellian – or is it Orwellian? or maybe both? – way.

And those who say that Garland can be impeached are correct. But he will not be convicted in the Senate, so it would just be a “Republicans pounce!” story. I’d like to see him impeached, though, on basic principles. He is abusing his power in order to protect the Bidens from a fair investigation, under the guise of ordering one.

Arguments for DeSantis over Trump – do they matter?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Griffin” links to this Twitter page in which Steve Deace endorses DeSantis. Deace gives a host of reasons, and I agree with pretty much all of them. Here’s a small excerpt:

DeSantis has done more damage to our enemies where it matters most (policy) than any politician I’ve seen in my career, and thus earned my (our) support IMO.

Or, to put it more plainly, it is time to not just message and market the MAGA, but to actually do the MAGA. …

… I think [Trump] has real electability issues, but even more fundamental than that, I don’t believe they’re going to let you vote for him if you want to. I think he will either be in prison by this time next year, or forced to take a plea deal to stay out of it. I don’t even think anymore they’re trying to get him the nomination, because they think they can beat him. Maybe it started there, but these people can’t restrain themselves. They just want to punish Trump for daring to be our voice. …

There is only one other candidate who truly threatens the system — DeSantis. Now, I think he threatens them even more/better than Trump, …

I see no other path to stop this, since Republicans in Congress won’t defund the weaponized DOJ (which Trump himself is strangely not even asking for), than to win the next election. If Trump isn’t on the ballot, who else has an actual record of draining swamps other than DeSantis? Nobody. Heck, the same Ramaswamy currently auditioning to be Bishop of MAGA just wrote a book — last year — condemning Trump and praising Pence for goodness sakes. …

… [N]ot a single meaningful incumbent lost last year, despite the three years of Hell we’d all just been through as a people. If you missed this, and are still claiming you know what time it is, I would kindly ask you to re-check your watch.

There were two places where the Democrat Party was rightfully destroyed — Florida and Iowa. Two places with governors who didn’t surrender their people to generational damage at the hands of Fauci-Birx as Trump did. Two places where landmark #ProLife legislation was enacted. Two places where the groomers were confronted head on and kicked out. Two places with strong leaders displaying strong leadership. And the voters in each of those states, which Barack Obama had just won twice, rewarded that strong leadership by re-electing their Republican Governors by 20 point margins.

There’s more from Deace, of course, but I wager you get the point.

A personal note: I’ve had a difficult year, as most of you know. I’ve weathered the death of someone very close to me, and there are other close friends who are wrestling with illness and I’ve also had other friends die. The news out there in the wider world is often depressing for the most part, as well. So it may be that my perceptions of the upcoming election are skewed by all of that grieving.

But with that caveat, what I see is that most people on the right are going to vote for Trump in the primaries, and no other candidate will be able to gain enough traction to stop that. Logical arguments like those of Deace don’t tend to change minds, and that is particularly true where strong emotion is involved. And with Trump’s candidacy, very strong emotion is involved. That emotion involves – among other things – justified outrage at what has been done to him by his enemies.

I think for the most part Trump was a good president, and I think what he accomplished under the constant barrage of false accusations, spying, lying, lawfare, and all the rest is nothing short of phenomenal. But I think that he won by a small margin in 2016, and was unable to build substantially on that. Whether or not fraud or rigging was involved in Biden’s win, I think there’s also no question that Trump made few converts to his cause. His behavior since the election of 2020 has alienated even more people, and I believe he cannot win in 2024 for that reason.

Of course, if Trump becomes the nominee, I hope I’m wrong about that.

However, I simply don’t see that anyone else in the Republican field has a chance to win the nomination, much as I think it’s logical to support someone like DeSantis. For a host of reasons, I don’t think Trump’s support is going to sink below a plurality of Republican primary votes. And I also think that quite a few Democrats will probably cross over in the primaries to vote for Trump, because they think he will be a sure loser in the general.

Trump and the perception of guilt

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Eeyore” has a question:

One thing I have never been clear on is exactly why they think Trump “guilty”, or guilty of what. I really haven’t seen anything resembling a coherent explanation. And I do not mean psychological diagnoses; I see far too many of them on the right. True, false, or whatever, they miss the point, as such approaches always do.

Is there such a thing out there?

I’ll have a go at an answer.

I think that, to most Democrats and most NeverTrumpers who once were Republicans, Trump’s guilt on myriad counts is overdetermined rather than underdetermined. But it starts with a perception, as so many things do: that Trump is a boor as well as often juvenile. I think that’s a correct perception about his personality, but it certainly doesn’t mean he’s guilty of anything in the legal sense or that he should be prosecuted for anything at all. And of course, I happen to agree with most of his policy decisions, whereas Democrats hate those positions of his, which makes them even more disposed to believe the worst.

So for them, the ground is prepared to consider Trump really really awful, and from there it’s just a short segue to believing him guilty of some or all the things of which he’s been accused. And those accusations have been made by people who are actually lawyers and law professors and prosecutors and Democrat politicians and other professors and just about every MSM reporter in the business, so if a person is already inclined to believe such things, then the Argument From Authority is available.

Most people do not delve into the details, seeking to question their own beliefs. Most people also aren’t especially knowledgeable about law or even about how our system of justice works. So they’re more than willing to believe that Trump is every bit as guilty as claimed.

And there’s a huge supply of such supposed crimes from which to choose. It is my distinct impression that many if not most Democrats have never quite abandoned the “Russian puppet” and “Russian interference on Trump’s behalf in 2016” accusations, after those things had been drummed into their heads so forcibly and for so long. So, Trump was not only illegitimately elected in 2016, but he was willing to sell us out to Russia. This latter point can combine with the classified documents case to create the belief that Trump took classified documents which could be shown to foreign powers in order to hurt us, although he hadn’t gotten around to doing so. Therefore, in their minds, the classified documents that Trump stored are far more nefarious that similar documents in the possession of other ex-officials, and need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Then we have Trump’s family. You can read accusations that they profited monetarily from his presidency, much like the current accusations about Biden. And of course there are things like E. Jean Carroll’s rape accusations, which they believe are true – as well as believing that her accusations are just the tip of a very large iceberg of Trump’s sexual crimes.

Then there’s the Georgia case, which rests on the meaning of the word “find.” When Trump told Raffensperger to “find” votes, the pernicious interpretation is that he meant to manufacture them, thus asking Georgia officials to commit voting fraud. I think it’s clear Trump believed there really were valid votes that had not been properly counted and that’s what he meant by “find,” but Trump-hating Democrats are not going to agree.

There’s more, but perhaps that’s enough to make the point that where there’s a will to think Trump guilty of crimes – and there is such a will in many people – there’s a multiplicity of ways.

However, these things are rarely listed or detailed, which I find interesting. Trump’s guilt and his awfulness are considered so very obvious that they need no restatement or proof at this point. They merely need to be alluded to, and the assumption is that every person with a thinking brain will understand what is meant and will agree.

Naomi Wolf: Happy Indictment Day

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a truly excellent piece by Naomi Wolf, on the reaction of so many Democrats to the J6 Trump indictment. Wolf is neither a Trump supporter nor a conservative, but she has the reaction that all Americans should have no matter what their political stance. I think it’s the reaction that the vast majority of Americans would have had several decades ago. But sadly, these days that seems to make her rare among Democrats.

One of the reasons that Wolf has gotten to that point is that she’s been very against the government’s line on COVID. I agree with some of her contentions on that topic and disagree with many others, but that’s not the point. The point is that she is already quite disillusioned about federal government, so her mind is open to possible government overreach and lies. And now, with this indictment from Jack Smith, she also has relevant personal experience from 2000 that informs her point of view. She cannot un-know what she knows, and her discomfort with the contrast between the way the Democrats reacted to challenges about the results of the 2000 election (she was somewhat of an insider, having worked for Gore’s campaign) and the way they’re reacting now to Trump’s challenges to the 2020 election means that she sees the huge contradiction and the naked drive for power that it represents.

What is seen cannot be unseen, at least not by Wolf.

An excerpt from her essay:

“Happy Indictment Day!” shouted the neighbor of my host, as my host and I sat out on a balcony. The neighbor was emerging from a car, three stories below us. The building must have contained thirty apartments. The man was certain that everyone who was in earshot of his joyous shout, agreed with his sentiments.

He witnessed my silence. “Don’t you agree?” he goaded me, a near-stranger, still shouting. “Don’t you?”

Finally I responded, “I am not sure that this sets a great precedent. Every sitting President in the future will try to indict his or her political opponent.” He cut off the discussion — a reaction, from the Left, to which I am getting accustomed — and headed inside.

Earlier, at lunch, an otherwise lovely lady had celebrated the possible-near-incarceration of “that criminal.” Again, she assumed that everyone present shared her view of the events of the day.

I am experiencing considerable inner turmoil at the spectacle of President Trump’s indictment, as well as at the almost animalistic glee that this spectacle has triggered in the solid bloc of Democrats that currently surrounds me.

I am extraordinarily sad — at the thickheaded ignorance of history that those who are celebrating tonight, reveal; and at what has become of our country.

Don’t people understand — much as they may hate this fellow — that this is exactly what coup leaders in every banana republic, do? Seek to imprison their political opponents? …

Another reason for my discomfort and misery is that I have a guilty conscience, because of what I experienced two decades ago and what I know — things that not that many people have experienced or know, and things that seem to be generally forgotten. These memories bear directly on current events.

Much more at the link, and well worth reading.