A Purblind Press, Unable To Admit Error, Boycotts the President

What is utterly astonishing about the fierce contest between the national press and President Trump is that the press does not realize how despised it is by most Americans, and how richly, as a group (which contains many individual exceptions), it deserves to be despised.

For 18 months Donald Trump campaigned with great energy all over the country, swept most of the primaries, many by astounding margins against a large field of candidates, and made a point of denouncing the national media as biased, self-serving, and malicious myth-makers. He referred to them hundreds of times as “liars,” and directed the very large crowds that he drew to the press section, and his supporters shook their fists in unfeigned rage at the press gallery. Did the complacent, bemused national press think they were paid plants or that it was all a spoof?

http://www.nysun.com/national/a-purblind-press-unable-to-admit-error-boycotts/89909/

Eugene Kontorovich: Jewish Settlements & International Law

Northwestern University Law Professor Eugene Kontorovich makes the case that Israeli settlements are not illegal under international law.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0ZTi-53t88

The Right to be Better People

http://sultanknish.blogspot.ca/2017/02/the-right-to-be-better-people.html

A GAME OF CHESS

During the last 18 months or so I’ve heard a lot of talk about chess. This guy or that guy is playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers or some mastermind is playing 3 dimensional chess, etc. I find it odd that these statements are made given that only a tiny percentage of Americans know how to play chess with that number sitting around 5% or slightly over 14 million people. This is too bad because if the population, as a whole, had a better understanding of chess then the actions of President Trump would make perfect sense.

History: The school district where I was employed drastically cut its music programs and decided that chess would be an appropriate alternative to music instruction. I was not entirely opposed to this as there were published research papers extolling the virtues of chess and there appeared to be a direct relationship between playing chess and higher academic achievement. Besides, anyone can play chess while not everyone has the dexterity to be a musician. Wishing to be part of the solution, I agreed to become a coach and took on after school chess programs on three different campuses.

Our school district was kind enough to foot the bill for some necessary chess coaching and needed chess supplies. Not only that but I had the great fortune of having World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov’s former full time coach as my new teacher as the former Russian coach had relocated to the very city where I lived and had been contracted by the School District to get us up to speed. Private lessons with Kasparov’s coach! Can you imagine it?

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2017/02/08/a-game-of-chess/#more-142774

How to Defeat Weaponized Empathy

I’ve spoken at great length on the matter of Weaponized Empathy. It is the primary weapon of the modern Left. Indeed, it so completely dominates their tactical thinking that everything else in their arsenal pales in comparison. Defeating this weapon ought to be the foremost on the mind of any opponent of the Progressive Left.

Almost nothing else matters, at this point. Any victory achieved without defeating Weaponized Empathy will be hollow and Pyrrhic. You may succeed in lowering taxes for a time, or passing some military budget items you want. But the Progressive steamroller will go on, slowly, inexorably, swallowing entire civilizations in the old Fabian manner. The war will be lost unless the weapon is destroyed.

What is Weaponized Empathy? It is the deliberate hijacking of your own moral standards, your ability to empathize with your fellow man, in order to force you to serve someone else’s narrative. It is, in essence, a highly sophisticated form of guilt-tripping designed to turn you into a slave.

You might consider it an evolution of the Alinsky tactic of forcing the enemy to live up to their own moral standards. But it goes beyond that. It forces an enemy to embrace your moral standards or suffer tremendous peer pressure and socially-engineered “justice” at the whims of the mob.

Here is a practical example:

http://thedeclination.com/how-to-defeat-weaponized-empathy/

Why Are Progressives So Angry? Trump Defeated Their Messiah

The obstinacy of Senate Democrats reflects the mood of their progressive base, whose panicked anger is the natural reaction of those for whom politics has become an article of faith. Progressives, as the terms implies, believe society must always be progressing toward something better. Always forward, never backwards. After eight years of Obama, they believed progressive politics in America would forever be on an upward trajectory.

Trump shook that faith. But his election also unmasked the degree to which progressivism as a political project is based not on science or rationality, or even sound policy, but on faith in the power of government to ameliorate and eventually perfect society. All the protests and denunciations of Trump serve not just as an outlet for progressives' despair, but the chance to signal their moral virtue through collective outrage and moral preening--something that wasn't really possible under Obama, at least not to this degree.

Not that they didn't try. Recall that during the Obamacare debate in 2009 Ezra Klein suggested that Sen. Joe Lieberman was "willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score," simply because he threatened to filibuster what would become the Affordable Care Act. This is the language of political fundamentalism--policy invested with the certainty of religious conviction.

Religious fundamentalism of course rests on immutable truths that cannot be negotiated.

https://thefederalist.com/2017/02/01/why-are-progressives-so-angry-trump-defeated-their-messiah/

Did Facebook Win Donald Trump the Presidency?

I stumbled across a rarity yesterday--a leftist who is curious enough about how the right thinks to read and study us.

Someone pointed this series of tweets to me after the writer linked my article, How Losing My Political Values Helped Me Gain My Freedom, as an example of the emotional state of the reactionary right.

Gabriel Rosenberg‏@gnrosenberg

I think we have not yet fully come to grips with emotional terrain of the current reactionary strategy.

It's a thoughtful series of tweets that I encourage you to read. The author has his finger on the emotional state of the reactionary right more than any other leftist I've encountered. He didn't rely on a bunch of tropes and stereotypes to reach his conclusions. He paid attention to what we've been saying.

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/368213.php

How Losing My Political Values Helped Me Gain My Freedom

There's a frustrating game that the left plays with conservatives. It's an Alinksy tactic called, "Make them live up to their values." Now, living up to one's values isn't a bad thing, but setting high standards ultimately means that you'll sometimes fall short.

The left loves to exploit these shortcomings--every Christian who falls short of perfection is a hypocrite; the social values candidate you voted for just got arrested for drunk driving. Haha, everything you believe and advocate is now discredited.

They got away with it for years, waving away the lies, hypocrisy, indiscretions, and criminal behavior from their own politicians while beating the right mercilessly with the missteps of their own. It's effective because the right always maintains a baseline of integrity not displayed by the left, as evidenced by comparing what happens to Republican politicians when they're caught in criminal behavior with what happens to Democrats. Republican voters and politicians reluctantly dump the malefactor while Democrats defend their guy and launch an offensive against those who demand accountability.

http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=368084

ISIS, Child Soldiers and Islamic Schools

While ISIS is ransacks the Middle East, and while the intolerable fundamentalist Muslim communities in Western cities are ignored by the Left, Muslim children suffer immeasurably. They will continue to suffer until the Western world finally recognises that the underlying problem is Islam

The subjugation and exploitation of women and girls in Islam is well publicised. The moderate factions promote the sexual shaming of women under the guise of “modesty” by the hijab, niqab and burqa. The extremists conduct the increasingly prolific sex-slave trade of Yazidi women as a recruiting tool for the Islamic State. It is no secret that Islam is the most misogynistic institution in the world. However, what is not widely considered is the appalling treatment of children under Islam. The Left will cover its ears and insist child abuse is a global phenomenon, not attached to any particular ideology. But child abuse in the Muslim world occurs for reasons that are Islamic, rather than universal. Its purpose is not only to disempower, but to brainwash.

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2017/01-02/islamic-state-child-soldiers-islamic-schools/