Why is Kamala Harris keeping pace in a race that seems 50/50 at this point?

The New Neo Posted on by

After all, shouldn’t she be losing badly? She’s part of the Biden administration, and by most metrics they’ve done a lousy job compared to Trump’s track record. She doesn’t speak well, especially when unscripted. She has an off-putting personality to a lot of people. She doesn’t have viewpoint consistency and can’t explain her many flip-flops.

Nevertheless, the race is a toss-up. Here’s my list of the reasons why:

(1) The vast majority of people still vote party line, and the country is pretty evenly split in that regard. I’m not talking about party registration, which is a different matter because many many people who pretty much always vote party line nevertheless register as Independents.

(2) The MSM is a huge factor and shapes public perceptions for the Democrat.

(3) In line with #2 and the Democrats’ message for the last eight years, Trump has been so successfully demonized that a great great many people would vote for literally anyone who would run against him.

(4) Abortion is still a huge issue and Kamala is its champion. This attracts many people who are essentially one-issue voters.

(5) Identity politics, in which Kamala Harris is a twofer: female and black. And her exact percentage of blackness in the genetic sense is unimportant. She is black enough.

(6) Kamala Harris is also relatively young, and looks good for her age. Trump is getting pretty old now, even though he’s very mentally alert. His choice of a young whippersnapper like Vance is good in that regard, but there is still a big age gap between Trump and Harris.

(7) Harris represents herself as an agent of change, which seems ludicrous to me since she’s been vice president for almost four years. But I think there are voters who buy it. After all, she’s never been president before. Biden has, and Trump has. And although Obama beat her at becoming the first black president, she would be the first female president, which also represents something fresh and new to a lot of people.

John Kerry: the elites and free speech

The New Neo Posted on by

John Kerry’s not alone in putting down free speech, of course. He’s speaking for the elitist left the world over, who want to block free speech in the name of wanting to block “dangerous disinformation.”

The former Secretary of State took part in a World Economic Forum panel on Green Energy on Wednesday. Near the end of the panel, a member of the audience asked what can be done to push back against disinformation surrounding climate change online.

“You know there’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc. But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence,” Kerry said. …

He continued, “So what we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.” …

“The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing. It is part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It’s really hard to govern today. The referees we used to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have kind of been eviscerated, to a certain degree. And people go and self-select where they go for their news, for their information. And then you get into a vicious cycle,” Kerry said.

Note the way Kerry puts it – the referees “have kind of been eviscerated.” By whom, Kerry? By nefarious forces? Or by their own demonstrated unreliability and bias, again and again and again? How many predictions have the climate change people made that have turned out to be wrong? Why have they sounded the alarm about climate change but have generally rejected nuclear power? And on and on and on. If they have “been eviscerated,” it is through a form of unintentional hari kari.

Elites generally tend to distrust free speech, for very obvious reasons. They are (as Sowell labeled them) the anointed, and therefore they know best about everything. So the temptation is always there to clamp down on those who disagree.

And sometimes what the elites are clamping down on really is disinformation, and sometimes it really is dangerous. I’m aware that this is a real dilemma. For example, on this blog, if I didn’t block trolls they actually would take over the entire comments section and drown out all the other voices. But although I write in a public venue, I’m not the public square in the sense that the internet as a whole is, or even that venues such as Twitter and Facebook are. With the latter sites, it’s easy to justify blocking bots and spam, but more difficult to justify blocking actual people who are posting ideas that seem bad on the face of it. How far does one go in doing that? Who gets to decide?

As that great mind Humpty Dumpty said in a slightly different contest, the question is who is to be master. Because, as COVID has so clearly underlined, the elites are often wrong – which doesn’t mean that all the people challenging them are any better at the science of it all. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But the elites have squandered most of the trust people once had in them, and they are not good faith arbiters.

The argument for free speech has always been that in the free marketplace of ideas, the truth will prevail. Obviously, that’s more of a hope than a given. But so far it seems like the cure offered by Kerry is worse than the disease.

[NOTE: Glenn Reynolds writes on whether scientific fraud should be criminalized.]

The dockworker strikers do an Emily Litella

The New Neo Posted on by

A crisis averted:

The theory is that a dockworkers’ strike would have been too damaging to the Democrats, so the problems have been patched up for now:

“Effective immediately, all current job actions will cease and all work covered by the Master Contract will resume,” the ILA and USMX said in a joint statement Thursday evening.

The tentative agreement would increase workers’ wages by 62% over the life of the 6-year contract, sources familiar confirm to ABC News.

This represents a significant increase from the shipping industry group’s offer of a 50% wage increase earlier this week. The union had been pushing for a 77% pay hike over six years.

The tentative agreement would bring the hourly wage for a top dockworker to $63 per hour at the end of the new contract, up from $39 per hour under the expired contract.

The workers’ demands about automation on the job have been pushed to mid-January.

Biden praised them, as well he might.

As the workers’ wages go up, I assume the prices of the goods they unload will reflect that.

[NOTE: Here’s Ace on the same subject.]

Vance explains his now-famous side-eye

The New Neo Posted on by

You know that now-famous “look” Vance gave during his debate with Walz? The one that seemed to gaze at the viewer and say: “Can you believe this guy?

Well, Vance has now explained that what he really was doing was checking the timer.

Do you believe him?

He also said he looked at his wife when the debate was all over, to see her opinion of how it had gone:

“I looked at Usha’s face and I just knew, I was like, ‘Holy sh*t we must have done a very good job,’ because Usha doesn’t lie to me and her face especially doesn’t lie to me,” he said. “And I knew that minute that meant we had a very good debate.”

And this bit of debate wisdom:

He said he realized that his opponent Tim Walz appeared nervous and flustered but he resisted seizing the moment to gain more points.

“‘When your enemy is making a mistake, don’t interrupt him,’” he said, referring to what he called a “Sun Tzu” quote.

Here’s a colorful description of Walz during that debate, from James Howard Kunstler [hat tip: commenter “Hubert”]:

Tuesday night’s veep palaver could be the last time you see the frightened animal known as Tim Walz for the duration of the campaign. He’s famous for his wild body language — jumping around on stage, flapping his arms — but this time the action was all concentrated in his face. You saw his eyes bug out, dart left and right, as if something fierce was coming at him (it was), and more than a few times, his head jerked around sideways so hard you wondered if it might do a whole three-sixty. His mouth, a pain-inflected frown in repose, turned down so deeply it looked like he had sashweights hanging from the corners. Altogether, his face said more than the embarrassing mishmash of mangled English that came out of it.

Ouch.

The rest is history: video on the roots of Nazi ideology

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve continued to watch videos on that YouTube history channel I recommended recently, “The rest is history.” These podcasts are fascinating and also highly entertaining, even if they sometimes involve discussions of very dark matters.

Last night I listened to a “The rest is history” video about a very dark matter indeed: the philosophy that motivated the Nazis. I’m putting the video up here because I think it might interest many of you.

I’ve sometimes heard people try to argue that the Nazi leaders were Christians and that this is an indictment of Christianity and even religion as a whole. But the idea that they were Christians is only true in some exceedingly narrow technical sense, in that they may have been raised as Christians and they may not have publicly repudiated Christianity for political reasons. And the German population was overwhelmingly Christian.

But the Nazi leaders certainly repudiated Christianity privately, especially Hitler. Anti-Christianity was not only a core part of their motivating philosophy but it was also a core part of their anti-Semitism. The history of Christian anti-Semitism in Germany, such as that of Luther, may have helped spread hatred of Jews among the general population or made it more palatable, but it seems to have played little to no part in the origins of Nazi anti-Semitism among the Nazi leadership.

From Wiki:

Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, saw an “insoluble opposition” between the Christian and Nazi world views. …Heinrich Himmler saw the main task of his SS organization to be that of acting as the vanguard in overcoming Christianity and restoring a “Germanic” way of living. Hitler’s chosen deputy, Martin Bormann, advised Nazi officials in 1941 that “National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.”

Hitler himself possessed radical instincts in relation to the conflict with the Churches in Germany. Though he occasionally spoke of wanting to delay the Church struggle and was prepared to restrain his anti-clericalism out of political considerations, his “own inflammatory comments gave his immediate underlings all the license they needed to turn up the heat in the Church Struggle, confident that they were ‘working towards the Fuhrer,'” according to Kershaw. In public speeches, he portrayed himself and the Nazi movement as faithful Christians. In 1928 Hitler said in a speech: “We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity… in fact our movement is Christian.” But, according to the Goebbels Diaries, Hitler hated Christianity. In an 8 April 1941 entry, Goebbels wrote “He hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity.” In Bullock’s assessment, though raised a Catholic, Hitler “believed neither in God nor in conscience”, retained some regard for the organisational power of Catholicism, but had contempt for its central teachings, which he said, if taken to their conclusion, “would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure”. Bullock wrote: “In Hitler’s eyes, Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves; he detested its ethics in particular. Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.”

Here’s the video:

Another Hezbollah bunker, busted

The New Neo Posted on by

Nasrallah’s likely successor and a whole bunch of other Hezbollah higher-ups were meeting in a bunker, and then:

A series of huge explosions rocked the densely populated neighborhoods just south of Beirut at midnight on Thursday as Israel kept up its bombing campaign aimed at Hezbollah leaders and weapon stores. …

Three Israeli officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence, said the explosions were Israeli airstrikes intended to destroy an underground bunker where senior Hezbollah leaders were meeting. The group included Hashem Safieddine, the presumed successor to Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime Hezbollah chief who was assassinated in a similar attack last week, the officials said.

The modus operandi seems similar to the approach that took out Nasrallah.

As Netanyahu said:

There is no place—there is no place in Iran—that the long arm of Israel cannot reach. And that’s true of the entire Middle East. …

As long as Hezbollah chooses the path of war, Israel has no choice. And Israel has every right to remove this threat and return our citizens to their homes safely, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Just this week, the IDF destroyed large percentages of Hezbollah’s rockets, which were built with Iran’s funding for three decades. We took out senior military commanders who not only shed Israeli blood but American and French blood as well.

And then we took out their replacements. And then the replacements of their replacements. And we’ll continue degrading Hezbollah until all our objectives are met.

You can’t say they weren’t warned.

Judicial election interference

The New Neo Posted on by

From Gregg Jarrett, Fox News legal analyst, on Judge Chutkan’s release of Jack Smith’s new motion against Trump [my emphasis]:

Yeah [Jack Smith is] trying to have a damning trial of Trump without a trial in the face of the fact that he couldn’t get a trial before the election. And, you know, releasing this motion, this court filing, it sure looks like blatant election interference, Lawrence, you know, Trump’s lawyers urged the judge, keep it sealed, it will impact the election. The judge did it anyway with almost no discussion and there is no good reason to make it public. It’s premature. There isn’t even a trial date. So, I think this was done knowing full well media and Democrats would seize on provocative details, publicize it to [a]ffect voters and damage Trump, and sure enough, as I looked at television, the internet and newspapers, that’s what’s happening. …

At times it reads like bad detective fiction. A lot of it is irrelevant and inadmissible. Conversations that other people had that are not connected to Trump directly. So, it seems like deliberate election interference, and the incendiary details notwithstanding, Smith’s basic accusations are the same that we’ve heard all along.

The aim is to get those inadmissible details out into the public prior to the election. Mission accomplished. But I wonder if it will matter. Trump haters and Trump fans won’t change their minds, but perhaps the independents can see through such a transparent ploy.

From Megyn Kelly:

Another terrorist gone, another captive freed

The New Neo Posted on by

Do you remember the famous Ramallah lynching in 2000 of two Israeli reservists who’d had the terrible bad luck to wander into Palestinian territory, to be dismembered by the crowd who stormed a police station where they were being held? Remember the terrorist who leaned out the station window to triumphantly wave his hands dipped in their blood?

Well, that guy is no longer walking the face of the earth:

However, he had been in an Israeli prison until 2011, when he was one of the people (Sinwar being another) who was released in the Shalit exchange, which turns out to have been one of the worst decisions Israel ever made.

The Ramallah lynching occurred almost exactly 24 years ago, on Oct 12, 2000. Here’s a brief and somewhat sanitized description:

According to the Israeli civil rights organisation Shurat HaDin, Salha “repeatedly stabbed the dying Corporal Vadim Nurzhitz and threw his body from the window. Aziz [Salha], one of the leading perpetrators of the lynch [sic] in Ramallah, was not satisfied with the brutal murder. The bodies were then abused for hours to joyous reactions from the incited mob of supporters in the street.”

That was one of many indications of the bloodthirstiness of the Gazan mob, so that 10/7/2023 should have come as no surprise.

NOTE: This is good news: a Yazidi girl kidnapped by ISIS ten years ago in Iraq at the age of 11 has been rescued at the age of 21 in Gaza. ISIS had given or sold her to what is described as a “Palestinian Hamas-ISIS member,” who held her captive all these years. About 6,000 Yazidis were captured around that time (2014), and 3,500 have since been rescued or freed. The details of how this girl was freed have not been revealed, but apparently Israel and the US were involved.

More on the Helene aftermath

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s an ongoing disaster in North Carolina and also Georgia, and I’m reading varying reports on rescue efforts. It seems fairly clear that preparedness was lacking although it was known that the storm would be pretty bad in North Carolina, but I doubt anyone realized just how bad. There is no question in my mind that, had Trump been president, he would be blamed. But there’s a Democratic president, of whom nothing is expected anymore.

Quite a few tweets of this sort are being featured on Instapundit:

What’s going on? What’s the usual procedure for Good Samaritan aid efforts in a case like this?

And then there’s this:

In less than two years, FEMA has dropped more than a billion dollars on non-resident services, and now American citizens who are dealing with the effects of a natural disaster cannot be properly remedied. Harken back to the time George Bush was excoriated for the response in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The failures of this administration, after displaying layers of incompetence, are barely touched on by the media, and now the very agency designed to aid in disaster relief is broke due to placing its focus and funds elsewhere.

Georgia’s Governor Kemp has complained that FEMA’s response is inadequate, with the initial order including only 11 countries although about 90 were hit hard. The White House responded by adding 30 more to the original 11.

ADDENDUM: It’s being reported that Kamala Harris skipped her hurricane preparedness briefings. Doesn’t surprise me.