Links - 8th July 2021 (3) (Trump)

Jeff Carlson on Twitter - "The Trump Tax Returns illustrate three primary things:
1) No unreported connections to Russia
2) MSM Journos & DNC Hacks do NOT understand how running a business and managing assets works tax-wise. Or any-wise.
3) Unlike Biden, President Trump didn't profit from his office."

How Trump and other real estate professionals get away with paying 'zero tax' - "“It’s not uncommon for real estate professionals to pay zero tax if they have highly leveraged investments,” E. Martin Davidoff, a CPA who helps wealthy clients with tax strategies and disputes, told Yahoo Finance.The practice is so common, Davidoff said, that there’s even an acronym for it. In certain circles, “ZT,” or zero tax is a goal for filers, he said, and has been especially easy to achieve under the laws that existed for real estate professionals before 1986 and after 1993, and for highly leveraged investors."
Bizarrely, some libertarians say that rich people don't need to pay taxes because they create jobs. Others say that since taxation is theft, anyone paying little or no tax is good. Yet others conflate the legal and moral cases for paying taxes

The NY Times knows tax avoidance and other commentary - "A New York Times “investigation” described how President Trump found ways to avoid taxes — and the Times “ought to know,” snarks Ira Stoll at The New York Sun, because the Gray Lady and “the Ochs-Sulzberger family that control it have done the same thing.” Trump, for instance, used losses in some years to lower his taxes in others. Likewise, in 2008, the Times lost $58 million and then cited a net income-tax “benefit” of nearly $6 million. The paper “complains” of Trump’s foreign investments and payments to his kids to avoid the gift tax. Yet the Times also has foreign business and has paid multiple family members six-figure salaries. The paper is painting “Trump as somehow corrupt for doing things that the Ochs-Sulzberger family has itself been doing for years.”"

Who Dog-Whistled Whom In the Battle of Cleveland? - "Contrary to the headlines, Mr. Trump didn’t refuse to condemn these groups. Although he spoke colloquially, saying, “Sure. I’m willing to do that,” was, in fact, a statement of assent... It’s easy to say Mr. Trump should have given Mr. Wallace what he wanted. But part of the problem here is that Trump knows that he has issued many declarative statements condemning white supremacy throughout his presidency, and it never satisfies those who are eager to pin the label of “extremist” on him. This impels him to petulant defiance that is foolish but not racist.Mr. Trump’s refusal to learn to speak like a politician and issue careful, modulated statements, inevitably invites opponents to both cherry-pick words to suit their preferred interpretation and cause the speaker to be mislabeled and be condemned.As with the Charlottesville statement, it’s the spin of Mr. Trump’s opponents that will dominate the narrative about the debate. An objective look at that transcript shows that the “very fine people” line was about those who objected to the removal of statues, not neo-Nazis. But many will still remember the debate as the time when Trump didn’t condemn racists.As much as this latest blot on his reputation is, in large measure, his own fault, any discussion of this subject must also note that Mr. Trump’s objections about the question were, in large measure, correct. The notion that white supremacists or the Proud Boys, a group that the ADL says numbers no more than several hundred, are the ones who created the urban crisis that has afflicted the United States in the last four months of violence and riots is not so much wrong as it is gas-lighting. Sightings of them at the hundreds of riots that have taken place since the death of George Floyd have been rare.It’s also true that while Mr. Biden condemned violence, like Mr. Trump, when it came to the Proud Boys, he chose not to condemn Antifa and its fellow travelers, as well as the people who have helped fund and foment riots, but somehow that was largely ignored.Mr. Wallace also ignorantly mischaracterized the “white fragility” critical race theory training sessions that have proliferated in both government and industry as unobjectionable “sensitivity training,” and which Mr. Trump has tried to ban. They are driven by a toxic racist and radical theory that is further dividing the nation and fueling violence, rather than quelling it.Nor did he ask Mr. Biden about his refusal or that of his campaign to distance himself from other extremists.For all of his pose of civility and normality, Mr. Biden wasn’t asked why he compared Mr. Trump to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels or why a Jewish Democratic group has published an ad comparing the administration to the Third Reich, egregious and inappropriate Holocaust references that should have been vigorously condemned by the organized Jewish community, but which it has largely winked at because of the political leanings of its leaders.Mr. Wallace didn’t ask Mr. Biden why he and running mate Senator Kamala Harris met with an anti-Semitic supporter of hatemonger Louis Farrakhan whose son had been shot by police, about whom his running mate said she was “proud.”Mr. Biden also wasn’t asked about his campaign’s apology for denouncing the anti-Semitism of former Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour who was granted a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention."

Biden says Trump has never condemned white supremacy ... Here are 20 times he did just that

Meme - "WILL TRUMP EVER CONDEMN HATE? 5 MINUTES LATER...... I HOPE HE DIES OF COVID"

Leftists Cheer News Trump, Hope Hicks Infected With COVID-19: ‘I Hope They Both Die’
The left's motto: "When they go 'low', we go lower. Many are blue check marks, of course

Israel demands apology after CNN anchor compares Trump's first term to Nazi Germany's horrific "Night of Broken Glass" - "In the classiest of moves CNN's Christiane Amanpour compared Donald Trump's first term to Kristallnacht, also called the Night of Broken Glass. You know, the two-day pogrom against Jews throughout Nazi Germany in 1938. The event which resulted in 267 synagogues being destroyed, 7,000 Jewish businesses razed, and 30,000 Jewish men being dragged off to concentration camps. To be clear, we're talking about the beginning of the freaking Holocaust here... apparently some people found Amanpour's remarks offensive, namely Jewish people"
Asking us to learn from the lessons of history is only hateful when conservatives like Gina Carano allude to them. But liberals can be as hysterical as they want with their false equivalences and this is justified "resistance"

Fire insurance up to date? Homes with Trump signs being targeted with arson threats - "locals who display Trump signs on their property are receiving menacing letters from anonymous sources, threatening to burn down their homes if Trump is not ousted... Letters have been confirmed in at least two different towns in New Hampshire, and are purportedly popping up elsewhere, including Kansas City and communities in Maryland, as well." Love Trumps Hate

Farmer who had Trump flags flying from his combine finds out his combine, two semis, and a tractor are on fire in his field

Patriot J on Twitter - "If you vote for Donald Trump, you are a racist. You have no wiggle room."
"Blindly labeling 62,984,828 Americans as racist is everything that's wrong with contemporary political discourse."

david surratt on Twitter - "If you vote for Donald Trump, you are a racist. You have no wiggle room."
"The worst thing about this tweet is: When you define racism so loosely and broadly, to include half of America, actual white supremacists benefit. They draw benefit when half the country is framed as being with them. And the charge of racism loses all potency."
That's why nowadays leftists throw around the term "white supremacist""

NinaVee on Twitter - "somehow, not knowing what Trump is up to is more unsettling than knowing"
"I hope he’s walking around a room, having a panic attack,trying to breathe. In other words, I hope he’s going through what he’s put me through the last four years."
"Seek professional treatment, Nina."
"lol imagine being this weak" br>"This is what mental illness looks like"

Gad Saad - Posts | Facebook - "Many people who suffer from Collective Munchausen repeatedly proclaimed that if @realDonaldTrump were to become @POTUS, this would constitute an existential threat to the US, to capitalism, to democracy, to global geopolitics, to the economy.  He is almost done with his 1st term. Ignoring the metrics that arose due to the global pandemic (of which the origin of the virus is unknown and definitely not due to the Chinese government), are those folks feeling justified in their doomsday predictions?"
I saw someone with TDS say it didn't matter that he was the first for a long time to not start any wars since he started a war domestically. Presumably Trump was responsible for the riots on his inauguration day

Kathy Griffin Slams Pro-Trump Video That Shows Her And Others Killed - "Comedian Kathy Griffin, who lost friends and nearly her career for posing with a fake decapitated head of President Donald Trump, lashed out against a fabricated video shown at a Trump resort rally that depicts the president shooting and stabbing members of the media and political foes"
SPOING!

Facebook - "We are beginning to really learn who is genuinely concerned about foreign propaganda campaigns attempting to manipulate our society, and those who are not.  It turns out that for many, concerns about Russian interference were merely a performance. A performance they put on because it hurt Donald Trump, in their eyes... Just look at all the left -wingers and even “centrists” who want to push the undeniable truth about the CCP aside, and look at all the trolls and apologists even here denying the truth on a daily basis, as if to make the story one where Trump was in the wet markets himself buying and selling bats and pangolins.  Look at how rich Chinese companies sponsor panels with woke activists trying to insulate their deadly corruption from criticism underneath a veneer of self-righteousness."

Facebook - "This is why I cannot take pearl clutching over Russian conspiracies seriously.  Newspapers are now painting totally normal online behavior by real people in exactly the same light.  "“Perhaps it’s not surprising that some of the tactics used by Russian actors against American voters in 2016 are now being used by American voters against each other,” said Philip N. Howard, head of Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project.""

Facebook - "With the ascension of a far right leader in Brazil, it's time for Democrats to admit to themselves that it wasn't James Comey or Hillary's emails or "Russian hacking" that are really responsible for her downfall.  There was not some special situation in the United States that put Trump in the White House. It is a global wave that has reached everywhere in our interconnected economic order, a response to the global order we instituted decades before.  Someone didn't start putting a love for fascism or racism in the water. We had global events and global trends beginning to cause a global response. The truth is that both Trump and Bernie were in touch with this, and Hillary was so embedded in the old way of thinking she could not see the tsunami coming.  You can pretend all you like that it was only thanks to James Comey. You can also pretend you don't have cancer when you have large tumors already forming. But unless you are willing to see the disease for what it is, and be willing to look for solutions based on that reality, you will never find a cure. A sham doctor refusing to see reality and issuing quack treatments will be banned from practicing medicine. Yet when it comes to our politics it is considered virtuous to be a sham doctor, just as long as your diagnosis and solutions align with the proper ideological Santeria that the powers that be have deemed infallible. And yet then they keep wondering why their liberal patients keep dying."

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "Yes, I’m grumbly about the press this morning. I watched four straight days of facts being distorted by a press trying to create a soap opera plot line suitable for sweeps week.  The facts are rather tame. Trump was showing signs of an illness and tested positive for Covid. He had mild symptoms and spent three precautionary days in the hospital. He was ambulatory, tweeted, recorded videos, and took a drive around the facility. If he wasn’t the president it’s doubtful he would have been hospitalized. Now he’s going to get better care in his residence than most people get in the hospital."

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "Former CIA director’s notes on 7/26/16 reveal that the intelligence community knew then that Hillary Clinton planned to vilify Donald Trump by claiming he was entangled with Russian intelligence.  They also believed that Russia was aware of this plan and was a threat to feed false information to the Clinton campaign (via Christopher Steele and his dossier). As it turned out the most outrageous (and false) elements of the Steele dossier came from a suspected Russian agent by the name of Igor Danshenko."

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "Lately it’s been brutal to watch the daily White House press briefings, particularly when Trump takes questions. Trump dominates the news by putting on a political wrestling match/morality play where he presents the press as the ‘heel’. Many members of the press corps, for their part, want sparks to fly with the president so they have something to draw the attention of viewers. Trump needs the likes of Peter Alexander and Jim Acosta; and vice versa.  But if you’re watching the briefings to gain information and not for a pro wrestling match then they can be drudgery. Not all White House correspondents are the same. Some, such as Jonathon Karl, will ask tough but usually fair questions.  He understands the game and isn’t blind to it.  There seem to always be a couple of airheads and Trump can sniff them out and embarrass them. Yesterday one started asking about oil prices and when Trump asked what the current price of oil was she had no clue. Last week a reporter asked about ventilator inventories and didn’t know if the number she gave was a differential or the total inventory — a near six-fold difference.  The worst to watch are the second tier reporters who want to be the next Acosta. They merely rephrase previous contentious questions and never get the desired reaction — like an inexperienced comic on open mic night. "

Meme - "Leftists laughing at the billionaire pedophilia-ring conspiracy in 2016"
"Leftists trying to connect Trump to the pedophilia ring they' ve laughed at since 2016"

Meme - Stone @stonecold2050 - "Oh look at Melania's renovated rose garden at the White House. Does anyone else see how the small bushes spell KKK in rows?"
No, the White House Rose Garden Doesn't Spell Out 'KKK' - "The same hedges, in the diamond configuration, can be seen in this 2015 image of U.S. President Donald Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, walking in the Rose Garden."

Facebook - "The fools who think that so-called Trumpism is just as dangerous as the idea pathogens inherent to Wokeism are utter fools, blinded by the cork effect that I've so often explained. Trump is now gone with nearly ZERO long-term effects. The changes unfolding in the West due to the attacks on science, reason, logic, and common sense stemming from the Leftist fascists is astoundingly more egregious.  The traditions of freedom of speech on which EVERYTHING is built are being dismantled by people who define themselves as anti-Trumpists.  Remember my words. My stating so HAS NOTHING to do with supporting or hating Trump.  I don't care about Trump one way or the other. I deeply care about the values on which the West was built and that are being extinguished before our eyes."

Fauci says Trump did not 'distort' impact of the pandemic - "Fauci said Trump's public press conferences in the early spring mostly echoed what members of the White House coronavirus task force were telling him in private.  "I didn't see any discrepancies between what he told us and what we told him and what he ultimately came out publicly and said," Fauci, the country's top infectious diseases expert and head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said.  "He really didn't say anything different than we discussed when we were with him"... Fauci was responding to a new book written by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward in which Trump went on the record to say he publicly downplayed the threat of the emerging coronavirus pandemic despite knowing its actual danger."
When Orange Man Bad clashes with Science Man Good

Fauci denies hearing Trump distort facts on coronavirus - "Fauci also challenged Woodward’s account that he had said the president was on “a separate channel” and had an attention span that was “like a minus number.” According to Woodward’s account, Fauci said Trump’s “sole purpose is to get reelected.”  Fauci disputed the quotes, saying they were from second-hand sources and not from him"
What happens when Fauci good conflicts with Orange Man bad? One way is to say Fauci was lying - but for the greater good

James Lindsay - Posts | Facebook - "One problem I think is transparently clear having been on both sides of it is that the way Trump speaks is itself a problem. It's almost like you have to relax to listen to him, or you will hear things as being far worse than they really are. People who "support" him, or who really support him, see this and think he's funny, though they wish he were a bit better spoken (usually) and more clear. Some few might, in the present insanity, need a LOT of calming down, which he never provides, but most don't. Most get it. On the other hand, since all of the left thinks he's literally a tyrant or a Nazi and have done since they just made it up out of thin air in 2015, they hear that every time and have worked themselves up into a self-congratulatory tizzy for believing it instead of the opposite. I don't know if Trump is neurotypical enough to be let off the hook for how he speaks. I don't know why he does it. No one does. Maybe it's something he picked up. Maybe it's a disorder. Maybe it's something else. The left never once tried to cool that fire, though. For whatever reason, whether conspiratorial, psychological, sociological, or something even more basic, the left has done nothing for 5 years except congratulate itself for wrongly believing the man is a tyrant and then finding "evidence" of it out of mere suggestions."

Trump Says To Drink Lots Of Water, Media Reports He Told Everyone To Drown Themselves | The Babylon Bee - ""Trump says water is good -- but this is very misleading," said Rachel Maddow. "Did you know that water kills many people every year? These dangerous, unhinged remarks from the president could cause many to drown themselves. Plus, do you know what's hidden in water? Sharks. This president wants you to die from a shark attack!""

Trump keeps claiming that the most dangerous cities in America are all run by Democrats. They aren’t. - The Washington Post - "Most of the current mayors of these cities are Democrats. Two of the mayors of cities with the most reported violent crimes overall, though, are independents and one, the mayor of Jacksonville, Fla., is a Republican. Among the 20 cities with the most violent crime per capita, one isn’t a Democrat: the independent mayor of Springfield, Mo."
This is Snopes level "fact checking"

Donald Trump: 'I was right' about COVID, Hunter Biden, Lafayette Square, other issues - "Former President Donald Trump has offered a handy summary of recent political developments, investigations and media coverage which suggests his perceptions about certain matters were correct. Mr. Trump suggests that analysts and rivals are changing their tune about his time in office.  “Have you noticed that they are now admitting I was right about everything they lied about before the election?” he asked in a statement issued Saturday. And here are his answers, verbatim:  “Hydroxychloroquine works. The virus came from a Chinese lab. Hunter Biden’s laptop was real. Lafayette Square was not cleared for a photo op. The ‘Russian Bounties’ story was fake. We did produce vaccines before the end of 2020, in record time. Blue state lockdowns didn’t work. Schools should be opened. Critical Race Theory is a disaster for our schools and our Country. Our Southern Border security program was unprecedentedly successful”"

'Proven right': Trump savors post-presidency vindication streak - "5. Washington Post corrects report Trump urged election official to "find the fraud": The claim that Trump pressured Georgia's top elections investigator to "find the fraud" in the state's 2020 presidential vote was explosive enough to have made it into the 2021 impeachment memorandum of House Democrats. In its correction two months after the story was first published, the Post admitted that it had "misquoted Trump's comments on the call, based on information provided by a source." Trump in a statement at the time of the correction sharply criticized what he said was the politicized state of current U.S. media. "A strong democracy requires a fair and honest press," he said. "This latest media travesty underscores that legacy media outlets should be regarded as political entities — not journalistic enterprises." "In any event, I thank the Washington Post for the correction," he added."

Colbert Mocks Bill Clinton For Criticizing Trump Behavior in White House
Trump should just have gotten a blowjob

Boston Anti-Trump Rally Involves Flag Burning and Blood Drinking

Tim Pool on Twitter - "Demi Lovato on criticizing Trump: "I literally don't care if this ruins my career""
"At great personal risk Demi Lovato bravely announced her perfectly acceptable mainstream opinion about the orange man being bad"

ASSANGE is a #1A Hero ️🧢 on Twitter - "In an unprecedented public attack by a sitting US president on the leadership of the US military, President Trump has accused US military leaders of seeking to start wars to boost the profits of defense contractors"
"Precedent: President Eisenhower on January 17, 1961 "Eisenhower Farewell Address - 'Military Industrial Complex' WARNING" https://t.co/Mx53PruQfW" / Twitter - ""Precedent: President Eisenhower on January 17, 1961 "Eisenhower Farewell Address - 'Military Industrial Complex' WARNING""
How to get liberals to support the military-industrial complex

Kayleigh McEnany – the 'acceptable' face of Trumpism who infuriates liberals - "It was a mic drop designed to thrill conservatives and infuriate liberals and the media.Kayleigh McEnany, the latest White House press secretary aiming to become the acceptable face of Trumpism, had been asked if she wanted to take back a bold prediction in February that “we will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here”. “I guess I would turn the question back on the media, and ask similar questions,” McEnany said on Wednesday. Consulting her briefing book, she reeled off a list of outlets and articles she said had downplayed the threat.“I’ll leave you with those questions,” she said, “and maybe you’ll have some answers in a few days.”"

CNN mocked for glorifying JFKs ‘legendary’ infidelity after harping on sex allegations against Trump - "Respected DePauw University professor Jeffrey McCall penned an op-ed for The Hill Friday headlined, “CNN lost its way in struggle to find an audience,” slamming the CNN Worldwide Jeff Zucker’s network’s obsession with women who have been friendly with Trump.  “CNN’s warped obsession with reporting about supposed adultery demonstrates a larger problem at the once-proud and groundbreaking channel,” McCall wrote.  McCall also noted that CNN mentioned McDougal and Daniels more often than the recently passed government spending bill, adding that the bill “isn’t photogenic,” and therefore not as critical to the Zucker’s vision for the network as Playmates and porn stars. “But was JFK’s love life really legendary? In actuality, JFK was an awful person in the bedroom who certainly would have been labeled a sexual predator in this #MeToo moment,” Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro wrote, linking to a 2012 Daily Mail story detailing the time Kennedy forced an intern to publicly perform oral sex on his assistant in the White House pool."

Jonathan Schanzer: Even Democrats agree with much of Trump's foreign policy legacy - "When asked whether he thought it was a bad idea for the Trump administration to cajole America’s NATO allies to spend more on defence, Blinken replied: “I do not.” On the Trump administration’s targeted killing of Iranian arch-terrorist Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, Blinken said, “When I was last in office, I saw first-hand the blood that he had on his hands. So, no one regrets the fact that he is no longer there.” After four years of pro-Israel policies under Trump, Blinken showed no intention of changing that. He affirmed that, “Our commitment to Israel’s security is sacrosanct.” He further acknowledged the benefits of Trump’s landmark peace deals inked between Israel and four Arab states: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.  Blinken called China the “most significant challenge of any nation state to the United States,” echoing the two of the most important documents issued by the Trump administration: the “National Security Strategy” and “National Defense Strategy.”   Even the Trump administration’s decision on its final day to call the Chinese treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang a “genocide” did not seem to bother Blinken... even Trump’s inconsistencies may ultimately be viewed by historians as strengths. The inability to predict the behaviour of the American president likely curbed some of China’s predatory behaviour. It likely hindered the Iranians from engaging in more brazen violence. It pushed NATO countries to pony up more for defence. And it certainly seemed to prompt our southern neighbours to get a better handle on illegal immigration before it reached America’s borders."

Woke Liberal Chelsea Handler Responds to 50 Cent Supporting Trump With Straight Up Racism: “I Had to Remind Him That He’s Black”

Opinion | They Are Not the Resistance. They Are Not a Cabal. They Are Public Servants. - The New York Times - "President Trump is right: The deep state is alive and well. But it is not the sinister, antidemocratic cabal of his fever dreams. It is, rather, a collection of patriotic public servants — career diplomats, scientists, intelligence officers and others — who, from within the bowels of this corrupt and corrupting administration, have somehow remembered that their duty is to protect the interests, not of a particular leader, but of the American people."
The "deep state" went from a far right conspiracy theory to a good thing really quickly
I like how subverting a democratically elected leader is a good thing. This from the same people who claim the popular will is thwarted by a corrupt political system

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "Taibbi is acknowledging that Trump is a flawed President, at least by conventional standards, but is warning about the danger to the republic when the intelligence community actively works to remove the president from office.Just as unsympathetic defendants lead to bad case law, an unsympathetic President can lead to a corruption of the system that has kept this country vibrant for over 200 years.The country will survive the Trump presidency just as it has survived dozens of other presidents. It might not survive if unelected bureaucrats work to disrupt the political system."

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "The country will survive Trump. While his words and behavior shock many, the system is operating. The courts have overruled and accepted administrative decisions. The loyal opposition is loud and powerful. The voters are as informed as they want to be. The courts are independent, the press is free, and the next president will reverse many Trump decisions.I’m far more concerned about how the reaction to Trump is destabilizing the country. For many, the solution to Trump is to change a system that has kept the country stable for centuries. Administrative departments are leaking and defying established processes. There is a push to end the electoral system. The House appears set to impeach the president without a high crime or misdemeanor. There is talk of packing the courts.Trump will be gone next year or in a few years. But are we going to enter an era where an opposition House will always be searching for a narrative to impeach? Is every President now going to be faced with a barrage of lawsuits, further forcing the game to the wealthy? Will the electoral system be upended, reducing the voice of rural states? Will corporate censorship further increase in the name of removing the bad (along with the good)? Will unelected Bureaucrats be further emboldened to undermine the voter’s choice?"

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "When Trump entered the race for president he stood out for his insults and unpresidential comments. What continues to surprise me is how his opponents are willing get down in the mud and try to out wrestle him. It’s four years later and Trump doesn’t stand out for his behavior anymore.Last night, after Trump refused to shake Pelosi’s hand, several Democrats made a noisy show of leaving the speech, a guest of Pelosi’s started yelling and had to be removed, and Pelosi tore up the constitutionally required State of the Union document that Trump delivered to her...  What I’m seeing is congressional Democrats making a big mistake in the lead up to 2020 elections. They are pandering to the base by trying to “out Trump” Trump, but they are alienating the middle. Meanwhile Trump is carefully packaging messages to key voting blocks while presenting a positive message about how the country is improving and what more it can become. It’s a coherent strategy that has worked for other two-term Presidents.Last night the Democrats didn’t look like the adults in the room and that benefits Trump."

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "If you’ve been following the Trump/Russia arguments the last three years, there was a belief that Trump will not support Ukraine to curry favor with Putin. That has turned out to not be the case. Instead, support for Ukraine has increased, including weapons that the previous administration did not want to release to the country."

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "Four Democrat Senators sent a letter to Ukraine in 2018 asking the country to keep investigating Trump or their support for Ukrainian aid may end."

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "Yesterday Justice Roberts publicly criticized Sen. Schumer for threatening two Supreme Court justices. Three weeks ago, Schumer was calling for Roberts to defend the Supreme Court from criticism by President Trump.Both sides of the political divide are using the same tactics to both defend and attack each other. Perhaps it’s time to stop pretending that one side is more virtuous than the other."

SNL's Michael Che: 'I Wouldn't Mind' if Trump Were Innocent But Went to Jail Anyway

Trump gives $35 million to aid human trafficking victims - "President Trump has sought to elevate the fight against human trafficking since taking office. In January, he appointed a special adviser for the issue."
Naturally there are people bashing him for this, saying it's a diversion

Newt Gingrich warns making Trump a martyr will divide America even more

Michael Tracey on Twitter - "You can tell this impeachment trial is extremely important because it seems to largely consist of carefully analyzing tweets"
On Trump's second impeachment

Reckless rhetoric is a reckless standard in this impeachment - "In 2020, his conduct when it came to Ukraine turned on his words alone. This time, a vote to convict could be seen as implicating a host of others in using similarly reckless rhetoric, including some of these Senate jurors.  The search for moral clarity will be lost if Americans cannot distinguish between the behavior of the accused and that of his jury. Polls show half the country favors conviction, so this trial could end up as an indictment of both sides for fueling our divisions. Impeachment was intended to be used in the clearest cases to secure a supermajority vote for conviction. However, Congress itself could wind up appearing like an unimpeached conspirator, not in the riots, but with our national discord... While the House frames these words in the most perilous light, it barely mentions other words that reinforce nonviolence. Trump told the crowd that “everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” He said the reason for the march was that “we are going to cheer on our brave” members of Congress... Cheering on your allies is an act of free speech rather than insurrection. Yet the House impeached Trump for inciting an insurrection or rebellion. Its article does not charge him with recklessly causing riots or threats to Congress. It alleges an effort to overthrow our government, which is the deepest hole to dig in the House and then fill in the Senate. The Supreme Court has rejected fluid standards to criminalize speech. Cases based on these remarks would likely fail. In Brandenburg versus Ohio, the Supreme Court refused to allow the government to criminalize speech which calls for “the use of force or of law violation” unless it is imminent. Lawyers for Trump will likely play similar language used by Democrats in both chambers to “fight” for the country and “retake” Congress. During the inauguration of Trump, Democrats denounced his legitimacy as riots broke out in Washington involving several violent groups. Maxine Waters later called on people to confront Republicans in public. Ayanna Pressley also insisted during the violent marches last year that “there needs to be unrest in the streets.” Kamala Harris claimed “protesters should not let up” even as many of them became violent. Nancy Pelosi has condemned her fellow lawmakers as effectively traitors and the “enemy within.”... Such reckless rhetoric reflects our age of rage. Charles Schumer stood in front of the Supreme Court and, citing two justices by name, he declared rather menacingly, “Hey, Gorsuch. Hey, Kavanaugh. You have unleashed a whirlwind and you are going to pay the price.” Further, Cori Bush seemed to defend that recent takeover of a Saint Louis prison in a tweet with the words of Martin Luther King that riots are “the language of the unheard.” Gretchen Whitmer defended state lawmaker Cynthia Johnson for calling for “soldiers” to make Trump supporters “pay” for harassing her. James Comey used such rhetoric when he said, “The Republican Party needs to be burned down. It is just not a healthy political organization.” Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin likewise claimed, “We have to collectively in essence burn down the Republican Party. We should level them because if there are survivors, if there are people who weather the storm, they will do it again.” Though the Republican National Committee was targeted with the pipe bomb, would that constitute incitement? Not under Brandenburg. Such rhetoric extends to academics who regularly abhor violence. Professor Erik Loomis said he saw “nothing wrong” with the killing of a conservative protester from a “moral perspective.” While they are not the president, lawmakers and pundits often engage in more violent speech than what Trump said. While clearly not responsible for the disgraceful riots at the Capitol, many of them remain accessories to stoking our politics of hate and division. Many of their claims are being defended as appropriate calls to action to combat greater social injustice. The issue is whether we want shifting majorities to decide whether words are inciteful or insightful. That is a dangerously fluid standard."

Out-Of-Work Waitress Excited To See Congress Spend Time Impeaching Trump Again | The Babylon Bee

Democrats Claim Real Impeachment Has Never Been Tried | The Babylon Bee - "After suffering defeat in their bid to impeach President Trump, Democrats in Washington are making the claim that real impeachment has never been tried."

Experts at Trump impeachment hearing outline 'serious abuse of power' - "Turley also seemed to question whether Democrats are actually aiming to build a successful impeachment case for a Senate trial. "Fast is not good for impeachment. Narrow, fast impeachments have failed, just ask Johnson," he said. "This is the narrowest impeachment in history... Turley calls the current legal case for impeachment not just “woefully inadequate, but in some respects, dangerous, as the basis for the impeachment of an American president.”  “I am concerned about lowering impeachment standards to fit a paucity of evidence and an abundance of anger. If the House proceeds solely on the Ukrainian allegations, this impeachment would stand out among modern impeachments as the shortest proceeding, with the thinnest evidentiary record, and the narrowest grounds ever used to impeach a president.,” Turley says in his opening statement.  “That does not bode well for future presidents who are working in a country often sharply and, at times, bitterly divided,” he says."
On the first attempt

Can President Trump be Impeached and Removed on the Grounds of Incitement? - "If Trump’s speech is protected by the First Amendment, then incitement cannot be grounds for impeachment...   Lawyers, and even judges, often misread Trump's speeches. But the task of fairly parsing a politician's speech, including a Trump speech, is not novel. It is traditional. Blackman engaged in such a parsing of Trump's remarks prior to his signing Travel Ban 1.0. Many people, including Justice Sotomayor, took out of context Trump's remark, "We all know what that means." Facts matter when prosecuting or removing a President—even one who has otherwise failed to reach the traditional aspirational norms of high office.   Do these remarks meet the Brandenburg standard? Blackman's co-blogger, Professor Eugene Volokh, suggests that the answer is no... Professor Howard Wasserman reached a similar conclusion.  The Supreme Court's caselaw is very protective of free speech. If Trump's speech was protected by the First Amendment, he could not be prosecuted for criminal incitement—regardless of whether he is President. Presidents do not surrender their free speech rights. This analysis should resolve the question faced by the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia... We have consistently taken the position that the Constitution imposes limits on the impeachment process...   In 2017, Blackman offered another example to illustrate this dynamic based on the Constitution's Religious Test Clause. That clause provides that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." This clause applies to all appointed and elected federal officials. If the Constitution does not restrict the impeachment process, then Congress could impeach the President for adhering to an unpopular religion...   In his classic book about presidential impeachments, Grand Inquests, Chief Justice Rehnquist observed that, during times of conflict, "[p]rovisions in the Constitution for judicial independence, or provisions guaranteeing freedom of speech to the President as well as others, suddenly appear as obstacles to the accomplishment of the greater good." The Chief Justice was right. We should pause before setting a precedent where the President is impeached, removed, sued, or criminally tried for speech urging political action by supporters or by other third parties, unless such speech is clearly not protected by the Constitution."
Naturally, these 2 credentialed legal scholars were treated with contempt by the TDS crowd

Trump Impeachment Was The Revenge Of The Political Establishment - "With Pelosi and her caucus’ help, the establishment is exploiting last week’s invasion of the Capitol, which Trump didn’t incite. They achieved their purpose, which was to kick Trump and policies’ supporters in the ass as he leaves office... the same Democrats who delayed passing a COVID relief bill for months because they didn’t want to give Trump a victory was able to rush through a bill of impeachment in less than a week"

Former Democratic Leader Daschle Warns Against Trump Impeachment - Bloomberg - "  Daschle called impeachment at a moment that party control of the Senate is so tenuous a “mistake,” saying it would first “galvanize” Trump’s supporters and then delay work on crucial issues"

Senate Republican threatens impeachments of past Democratic presidents - "“If it is a good idea to impeach and try former presidents, what about former Democratic presidents when Republicans get the majority in 2022?”

Rand Paul ACTIVATED – the senator lays out all the times leftists have recently incited violence as Impeachment 2.0 continues - ""No Democrat will honestly ask whether Bernie Sanders incited the shooter that nearly killed Steve Scalise and a volunteer coach. The shooter nearly pulled off a massacre."
"No Democrat will ask whether Cory Booker incited violence when he called for his supporters to 'get up in their face' of congresspeople, a very visual and specific incitement."
"No Democrat will ask whether Maxine Waters incited violence when she literally told her supporters and I quote, 'If you see a member of the Trump administration... any place, you create a crowd and you push back on them.' Is that not incitement?"
"Kamala Harris famously offered to pay the bill for those who were arrested [in the BLM riots]. I wonder if she will be brought up on charges of inciting violence for that now that she's Vice President? Should Kamala Harris be impeached for offering to pay for violent people to get out of jail who've been burning our cities down?"
"The mayor of Seattle, who incited and condoned violence by calling the armed takeover of part of her city 'a summer of love.'"
"On June 8th, the New York Post, citing U.S. Department of Justice statistics, reported that more than 700 law enforcement officers were injured during the Antifa/Black Lives Matter riots. There were at least 19 murders, including 77-year-old retired police officer David Dorn."
Paul pointed out how he and his wife were threatened by a violent mob last summer. He also noted that GOP legislators have never called to impeach those who used heated political rhetoric or even promoted violence, despite these examples over the past few years.
"Shame on these angry, unhinged partisans putting forth this sham impeachment, deranged by their hatred of the former president.""

WATCH: Sen. Rand Paul calls for the impeachment of Sen. Chuck Schumer - ""He went to the Supreme Court, stood in front of the Supreme Court, and said specifically, 'hey Gorsuch, hey Kavanaugh, you've unleashed a whirlwind, and you're gonna pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you continue with these awful decisions.  "This inflammatory wording, this violent rhetoric from Chuck Schumer was so bad that the Chief Justice, who rarely says anything publicly, said 'this kind of language is dangerous' as a mob tried to invade the Supreme Court."

AP on Twitter - "Im old enough to remember when the left said Trump was going to start ww3. Couldn't be further from the truth as to the peace he's actually brought around the world."

Donald Trump nominated for Nobel Peace Prize - "“For his merit, I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees”...   "The people who have received the Peace Prize in recent years have done much less than Donald Trump. For example, Barack Obama did nothing.”"

James Lindsay - Posts | Facebook - "Put the two China stories out today together  Corporate elites, media, and politicians who weaponized Russiagate and the Fine People Hoax   Their target was the one president they couldn't control  To take him out"
"I've been of this mind for a few months. The Trump hysteria, if you ask me, was a little to do with Trump himself (obviously, lol) and mostly to do with the fact that he was outside of their control. When you adopt this view, a lot of cognitive dissonance falls away. Try it."

The American Independent on Twitter - "Praising his own virus response as deaths near 200,000, Trump says, "if you take the blue states out, we're at a level I don't think anybody in the world would be at."
The outrage comes from the same people who mock flyover country as a land of deplorables, say land doesn't vote and tell red states to secede because they'll die without the blue ones

DrJai 🦺 on Twitter - "Democrats: "Donald Trump will destroy democracy as we know it"
Also Democrats:
- Steal nomination from Bernie in 2016
- Steal nomination from Bernie in 2020
- Blocking Green Party access in 2020
Which democracy are you trying to save from DJT?"

Kambree on Twitter - "Find someone who looks at you the way Al Sharpton looked at Trump before he became president."

Razor on Twitter - "Pres. Donald Trump pushes racial division, flouts virus rules at the foot of Mount Rushmore."
"@ABC President quotes MLK, encourages equal justice, calls America great, and you call it pushing racial division. It’s almost as if you didn’t read the speech and are the hateful ones deceptively pushing racial division for clicks."

Trump Has Condemned White Supremacists - FactCheck.org - "Former Vice President Joe Biden wrongly claimed President Donald Trump has “yet once to condemn white supremacy, the neo-Nazis.”... contrary to Biden’s claim that Trump has “yet once to condemn white supremacy, the neo-Nazis,” in the course of two days, Trump did it twice. Nor was that the last time Trump condemned white supremacy by name."

Fact check: Coronavirus vaccine could come this year, Trump says. Experts say he needs a 'miracle' to be right.
Miracles do happen after all. And not just one vaccine, nor two, but even three (if you count Astrazeneca - approved in the UK on 30 Dec 2020). Or maybe "fact checkers'" biases blinded them

PolitiFact | No, Trump didn’t tell Americans infected with the coronavirus to drink bleach
I still see people with TDS repeating this lie, together with the covid hoax one

Escape The Echo Chamber - "A former FBI assistant director explains the absurdities of the document that created the failed Russian collusion investigation. Peter Strzok approved his own investigation, that was based on supposition, then expanded the investigation without supporting evidence."
Article: New FBI document confirms the Trump campaign was investigated without justification

David Hogg on Twitter - "Imagine calling the immigrant parents that bring their children to the United States for a better life “Coyotes” The level of xenophobia is sickening."
FAIL

Meme - "Woke v. Never Trump is perfection."
"The Lincoln Project: Donald Trump is the most racist president in American history."
"Ida Bae Wells: ...
10 of the first 12 presidents enslaved Black people."
"When the woman who kicked off the 1619 project has to correct you...."

James Lindsay - Posts | Facebook - "Maybe—and just hear me out here—a Trump rally is also the voice of the unheard. And no buildings or police cars get set on fire in the process."

Hundreds of writers and book agents sign joint letter demanding publishing industry bans Trump memoir - "The letter, titled "No Book Deals for Traitors,” was signed by more than 250 editors, authors and publishing agents last week... “No participant in an administration that caged children, performed involuntary surgeries on captive women, and scoffed at science as millions were infected with a deadly virus should be enriched by the almost rote largesse of a big book deal.”"
When people in the books industry want books to be banned
Of course, Biden's kids in cages won't count. Nor will the fact that the mass hysterectomies are just rumours

Supernova in the East V

Hardcore History 66 – Supernova in the East V

"Take the way the Germans treated civilians in villages where partisan activity was nearby. If somebody took a shot at German soldiers, they'd line up civilians in the village and kill them. And of course, the goal wasn't to just be cruel, it was to try to deter them through terror, something that is generally frowned upon today. It's called collective punishment. 

And it's funny because everybody believes in collective punishment to one degree or another. I mean, you ever been in the classroom where the teacher’s got a couple kids talking, you know, amongst the 30 students and says, if the talking doesn't stop, all 30 students have to stay after school? Or how about the football coach who says if you know, anybody starts, you know, fooling around, everybody's going to have to run laps, I mean, that's a way to sort of get the group to enforce behavior, right?…

The idea may be completely flawed. In fact, evidence seems to show that in the Second World War, German atrocious attitudes toward the civilian population to stop partisan activity actually leads to more partisan activity. It's long been understood that the Germans were welcomed in some places as virtual liberators when they took over areas that had been occupied by the Red Army. And they turn those people against them by their cruelty. This is not a Second World War thing. Of course, though, I mean, in the First World War, go look at the Rape of Belgium, it's based on a similar sort of thing. Killing civilians in villages in an effort to deter partisans.

What's going on in Asia is a different story, and much harder to pin down. I mean, as far as I can tell, and I could be wrong about this, I can see like three levels of responsibility here. What's going on with Japanese soldiers in this cruelty could be happening at the soldier level, which is an excuse that the Japanese sometimes use, I mean, in the Nanking situation in China, there was sort of a well, you know, boys will be boys kind of excuse. Yes, the soldiers did things that were out of control. But you know, can you blame them, it was a very hard fight to take the city, they lost a lot of buddies. You know, sometimes people lose their minds a little bit, you know, maybe a lack of institutional control.

But, but this was not a deliberate effort to wipe people out. That would be the excuse. And listen, soldiers have been misbehaving since caveman times. So there's some validity to that maybe. Of course, there's no excuse for the loss of institutional control. But we'll we'll play with that as one of the possible levels that atrocities happen at, the actual ground level where the soldiers are right. Then there's a high level responsibility possibility, which is what's going on in Europe, right? You could say, listen, the Emperor and the major leaders decided they wanted to have a, you know, Iron Fist. And this would be very in keeping with sort of fascist, intellectual doctrine, right, an iron fist sort of strength, and we will crush dissent, and we will teach these people you know, that sort of thing. And then that can be true too.

But where we left the story, was in discussing an affidavit from an Australian officer that was introduced in the post World War crimes trials in the Asia Pacific Theater, it was recounted in Lord Russell of Liverpool's book, the Knights of Bushido. Where in New Guinea, Australian troops were being atrociously killed. I think we used as an example of Samuel Eliot Morrison, I think it was, incident where he said some Australians had been tied to a tree, tortured and killed and some Japanese soldier who spoke English, had put a placard above the head of one of them that said, he took a long time to die. What do you think that's going to make the Australian soldiers react when they capture a Japanese soldier? Well, according to this affidavit, that's exactly what the Australian officer had done. A Japanese soldier had fallen into their hands, which is unusual. And the guy spoke English, which is a double rarity. And the Australian soldier who gave the affidavit says they took the Japanese soldier to the Australian corpses, not the ones tied to a tree, but some other ones. And basically said, why did you do this? And his excuse was the officers ordered us to. And his rationale was, that he says, and these are my words, but this is what he essentially points out, that they were trying to create an intentional tit for tat retribution cycle of atrocities as a way to discourage their own troops from surrendering...

A Japanese wounded soldier calling out for help. An Australian officer goes over to try to help him and the Japanese soldier throws a grenade at him from close range. Once again, that poisons the well for any other Japanese who might legitimately want to surrender and get medical treatment or anything like that. And the Australians start doing what the British and the Americans have already begun doing in their theatres, not taking any chances. I remember one soldier saying we just never stopped watching Japanese dead. And they would run them through with bayonets and shoot at the corpses. They just, it was a little like having vampires rise from the grave. They just never knew when it was safe to consider, you know, a corpse, a corpse...…

As this campaign goes on, you start to see the really good Australian troops up against the really good Japanese troop. There's a line that I loved, I believe it was quoted in Eric Bergeren’s book, where they asked a veteran who was talking about, you know how they rank the jungle fighters. And after a while, it was always thought the Japanese were now these super jungle fighters. But after a while, they will say that the Australians are the best jungle fighters in the war, that the Japanese are the second best jungle fighters in the war, and that the Americans really you can't judge because they sort of knock the jungle down first and then fight in what's left...

In his book On Killing, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, who taught Psychology at West Point, said this. “During World War Two more than 800,000 men were classified 4F, meaning unfit for military service, due to psychiatric reasons. Despite this effort to weed out those mentally and emotionally unfit for combat, America's Armed Forces lost an additional 504,000 men from the fighting effort because of psychiatric collapse, enough to man 50 divisions. At one point in World War Two, he writes, psychiatric casualties were being discharged from the US Army faster than new recruits were being drafted in”...

[On friendly fire] In Europe and North Africa and other theaters, it was usually very understandable things like artillery, for example, your famous phrases. The short round, for example, short round meaning a round that lands way short and hits your own people instead of an enemy. It happens. Or aircraft coming in for close air support that hits friendly troops instead of enemy. Again, hard to avoid over the long haul.

But in the Pacific, due to the terrain, jungle, especially, and all the night fighting, the friendly fire was often much more up close and personal and many more people were killed by their own people using small arms. Australian medics, I was reading one account, were continually horrified by the number of slugs they pulled out of their own people that were of a caliber that the Japanese didn't use, but the Australians did. Meaning, those people were friendly fire victims. And when you look at the rates of friendly fire, they are shocking. Eric Bergerund quote, some of them, the worst was it ,on the island of New Georgia. 24%. That means one out of every four Americans shot on New Georgia were shot by their own people. But there were reasons for this.

The jungle jitters was one of the famous ones you, people got trigger happy and the number of people that were found when daylight first hit outside their foxholes killed by other Marines or US Army soldiers is legendary. You have to go out to go to the bathroom. But everybody's so afraid of the Japanese that anything that moves get shot out at and in the morning you find out that you killed a water buffalo or you killed a deer or you killed a civilian or one of your own. These are the sorts of incidents that are so troubling and upsetting that they don't sell a lot of tickets for movies after the war. And they prompt phrases like the real war will never make it into the books"

 

But of course we know that the atomic bombs were dropped when Japan was on the verge of surrendering, just to frighten the Soviet Union

Links - 8th July 2021 (2)

Ben Shapiro - Posts | Facebook - "The systematic destruction of American values, history, and institutions have been under siege by the hard Left for quite some time and they are gaining ground. The hard Left pushes where it meets least resistance. So they promulgated hate speech policies on college campuses, where the administration was sure to cave; they moved on to newsrooms, where editors were sure to cave. Now they're targeting corporate boardrooms, where risk aversion dominates, and seeking to weaponize corporate risk aversion to take down social media platforms. The result: a closed system in which only approved opinions are allowed."

Malaysia: Permanent Ethnic Malay Polity

Artificial intelligence makes blurry faces look more than 60 times sharper - "The system cannot be used to identify people, the researchers say: It won't turn an out-of-focus, unrecognizable photo from a security camera into a crystal clear image of a real person. Rather, it is capable of generating new faces that don't exist, but look plausibly real."

James Lindsay - Posts | Facebook - "One of the most striking features from my insane email space right now is just how many academics are writing to me in shock that Wokeness is making it into THEIR department, which they had believed would be impossible until it hit them."

James Lindsay - Posts | Facebook - "Weird, actually sick, stuff going on in California education.This is child abuse, as with so much in Woke education and parenting. It will also be attached to "systemic racism" by teaching that the sex binary is "racist."Fisting, blood play, golden showers... sex ed?The Woke campaign to destroy the innocence of children (a hegemonic narrative) and to bring them into queer Theory, mental illness, and some Neo-Marxist hate for society, needs to be stopped. This is horrifying."

Here Are The Details On California’s Sex Education - "California parent John Andrews of the Murrieta School District said that schools in his district are using Positive Prevention Plus Sex Ed Curriculum, a curriculum that contains explicit photos and drawings of sexual activity.“They talk about anal and oral sex as an alternative to regular sex because you can’t get pregnant”... “They talk about mutual masturbation,” he added.“They discuss gender roles, the gender spectrum, and in the support materials … they take it even further. They discuss everything, topics like roleplaying for different genders, blood play, dental dams … fisting is mentioned. I mean, they mention it all.” “If I were to show that material to a child, I would be brought up on charges,” Andrew said. “But somehow our public schools are allowed to teach this to junior high and high school kids.”... The video depicts ACLU staff attorney Ruth Dawson instructing teachers on how to help students obtain abortions without parental knowledge or consent... “Get Out Now: Why You Should Pull Your Child from Public School Before It’s Too Late” author, attorney, and director of the Catholic Women’s Forum Mary Rice Hasson believes that most parents do not understand what their children are being exposed to — and often being exposed to without parental permission.“The California sex and gender “health” curriculum shows kids explicit images, normalizes kinky and perverse sexual activity, and teaches kids that their basic identity — as male or female — is something fluid or changeable,” Hasson told the DCNF, saying that schools see parents as “obstacles or barriers to their efforts to indoctrinate an entire generation.” “Parents — especially religious parents — are portrayed as ignorant or untrustworthy when it comes to issues of sexual identity or activity — as if only the schools can be trusted to ‘protect’ kids and teach them all about”"

Motion for anti-corruption committee voted down 181 to 143 - "The motion for a special committee on anti-corruption was voted down today, to a final vote of 181 against, and 143 in favour. All Members of Parliament voted within their party's position.Opposition Leader Erin O'Toole said that the special committee would have investigate "WE Charity and the Liberal government and their families, the lobbying efforts for amendments to the income tax act in respect to the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy program, the acquisition, purchase, and approval of Baylis Medical Company ventilators, and topics other house committees related to" the Liberal Party's actions."

Pelsjas on Twitter - "Woah this just fukkin hit me hard: "Why has sex positivity turned into a competition between girls on who can withstand the most sexual violence from men veiled as kink.""

Judge overturns decision and finds woman defamed doctor in making sexual allegations, but says doctor has 'no moral victory' - "Justice See said Ms Tiong failed to prove her defence of justification, as she did not prove that the two doctors colluded to take sexual advantage of more than one "vulnerable woman patient".For a defence of justification to stand in defamation, the person making the allegedly defamatory remarks must prove that what they said was true.Even though the judge found that a woman named only as K was indeed a target and a vulnerable patient, no other such patients were named. The judge also rejected Ms Tiong's claim to be one of the vulnerable patients, as there was no proof of when she became Dr Chan's patient, and she had been having an affair with him years before taking any medicine from him.Even if Ms Tiong was Dr Chan's patient all along, she had never complained at any time of being vulnerable or taken advantage of, until she found Dr Chan's "surreptitious" messages in April 2018 and realised she was not Dr Chan's exclusive lover.There was no evidence that more than one woman, who was a vulnerable patient of either of the doctors, was targeted, said the judge."It is not open to the court to speculate that because one patient was targeted, there must be others in the past or that there will be others in the future."... Lewd messages exchanged between Dr Ong and Dr Chan, in which they discussed sexual conquests with women, using terms such as "sluts" to label them, were shown in court and reported about.WhatsApp messages between the two doctors include texts where Dr Ong told Dr Chan to "feel free to play your game" and made a reference to anal sex with the patient. He also shared a patient's contact with Dr Chan and egged him on to meet her."No doubt, the messages (were) in exchange between friends ... but it is often only in private messages, when (one's) guard is down, that true colours reveal themselves," said the judge.To protect his reputation, Dr Ong had "been forced to come clean" on repeatedly cheating on his spouse, he added, while Dr Chan admitted making inappropriate touches in the past.The two doctors' "smug boasts" of their trysts with women speak to their true character, said Justice See."They may be competent doctors and their sex lives are of course private matters, but their blatant treatment of women as sex objects sullies whatever professional reputations they have built up for themselves.""

Professor ripped for 'multiracial whiteness' claim - "A New York University professor has come under fire for writing a Washington Post opinion piece that claimed some black and Hispanic voters in the United States supported Donald Trump because of something called ‘multiracial whiteness.’ Cristina Beltran wrote that it was unsettling to see “a quarter to a third of Latino voters voted to re-elect Trump.” She was also surprised to see many Latino and black people among the group storming the U.S. Capitol recently.Her theory was that they had “multiracial whiteness,” contending that being white is more than a race or racial identity."
War is Peace

Thai Airways earning over S$431,700 a month from selling fried dough sticks - "the airline's branch at Silom has also launched a cafeteria selling food inspired by in-flight meals"

LeBron James, who claims to be persecuted, just bought a $37 million Hollywood mansion - ""We're literally hunted EVERYDAY/EVERYTIME we step foot outside the comfort of our homes!" LeBron says (which is a weird thing for one of the most rich, famous, respected athletes on the planet to say)... Who even knows how many houses this guy has now. All this oppression sure is paying off for him!"

I,Hypocrite - Posts | Facebook - "when i say men deserve nothing this doesn't apply to men who subscribe to my onlyfans, so subscribe to deserve something"
Comment: "When you bash the male gender to get some retweets but by accident you alienate your simps"

The Austrian castle where Nazis lost to German-US force - "In early May 1945, American and German soldiers fought together against the Nazi SS to free prominent French prisoners of war. It is believed to be the only battle in the war in which Americans and Germans fought as allies.Hans Fuchs remembers how Itter Castle was converted into a prison by the Nazis in 1943."

Owner of Viet Restaurant in Canada Gets Death Threats Over Insulting Dish Names - "A restaurant serving Vietnamese cuisine in Montreal, Canada has come under fire for using puns to name a number of items in its menu.Pho King Bon, which recently opened in Rosemère, wanted customers to mispronounce names of traditional Vietnamese food, resulting in crass and sexually-explicit wordplay... Pho King Bon called Bún Thịt Nướng, a classic dish of cold rice-vermicelli noodles, “Bonne Tite Noune,” a slang for “good little p***y.” Another item, “Lichi Mwa Lku,” misspelled the French phrase for “lick my a**.” The restaurant also offered items with the names “Pho Kyu,” “Pho Kme,” “Pho Kit” and “Pho Koff,” which can easily be heard as swear words in English. Inside the establishment, staff also reportedly wore masks that read “Pho King COVID.” One particular item that angered critics was a drink called “Viet Kong,” which referenced the pro-communist Việt Cộng from the Vietnam War. The organization reportedly killed thousands of innocent civilians.“Pho King Bon Restaurant claims to be an homage to Vietnamese culture, but uses vulgar and degrading puns in its name and menu,” wrote Kim Nguyen, who started the petition. She added, “I ask that the restaurant removes these insulting and disrespectful names, in addition to formally apologizing to the Vietnamese community.”... Boutin received death threats, with people even threatening to burn down the restaurant"
Apparently death threats are an appropriate response to "racism"

ACLU employee publicizes where Covington teen Nick Sandmann is attending college, calls him 'dangerous' - "An American Civil Liberties Union staff member alerted the public to which university Covington Catholic graduate Nick Sandmann is attending as an incoming freshman, suggesting that the college should have barred the young conservative's admission.Samuel Crankshaw, a communications associate at the ACLU's Kentucky arm, targeted Transylvania University for admitting the first-year student and expressed outrage that the liberal school would accept an undergraduate with opposing views held by approximately half of the country... The ACLU staffer then cited the QAnon conspiracy theory movement for "literally" being the "direct cause of multiple instances of violence," while ignoring the 100-plus days of Portland riots incited by Antifa and Black Lives Matter activists. Crankshaw also faulted Sandmann for "proudly defending" vilified 17-year-old Kenosha gunman Kyle Rittenhouse, "who murdered two people for exercising political speech." But Crankshaw also failed to mention glorified Antifa shooter Michael Reinoehl who admittedly murdered a Trump supporter in Portland last Saturday... "[I]t is far more alarming to see an ACLU official rallying people against a young man whose chief offense appears to be that he is publicly (and unapologetically) conservative and pro-life, reported Jonathan Turley, an attorney and professor at the George Washington University Law School.Turley pointed out that Crankshaw's reference to the “both sides” defense used to be the devil's advocate position of the ACLU in fighting for all sides to be given equal opportunities and protections... Turley noted as a "long supporter" of the ACLU that he previously wrote about his "concern over how the venerable group has changed under its current leadership, including a departure from its long robust defense of free speech.""Recently, the ACLU has abandoned its famed neutrality and has not supported some on the right while supporting those on the left," Turley stated... As Cranshaw agreed with Tompkins and together ganged up on the teen, he told her that "people like you are why it's such a great place to learn."... Turley, a self-described defender of liberal academics attacking a wide array of conservative causes, called the scenario "deeply problematic.""That fact that figures in the ACLU and academia would publicly espouse such views of intolerance is a chilling example of how our faith in free speech has eroded in the recent years""

Schools in England told not to use material from anti-capitalist groups - "The government has ordered schools in England not to use resources from organisations which have expressed a desire to end capitalism.Department for Education (DfE) guidance issued on Thursday for school leaders and teachers involved in setting the relationship, sex and health curriculum categorised anti-capitalism as an “extreme political stance” and equated it with opposition to freedom of speech, antisemitism and endorsement of illegal activity. Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell said the measures effectively outlawed reference in schools to key events in British history, and that it symbolised growing “authoritarianism” within the governing Conservative party... It listed examples of what were described as “extreme political stances”, such as “a publicly stated desire to abolish or overthrow democracy, capitalism, or to end free and fair elections”; opposition to freedom of speech; the use of racist, including antisemitic, language; the endorsement of illegal activity; and a failure to condemn illegal activities done in support of their cause.McDonnell said: “On this basis it will be illegal to refer to large tracts of British history and politics including the history of British socialism, the Labour Party and trade unionism, all of which have at different times advocated the abolition of capitalism... Tariq Ali, the writer and activist, said although the new guidance was a sign of “moral and political bankruptcy”, the advent of the internet meant such measures were futile.“Leaving aside the stupidity, these things don’t work,” he said. “People will read what they want to read. Trying to enhance a version of the Prevent strategy, which is already in place, is quite scandalous and shocking... It is understood that the DfE is clear that schools should not work with agencies that take extreme positions, including promoting non-democratic political systems, and that teachers should be politically impartial."
All the leftists (wilfully?) misunderstanding the rule. Given their logic, there shouldn't be any guidance on schools not using anti-Semitic material, since many figures in British history were anti-Semitic, and since students can easily access anti-Semitic material online

The Myth of 'Stolen Land'

The myth of the ‘stolen country’ | The Spectator

"​This ‘stolen country’ paradigm has spread like wildfire throughout the British diaspora in recent years. The BBC recently ran a piece on the 400th anniversary of the Plymouth landings, whose author took obvious delight in portraying the Pilgrim Fathers as native-mutilating slave drivers. In Canada, in the greater Toronto school district, students are read a statement of apology, acknowledging European guilt for the appropriation of First Nations lands, before the national anthem is played over the PA system every morning...

What well-meaning liberals do not seem to realise these days is that democracies thrive or fail on the basis of national stories. This is doubly so in republics like the US, where there is no apolitical figurehead to unite people in place of a monarch. In the end, stories are all we’ve got as a glue to cement us together as a society. If that story says that our democracy is rotten to the core, then how do we expect anyone to retain enthusiasm for democracy itself? As history shows time and again, as soon as a republic does not believe in itself and its ideals — that it is better than the tyrannies and autocracies surrounding it — that republic succumbs very quickly to autocracy itself. The riots that have recently erupted across the United States, the new and unaccustomed boldness that characterises dictators around the globe, attest to the breakdown of the Western democratic order which is being accelerated by these self-inflicted wounds.  

​This is not an abstract fear. By many measures, support for democracy among younger people is plummeting around the globe. Many in the US seem to have no clue just how much of a ‘city on a hill’ the US is still perceived to be, and how important that American beacon is to millions of people living under autocratic regimes. The mere thought of Obama’s motorcade passing through my European province electrified schoolchildren across the region. For them, he was as close as you get to a real-life superhero. Such universal support for a politician is virtually unheard of. Even though republican regimes are historically less popular internationally, for billions of people around the globe the US still equates with democracy — it is ‘the good place’. If the image of US is fundamentally delegitimised, if it’s entire raison d’être is tainted, then increasing numbers of people wonder whether democracy itself is worth the trouble. So we have to be very careful what we wish for...

The narrative of the ‘stolen country’ or ‘Native American genocide’ does not stand up to scrutiny by any honest and clear-sighted historian. It is a dangerously myopic and one-sided interpretation of history. It has only gained currency because most practising historians and history teachers are either susceptible to groupthink, or else have been cowed into silence by fear of losing their jobs. Reduced to its puerile form of ‘statement of guilt’, this myth puts 100 per cent of the burden on Europeans who are held responsible for all historical evil, while the First Nations people are mere victims; martyrs even, whose saintlike innocence presumes that their civilisation and society were practically perfect in every way. This is no way to honour or respect the realities of First Nation lives and their agency. And it helps perpetuate the idea that the US and Canada are fundamentally illegitimate societies, and that by implication, every other country on Earth is legitimate. If we were to be honest, there is not a single country on Earth which did not displace natives, or which did not engage in nasty wars or ethnic cleansings at many points during its history. The current fad for holding up the US and Canada to special scrutiny and particular opprobrium is therefore distorting at best...

No matter who ‘discovered’ the New World, it is inevitable that a large proportion of New World inhabitants would have died within the first few decades after first contact. This is universally acknowledged by specialists in the field. The New World population was smaller and more homogenous than the Old World population. Thus, its people had less immunity to disease than the people of the Old World, where disease communities from Africa, Asia and Europe had been intermingling for millennia. Even though some European captains did try and spread smallpox around a few forts and villages from time to time, the effect of their efforts was almost negligible compared with the natural spread of disease. So the claims of genocide by disease have almost nothing to do with European actions, apart from their simply reaching the New World. And of course, Europeans of the time had no way of envisioning the continent-wide epidemic repercussions of their actions. Verdict: not guilty. 

​Let us also acknowledge that Native American society was just as warlike as any other in human history. The anthropologists’ vision of Native Americans as peace-pipe-smoking environmentalists which gained purchase in the 1970s has long since given way to a more Hobbesian portrait of pre-Columbian reality. In North America, most Natives were primitive farmers. This means that (with some exceptions) they had no permanent settlements: they farmed in an area for a few decades until the soil got tired, before moving on to greener pastures where the hunting was better and the lands more fertile. This meant that tribes were in constant conflict with other tribes. It also meant that chiefs were continually vying for power, creating confederations under themselves, and that the question of who owned the land was in a more or less constant state of flux. In most of North America, the idea that any one piece of land belonged to any one tribe, for more than 50 or 100 years, is therefore highly questionable. In short, if you looked at a map of Native Canada 200 years before Europeans arrived, it would have been entirely different. In the meantime, some groups of natives would have slaughtered, bullied or enslaved others. Should we not be grieving for those Native Canadians whose land was stolen by other Native Canadians? Or is that somehow OK? I don’t suppose there is an app for that. 

The idea that the Europeans stole some land which had belonged in perpetuity to any one tribe is therefore ludicrous. The situation in most of North America was similar to northern Europe on the eve of the Germanic migrations, or western Europe as the Celts were moving across the landscape. Precisely to whom the land belonged in any given century at these periods in history was anyone’s guess. The very notion of property is a Graeco-Roman invention which most cultures found foreign until quite recently. But Europeans of the time had little chance of grasping this difference. What the Europeans did in the New World was insert themselves into a fluid power struggle which had been ongoing for millennia. Many Native American chiefs were ready to pledge allegiance to the Great ‘Chief of the English’, as a political expedient, just as various English colonies sided with this or that Native American ‘Great Chief’. Despite a few sensational cases of duplicity, most of the time, Europeans tried to buy land from Indians, just like they would buy an acre of land in England. If the local chief assented to this and liked the price, where then was the crime?... Musket use by natives probably depleted animal stocks at a higher rate than previously, meaning that the very introduction of firearms might have spelled the doom of hunting and gathering in North America in the long run, even if the Europeans had otherwise left the country alone.

​Another major structural issue is this: what precisely would our pious anthropology professors have had Europeans do with the New World once they found it? 

This is not a joke. Political reality has a way of crashing in on the pipe dreams of liberal academics. The reality is, if the English had not colonised, then the French or the Dutch would have. If the Spanish had not colonised, the Portuguese would have. This would have shifted the balance of power at home, and any European country which had not colonised, would have been relegated to secondary status. And it is easy to overestimate the amount of control that European governments actually had. As soon as the New World was discovered, many fisherman and traders sailed across the Atlantic on their own, in hopes of circumventing tax authorities and scoring a fortune. Long before colonies were established in most regions, the New World was crawling with Europeans whose superior technology gave them an edge in combat. Nonetheless, it was extremely dangerous for Europeans to provoke fights with Native Americans, and most of them tried to avoid this when possible. In retrospect, one could in theory be impressed that so many European governments showed a genuine concern to rein in the worst excesses of their subjects, with an express eye to protecting the Indians from depredation. The logic was simple: they attempted to protect their subjects at home, in order to secure good order and a better tax base. So they would do the same to their subjects in the New World. For a long time, few Europeans harboured any master plan of pushing the Native Americans out of their own lands. In more densely populated regions such as Mexico, such an idea must have seemed an absurdity. Reality tends to occur ad hoc. Boundaries often took generations to move, and would have seemed fixed at the time. For several centuries, many Europeans assumed that they would long be a minority on the North American continent. In Mexico and Peru, they always have been...

It is worth noting that no one claims that Europeans committed genocide in India, Asia or even Africa, although their technological advantages gave them every opportunity had they actually been of a genocidal mindset (as were for example the Mongols). In fact, the European track record shows them to be almost shockingly un-genocidal, given their clear technological advantages over the rest of the world for a period of several centuries. Few other civilisations, given similar power over so much of the world’s people, would have behaved in a less reprehensible manner. This is not to give Europeans a pat on the back. Rather it is to point out that Europeans are regularly painted as the very worst society on Earth, when in fact they had the power to do far, far more evil than they actually did. Let us at least acknowledge this fact.  

​The mixed farming/gathering economy of most Native Americans, coupled with their vulnerability to Old World diseases, therefore meant that North America was sparsely populated by the time Jamestown was founded in 1607, and unable to replace missing population at a very high rate. At this time, the New World was more sparsely populated than anywhere in the Old World apart from its subarctic regions and the Sahara...

Many people have been told by their friends on social media that Europeans destroyed Native Culture. The problem is this: whenever a good idea comes along, which clearly increases one’s living standards, one tends to adopt it. And who is to say that this adaptation is bad, especially if it results in higher living standards? Even as they discovered America, the Europeans were in the process of adopting dozens of superior Chinese inventions and ideas: paper money, gunpowder, pasta and fine porcelain are only the most famous. Should we accuse China of ‘cultural imperialism’ when they ruined ‘native’ Italian cuisine by introducing Marco Polo to spaghetti? Similarly, Native Americans were quick to adapt the many useful Old World ideas which Europeans happened to carry with them. To reiterate, most of these had not even been invented by Europeans, but had been adopted by Europeans from other Old World cultures. Why grind corn laboriously by hand for several hours a day, when one can use millstones instead? Why hunt with bow and arrow, when one can use a rifle? Why refuse to domesticate cattle, when they provide huge boosts in caloric intake for your family? Why refuse to adopt the wheel, for goodness sake?...

What about Columbus himself? Try as they might (and they have tried mightily), historians have been unable to find any evidence that Columbus was genocidal, or had any particular ill-will towards the Native Americans that he encountered. The guy lived in 1492. We could have forgiven him for literally ‘going medieval’ on any natives that he encountered. This was the same century in which the Mongols were exterminating every Russian, Muslim and Chinese person that they could get their hands on, sometimes slaughtering over 100,000 men, women and children at a go in some of history’s worst blood orgies. Instead, we find in Columbus’s journals a general sense of curiosity, of wonder even, and a genuine desire at many points to communicate and trade with natives, whose help Columbus realised he would need if his little expeditions were going to be successful. Let’s remember that Columbus was first and foremost a merchant. His main purpose was to open a trade route to China. Europeans realised that China had better stuff. Like expert businessmen everywhere, Genoese merchants had long since realised that attacking the people you want to trade with is counterproductive.

From the get-go, Isabella of Spain expressly forbade the enslavement of her New World subjects. Instead, she showed a genuine desire to bring them into what for her constituted the folds of civilisation, as Christian equals. So historians must grudgingly concede that the Spanish Crown, for its part, was likewise not nearly as bloodthirsty, genocidal or racist as they clearly hope to find.  

The priest Bartholomé de las Casas wrote an eloquent plea to the monarchs of Spain as early as the 1540s, chronicling in detail how wonton adventurers had taken advantage of the lawless situation in New Spain to exploit and slaughter natives against the express will of the Spanish Crown. A few things are worth noting about this: A) at least some Spanish people already had a genuine sense of compassion for, and desire to save, the Indians. B) Las Casas assumed that there was enough sympathy for his story at the Spanish court that he presented his book to the crown. Las Casas believed, therefore, that compassion for the Native Americans was, or at least could become, the dominant mood at court. 

Likewise, the relationship between English colonists in North America and Native Americans was never one-sided. To borrow a phrase from Facebook, the real historical relationship between these peoples is best described as ‘complicated’. The very first Native American chief who encountered the English, Powhatan, almost immediately expressed an interest to live in an English-style house. He considered it to be superior to the types of houses that his own people built, and he was ready to adopt whatever European ways made his life more comfortable. John Smith is supposed to have built him such a house in his capital of Werowocomoco, and to this day a monument called ‘Powhatan’s Chimney’ purports to be the remains of this house. Whether this is actually true or not, the fact is that many such acts of cultural borrowing were at work in English North America. We will say nothing of the many Native American habits that English settlers gratefully adopted, since this would be angrily dismissed as ‘cultural appropriation’ or some other such bad-faith nonsense.

​The story of Powhatan is outshined by the biography of his daughter Pocahontas. Of course there is much legend attached to this and there will be a ‘whitewashing’ of the legend. However, we have eye-witness accounts attesting that Pocahontas and other native children were in the habit of turning cartwheels around the Jamestown fort and playing with the boys there. Pocahontas and her friends are credited at one point with bringing provisions into the fort when the colonists were starving. Like any other neighbours, the settlers of Jamestown and the natives of the region had individual personal relationships that lasted for many years. But frontier relations were often capricious, and friendly games could turn to war, and back again, in a matter of months. At one point, John Smith was captured and brought to Powhatan; it is believed that Powhatan thereby hoped to bring Jamestown into his own dominions as Great Chief. He also sent an agent to England with a mission to spy out the population of that country — thus quite resourcefully attempting to size up the competition. He might even have imagined conquering England itself. Should we call Powhatan a ‘cultural imperialist’? At a later date, Pocahontas was captured in war, kept under house arrest, and eventually freed. In 1613, she converted to Christianity and took the rather less interesting name of ‘Rebecca’. She was given away by her father Powhatan to the successful Jamestown planter John Rolfe, and the two of them were given an estate totalling thousands of acres by Powhatan himself. Was this land ‘stolen’ from the Native Americans? Sources relate that the marriage helped foster several years of peace between the Native Americans and the Jamestown colony. In 1616 Pocahontas accompanied her husband to England, where she was treated as a celebrity, and an example of how the natives could be ‘civilised’. One can read this suspiciously, as any good Liberal critic is now taught to do, as an act of ‘white superiority.’ Or one could accept it at face value, as proof that many English people believed Native Americans to have the same innate human abilities as Europeans. Arguably, this is the exact opposite of racism. (Notice we don’t even have a word for this.)  

​There is therefore little real mystery of what happened to the Native Americans as a culture. They were certainly not exterminated at the behest of any concerted ideology of hatred or European superiority. After the initial disease-caused die-offs, and in spite of a few sensational wars and small-scale massacres, remaining Native Americans adopted so many Old World ‘life hacks’ that most of them were gradually assimilated into European culture. Only a minority stayed ‘wild’ enough to be placed on reservations. Even after that, many enterprising people left the reservation for a better life elsewhere. This was done on an individual basis, for the most part peacefully and willingly, leaving no fuss or much trace in the historical record. The stories of Powhatan and Pocahontas attest to the presence of this pattern at the dawn of English-Native American relations, and it continues to the present day. Now, such a statement would cause an uproar in almost any academic conference room these days. But the majority of the evidence and experience all points in this direction...

Plaques attest to schoolrooms full of Native American children who were being taught to read and write German by the Moravian settlers. While modern-day anthropologists might recoil in horror at this act of ‘cultural imperialism’, it is likely that the parents of these children were grateful for the opportunities afforded to them (and the calories given to them) by the Moravian schoolteachers. It is also very likely that these children would grow up to marry and live on a farm, in European style. Who in their right mind would live in the woods, if they could live a far more secure life on a farm? This was the 18^th century we are talking about, when life was hard enough for the great majority of Europeans. The Native Americans therefore showed common sense by gravitating towards habits which enabled them individually to survive and thrive. Accordingly, the colonial-era graveyard in Bethlehem contains a significant percentage of native people who, like Pocahontas 150 years before, had converted to Christianity and adopted a new name. There is no evidence that the egalitarian-minded settlers thought any less of these new converts to the faith...

​Let’s take a moment to look at the Moravians, whom our Liberal friends will glibly dump into the bucket of ‘European cultural imperialists’. First, the Moravians were, quite literally, communists; I will let that settle without further comment on the irony that entails in this context. In the lands bordering Moravia, ‘white privilege’ meant the privilege of sending an annual tribute of children to be slaves of the Ottoman Sultan: a practice which went on for 500 years, and was not discontinued until 1918. For centuries, Moravians therefore lived under threat of their homeland being invaded, and their people slaughtered or carried into Islamic slavery. (And though it is meant tongue-in-cheek, even pretending to use the lens of ‘race’ here is wholly distorting: in the Mediterranean context, religion and ethnicity mattered far more than ‘race’.) My point is that the Moravians and many neighbouring peoples hardly came from a position of cultural dominance.

​But it gets much worse. Moravia itself was originally Slavic-speaking, but it was also in the process of being taken over by culturally dominant Germans. So the very people teaching Native Americans to learn German in Pennsylvania were themselves victims of ongoing cultural imperialism which threatened the extermination of their ancestral language. And within a few generations, German itself would be all but eradicated from Pennsylvania by the majority English-speaking population. To this day, a few Amish still speak Pennsylvania Dutch, which is a version of German. They still refer to non-Amish as ‘the English’ and think of them as foreigners. To pretend therefore that Native Americans were the only ones in 17th- and 18th-century America whose culture was being ‘erased’ is highly naive. It is pernicious even — and racist in itself. This is to say nothing about religion. The Moravians were only in Pennsylvania in the first place because they faced a threat of extermination for their religious beliefs at home. They were, quite literally, refugees seeking asylum from the most horrific conditions. They found refuge in the tolerant state of Pennsylvania, set up by the religious refugee William Penn.

​As this piece was going to press, an article was published by the BBC on the occasion of the 400^th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower. After pretending neutrality at the beginning of the piece, the author launched with relish into all the worst possible assertions that can be levied against the Plymouth colonists. He implied that they were slave owners, when in fact, only a single Plymouth colonist is documented as having owned a slave. He implied that Plymouth ran on dirty money from the African slave trade, which is likewise almost entirely false. He mentioned every instance that can be found of colonists murdering Indians, and the image accompanying the article showed a representation of a native who was mutilated by colonists.

​The article steadfastly refuses to mention any mitigating factors. It says nothing about massacres perpetrated by Native Americans on colonists, or on each other... It does not mention that the colonists usually attempted to purchase land from local chiefs. Nor does our BBC article mention the disease which had wiped out over 90 per cent of the Native Americans who lived on the site of the Plymouth colony in the year before the Mayflower landed (the disease had been brought by fishermen, who had been sailing off Massachusetts for generations)... The article in question says nothing about how Plymouth authorities sometimes hanged Englishmen, or hunted down English fugitives, in order to demonstrate to their Native American allies that they took crimes against them seriously. Nor would the author dare to address the fact that the protestant dissenters of Massachusetts were intellectual ancestors of the global abolitionist movement which he and most of his fellows now take for granted, and give European culture zero credit for. 

​The question becomes, what good purpose does this calumny against the Pilgrims and other European colonists really serve? I ask this question in good faith. What myth about the Pilgrims needs tearing down with such one-sided ferocity? During the Cold War and the Gulf Wars, liberal historians called out excessive nationalism and jingoism, based on the legitimate fear that military types might start a war for no good reason. (In the case of Gulf War II, they apparently did.) So there is always a place for liberal critique within history. But on this issue, it’s more difficult to see the value of Pilgrim-bashing to today’s Native Americans, apart from making them bitter and resentful, and everyone else feel guilty and ashamed. There are after all very few Native Americans who identify as such; they are generally not subject to racism in the way that, say, African-Americans are, most are mixed race anyway, and most of them do not live on reservations. Many who do, are better off than many other Americans. So what grievances are pieces like the BBC story really addressing? In Canada, I am aware that there are serious social grievances on some reservations, particularly in the far north, but it seems as though the Canadian government has gone a long way in recent decades to address these in a reasonable manner, by allowing Native American representatives to guide and execute policy as much as possible. Should this not be applauded and supported? 

And whenever there are real grievances such as these, do we need to rewrite the entire history of European-Native relations in the most negative possible light in order to address them? Peel back the veneer, and we often find well-meaning white middle-class writers, whose cries of victimisation bespeak an essentialising racialism that they don’t even recognise themselves. Would it not be more productive to be more nuanced, to acknowledge that there have been points of goodwill, friendship, positive communication and — shudder the thought — even mutual benefit, since the very beginning?  

The real reason to perpetuate such a disastrously one-sided view, it seems, is if one is in a tiny minority of activists who has ‘drunk the kool-aid’ of Cultural Marxism — an ideology bent on bringing maximum embarrassment to Capitalism, Democracy, Western Civilisation and Europeans in general, in the vain hope that this will somehow bring about a sort of… what? Revolution? Really? Let’s not be naive. The only reason to be this consistently, this unreasonably angry about things which happened centuries ago, is if one sees the entirety of experience through the lens of perpetual racism and victimisation, and crucially, if one does not believe in the power of democracy to correct these wrongs. 

​At base, such people do not believe in the democratic process. Marxists have always believed that a handful of self-appointed intellectuals are better suited to creating a ‘good society’ than the rough-and-tumble of real-world parliamentary debate. Has history taught them nothing? The ones who will really lose out if Anglophone democracy is further discredited are surely those people in the world who are most vulnerable and in need of protection. Do you wish to provoke an even wilder right-wing reaction to your irrational hate-mongering than we have already seen? Do you think that the autocrats you are emboldening will treat minorities and homosexuals better than the United States, Canada, and Britain? The Cultural Marxist’s finger, once again, is pointed in precisely the wrong direction.  

​It is high time that historians spoke out against the dangerous misuse of history which supports the zealotry and iconoclasm currently emanating from our educational systems. This has become far too culturally dominant, far too damaging to global society, for us to ignore it any further. In the name of science, fairness, level-headedness, humanity, and democracy itself."

 

 

Naturally, liberals who claim to be for the accurate teaching of history (i.e. Critical Race Theory, in their book) get upset and block people who cite historical facts they don't like

Related:

Meme - "White people stole this land!"
"That means you should give it back."
"No, it means we need to invite the rest of the world to live on your land with us."

Facebook - "Native Americans arrived as immigrants on the North American continent 30,000 years ago, crossing the Bering Strait from Siberia. EVERY North American Indian tribe by genetic extension is related to the Athabaskan peoples who descend directly from the Altaian Siberian-Mongol DNA allele. This is proven anthropology. Don’t be a science denier. For the totality of those 30,000 years prior to Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean, native tribes engaged in slavery, intertribal warfare and genocide, cannibalism and human ritual sacrifice involving the stealing and raping of the women and children of other tribes. Intertribal skirmishes decided land ownership and territorial dominance for the history of the continent that can only be properly summarized as an epoch of constant, viciously brutal warfare interspersed by rare periods of peace and truce. Entire tribes were wiped from existence by other native tribes. Genocide. Northeastern tribes like the Huron and Iroquois reveled in their elaborate and lengthy victory ceremonies lasting days by skinning and burning alive surviving enemy warriors, roasting their victims on scaffolding above roaring fire, eating the hearts of the vanquished and sating themselves with the naked flesh of captured wives of the conquered who were expected to be loyal concubinous property of the victors ever after. Perhaps those convinced of the modern romantic myth of the “Noble Savage” would care to explain why the name given for the Mohawk tribe is rooted in an Algonguin word literally translated “eaters of the dead,” or why overwhelmed opposing tribes of the Iroquois, warriors, women and children alike routinely committed suicide rather than suffer the infamous and well told savagery of becoming chattel to the Iroquois confederacy. So, the demonization of European arrival in the New World canonizes the warmongering land expansion of tribes, including the Lakota Sioux who claimed the Black Hills in 1776 by defeating the Cheyenne–who stole the land from the Kiowa–who stole the land from the Pawnee and Crow–who stole the same land from the Arikara, Mandan and Hidatsa tribes who occupied this land between 1000 and 1560 A.D. Any condolences cards exchanged between the Lakota Sioux and the Arikra on this Native American Day? Apology notes for arriving and taking a land already claimed by other peoples, at a terrible cost of lost human life? Is the Iroquois Confederacy issuing apology to the Algonquins for wiping them out of existence in 1640? Didn’t think so. In the lunacy of the present demonization of white culture in the main and white masculinity in specific, we’re now apologizing for the arrival of smallpox via exploration and conquest. Interesting. I wonder if the Chinese explorers who carried the rats infected with Yersenia Pestis up the Silk Road into Europe have ever apologized for the Bubonic Plague outbreak in 1340 that eventually would kill 60% of Europe in a death toll of 60-million….ten times larger than the Native American population of the America’s in 1492 and the single largest pandemic in human history... in this maniacally stupid era of history revision and virtue orgasm, America is the first nation in history to apologize for conquest. It’s stupid and unnecessary indoctrination. Unless you’re a social planner attempting to fractionalize and conquer through propaganda... Everyone on this continent from the beginning of time is an immigrant. Choosing to chop the timeline five hundred years ago rather than 10,000 years ago is the source of the inaccuracy and the stupidity of the present discussion... But then, all of human history is a tragedy of winners and losers, in line and chapter and verse for every race of people that has ever lived. And it can only be properly understood by reading the entire book, rather than fixating on chapters that now serve as handy political weapons for the reinstatement of the very brand of serfdom and classism and inescapable servitude that drove the exploration for new lands with free air and room to succeed by the sweat and toil of a man’s brow. New lands and nations found and founded by the bravery, courage and determination of giants of men who undertook impossibly dangerous voyages of great discovery and shook the foundations of the world. Men like Christopher Columbus. Happy Columbus Day."  

WALSH: The Left Says America Was Built On ‘Stolen Land’; Here’s The Reality That Narrative Ignores - "As so many woke Leftists tend to do, Duckwork speaks of Native Americans as if they were one homogenous and unified group. Americans stole from “Native Americans,” generally, she says. Which is like saying the British “stole land from Asians” when they occupied India. No, they were taking from Indians, not the Chinese or the Vietnamese, and the distinction is important. Indeed, Leftists would usually be the first to claim that it is racist to erase or minimize such distinctions.Yet there is a reason why the “we stole land” crowd is hesitant to get specific on the matter of who we stole the land from. The problem is helpfully illustrated by this PBS article, which says the Black Hills were appropriated from the Lakota Sioux, who were “the original occupants of the area.” But the Lakota were the original occupants of the Black Hills in the same way that I was the first person to experience human flight when I took a plane from Baltimore to Charlotte in March. That is to say, I wasn’t. And they weren’t. Not by a long shot.There has been a human presence in the Black Hills since prehistoric times. From that era until the US “stole” it, many groups of people fought, often quite brutally, for control of the region. Slightly more recently, the Arikara tribe moved in around the time that Columbus first sailed the ocean blue. The Cheyenne, Kiowa, Crow, and other tribes all arrived in short order to fight for their own share of the coveted mountain range. Finally, the Lakota — the alleged “original occupants” — came in the 18th century, drove all of their competitors away, and established control. It’s worth noting that, for Indian tribes, “driving competitors away” often meant violence and pillaging.The U.S. did not take the Black Hills from its original occupants. The original occupants had long since been exiled or exterminated by other Native American tribes, who received the same treatment from the next tribe, who received it from the next, and so on. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that the U.S. took the Black Hills from the most recent tribe that had taken it from the tribe that had most recently taken it before them. This is not mere pedantry. The point is that white settlers and pioneers, by trying to claim and conquer new land, were not introducing some new horror to the continent. They were playing the same game of conquest that Indian tribes had been playing — that all people, everywhere, had been playing — since the dawn of human civilization. It is simply absurd to treat the “theft” of land by Europeans and Americans as a unique evil for which we must repent and take down our monuments in shame. Wars of conquest had been waged in this part of the world for thousands of years before any white man graced these shores. Slavery, torture killings, rape, pillage — all of these were common features of Indian conflict. The white man jumped into that fray, he didn’t invent it. This is just how the world worked, long before air conditioning and Taco Bell and Twitter accounts.And we certainly cannot say that white people were unique in their barbarism. Such claims are rendered absurd by even a cursory study of tribes like the Comanche, who were known to torture babies and roast captives alive; or the Iriquois, who committed a campaign of extermination against the Huron over a century before the United States was founded. As SC Gwynn explains in his book “Empire of the Summer Moon,” many Indian tribes in North America were brutal and warlike. And that is to say nothing of the Mesoamerican tribes, like the Aztecs and the Maya, who engaged in human sacrifice on a scale that is almost impossible to fathom. Archeologists are stll uncovering the endless and towering racks of skulls where the dismembered heads of the butchered victims were kept.This doesn’t excuse the many acts of brutality committed by the Spanish, or any other group of Europeans or Americans during the 400-year clash of civilizations between the white man and the Indian, but it does underscore the need for historical context. It was a harsh and violent age, and the world was being tamed and settled by harsh and violent men. We should be thankful that we have the luxury to feel squeamish about it now."

NPC Wars Reserve Corps - Posts | Facebook - "The USA stole the land where Mt. Rushmore is from the Lakota"
"And the Lakota conquered that land from the Cheyenne..."

The western idea of private property is flawed. Indigenous peoples have it right | Julian Brave NoiseCat | The Guardian - "While indigenous values, beliefs and practices are as diverse as indigenous people themselves, they find common roots in a relationship to land and water radically different from the notion of property. For indigenous people, land and water are regarded as sacred, living relatives, ancestors, places of origin or any combination of the above."
Ironically, the same people who romanticise indigenous people for not treating land like a possession and thinking it's ridiculous to think you own land, then claim that indigenous land has been "stolen" and this "stolen land" must be returned to the natives (i.e. the people who just happened to be on the land when white people first came to the area, even if they had just conquered it from another tribe)
Plus, the same people who gripe about stolen land and who want to return land to the indigenous people are clamouring for more (non white) immigrants

Links - 8th July 2021 (1) (Spending beyond your means & the lottery)

60% of Millennials Earning Over $100,000 Live Paycheck to Paycheck - "54% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. And nearly 40% of high earners — those making more than $100,000 annually — said they live that way... Living on constrained budgets may therefore have less to do with income and more to do with expenses... That's partly because of lifestyle choices. Many of these millennials are likely HENRYs — short for high earner, not rich yet. The acronym was invented in 2003, but it has come to characterize a certain group of 30-something six-figure earners who struggle to balance their spending and savings habits.  HENRYs typically fall victim to lifestyle creep, when one increases one's standard of living to match a rise in discretionary income. They prefer a comfortable and often expensive lifestyle that leaves them living paycheck to paycheck."
Liberal-Leftist logic: this shows that the system doesn't work for ordinary people and the rich are screwing everyone and/or we need a revolution

Poll results show nearly 50% of high-income earners in Singapore face money issues - "This result was derived from a poll conducted with 1,000 Singaporean respondents aged 25 to 54 with monthly salaries of at least S$6,000 to over S$20,000... It turns out that being rich and wealthy has less to do with how much you earn, but more to do with what you do exactly with the money you have.  Elaborating further on the financial issues, the poll revealed that the monthly income of these high-income earners is in fact insufficient to cover their expenses, resulting in them having to dig into their savings just to pay the bills... This is not necessarily because high-income earners splurge on luxurious items during the current recession, but rather about how once they choose to live beyond their means, their expensive lifestyle will come back to haunt them even if they are staying at home and cut all spending except for food and utility bills.  For instance, if they have monthly loan repayment for their multimillion-dollar home and a S$500,000 car, they will find it extremely difficult to pay back these loans when their regular income is affected... a third of high-income earners who polled admitted that they cannot control their spending and have poor discipline in money management. The main reason why people end up in debt is not due to investment or business failure but overspending"

Research Statistic on Financial Windfalls and Bankruptcy - "Over the past couple of years several news organizations have attributed a statistic to the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) stating that 70 percent of lottery winners end up bankrupt in just a few years after receiving a large financial windfall. This statistic is not backed by research from NEFE, nor can it be confirmed by the organization. Frequent reporting—without validation from NEFE—has allowed this “stat” to survive online in perpetuity.In 2001, NEFE conducted a think tank of experts from several industries including psychology, financial planning and other fields, to discuss life-changing events and the psychology around them. One topic discussed was the impact of financial windfalls on individuals, where it is believed that a participant stated the 70 percent statistic. This statement was made independently and without verification from NEFE."

The Ticket to Easy Street? The Financial Consequences of Winning the Lottery - "This paper examines whether giving large cash transfers to financially distressed people causes them to avoid bankruptcy. A comparison of Florida Lottery winners who randomly received $50,000 to $150,000 to small winners indicates that such transfers only postpone bankruptcy rather than prevent it, a result inconsistent with the negative shock model of bankruptcy. Furthermore, the large winners who subsequently filed for bankruptcy had similar net assets and unsecured debt as small winners. Thus, our findings suggest that skepticism regarding the long-term impact of cash transfers may be warranted."
Presumably according to Americans who rail against the system which is broke, the lottery winners went broke because they didn't have enough money

Long-Run Effects of Lottery Wealth on Psychological Well-Being - "We surveyed a large sample of Swedish lottery players about their psychological well-being 5–22 years after a major lottery event and analysed the data following pre-registered procedures. Relative to matched controls, large-prize winners experience sustained increases in overall life satisfaction that persist for over a decade and show no evidence of dissipating over time. The estimated treatment effects on happiness and mental health are significantly smaller. Follow-up analyses of domain-specific aspects of life satisfaction implicate financial life satisfaction as an important mediator for the long-run increase in overall life satisfaction."

Does Inequality Cause Financial Distress? Evidence from Lottery Winners and Neighboring Bankruptcies - "We test the hypothesis that income inequality causes financial distress. To identify the effect of income inequality, we examine lottery prizes of random dollar magnitudes in the context of very small neighborhoods (13 households on average). We find that a C$1,000 increase in the lottery prize causes a 2.4% rise in subsequent bankruptcies among the winners’ close neighbors. We also provide evidence of conspicuous consumption as a mechanism for this causal relationship. The size of lottery prizes increases the value of visible assets (houses, cars, motorcycles), but not invisible assets (cash and pensions), appearing on the balance sheets of neighboring bankruptcy filers."