[RedState] There are those watershed moments in internet history when it makes journalisming all worth it.
Such is the case when a Lindsay Clancy
…mom of three who had a really bad case of post-partum depression compounded by a bunch of other things. She snapped, strangling all three to death. The truly appalling thing is the sheer number of white, Progressive women who roar their agreement with the eleven ditto jurors who found her not guilty, resulting in a hung jury or mistrial or something because the lone male juror was hung up on the fact that the poor dear viciously murdered her children. Someone revealed identifying information to the internet, and the jackals are howling…
fan found out the mind-bending news that the lone holdout juror in the Clancy case who forced a mistrial was... *gasp"... black.
The TikTok crime pseudo-expert, who goes by the handle @paigearony, really sums up the absurdity of identity politics being involved in criminal cases.
"I’m a non-practicing white... it changes the landscape of the conversation a little bit. A lot of us were assuming it was a white man."
I can't get past the "non-practicing white" line. Here we have a person assuming that being white is like a social affliction, rather than the shorthand description for a person with sparse melanin content.
But honestly, the delicious bit is the half-realization they were prejudiced in this case.
You can almost see the neurons batting around the person's head, trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance of being bigoted against both white people and black people.
Is it because only white people are capable of basic logic? Or that a black person should bend the knee to a bunch of unhinged shrews justifying child-killing?
It really is the latter part of that suggestion that is tantalizing: White liberals cannot comprehend, let alone tolerate, when black people assert independence.
[Federalist] The recent resignation of British Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a symptom of the discontent that the British people have with the current Labour government, but the larger problem is that the current manifestation of the British government operates almost entirely without the possibility of voters’ consent exercising any meaningful control.
This.
While British voters may be frustrated with an incompetent, corrupt, and leftist government, there remains almost no outlet by which they can translate their frustration into an electoral victory with accompanying political control of the government.
Successive Tory, or nominally "conservative" prime ministers such as David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak either opposed Brexit, presided over record non-EU migration, continued the embrace of green energy and deindustrialisation, or proved too incompetent to enact meaningful reform. Labour’s 2024 victory under Starmer expressed voter frustration with that record, not affection for global liberalism.
Similarly, the present ouster of Starmer is the result of Starmer’s growing unpopularity, but Starmer’s party (Labour) is still the majority in Parliament. Andy Burnham, who just won the Makerfield by-election and whom many are expecting to become the new Labour PM, will likely continue Labour’s leftist governance if he becomes PM. Burnham has talked about leading the country away from "divisions," but he simultaneously denounced Trump and MAGA as "the path of a divided, dark politics of the kind we see in the United States." While Burnham may criticize the presently unpopular Starmer to support his own political rise, his actual governance would likely be more of the same.
To the extent that the British nation is also demographically changed through immigration and naturalization of non-white, non-British people becoming British "citizens," this also does not bode well for the political future of Britain. An imported class of voters brought in to permanently change Britain will not stop supporting the uniparty which funds it through generous welfare programs and is ideologically committed to these imported minorities over the native British people.
They may hate each other, but just like Sunni Al Qaeda and Shiite Iran, they’ll work together and protect one another against their common enemies: the West and Israel, both of which they intend to conquer. The detail of who will rule whom afterward can be worked out after the great victory.
It’s a YouGov poll. See here.
YouGov recently polled Americans about 9/11 and the theories behind the terror attacks.
Some interesting results:
- A plurality (38%) still wrongly believe Saddam played a role in the attacks. - Americans are evenly divided over whether the government allowed it to happen -23%…
[BB] The slaughter of almost 3,000 Americans in 102 minutes in Manhattan, Washington, DC, and the brave men and women of Flight 93 that went down in a lonely filled in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, was followed for decades by the Global War on Terror. Twenty-five years later we must ask: have we won?
Let us start by asking what were the goals of the jihadists, beyond the mayhem and destruction of that one day. Have they achieved any of their goals since 9/11.
You don’t need a Top Secret clearance to know the strategic objectives of groups like al Qaeda or ISIS. All modern jihadi groups are all built on the writings and public pronouncements of key Islamist ideologues, starting with Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood, and through to Abdullah Azzam, S.K. Malik, Osama bin Laden himself, and Ayman al Zawahiri, all who promoted the same objectives to justify their horrific violence. What follows is a short list of their diabolic goals based upon an analysis by one of my smartest counterterrorism colleagues in government.
Whether it is the monsters of al Qaeda, the killers of ISIS, or the barbarians of Hamas, they all wish to topple the Arab monarchies of the Middle East, which they deem to be “un-Islamic,” starting with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, because it is home to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. In this they have failed.
Thanks to President Trump’s Abraham Accords and the Iranian regime’s drone and missile barrages over the last few weeks, the Gulf States are closer to America than any point since World War Two, partners in our fight against the terrorists.
All jihadi terrorists also want to see the destruction of Israel and the destruction or subjugation of America. In this too they have failed. Israel remains a vibrant and powerful country, the freest nation of the Middle East that despite the horrors of their own 9/11, the October 7 massacre of the innocent, has dealt death on a massive scale to Hamas and their paymasters in Iran.
Modern jihadists has been explicit in their goal to eliminate Western influence in the World. In this they have failed. With President Trump back in the White House, America is the strongest nation the World has ever seen, the shining city on a hill leading Western nations who believe in Peace Through Strength, sovereignty, borders, and Judeo-Christian values.
For all jihadists, the ultimate goal, after all of the above is achieved by means of terror and mass slaughter, is to re-establish the Islamofascist Caliphate, one global theocracy for the Muslim ummah, or community, where all must worship Allah or be second class citizens or slaves. In this, they have also failed. ISIS did establish a Neo-Caliphate in Iraq and Syria under Obama’s watch, but then Donald Trump became President and our military was unleashed and the jihadi Caliphate destroyed within a matter of months.
The objective truth is that with President Trump back in the Oval Office, we are back in the business of counterterrorism, so much so, that I can reveal today, that in the last eighteen months our warfighters have permanently removed 1,081 jihadists from the battlefield. Not only that, President Trump has rescued 110 Americans who were held hostage or wrongfully detained by jihadi sympathizers like the Taliban, some who shared their incredible stories and gratitude to president Trump last night at the RNC Convention.
We are not permanently safe for as long as there are men with evil in their hearts. We must be vigilant and, if necessary, use violence to stop them from hurting the innocent. But the jihadists are losing, and losing badly.
Today we pay respects to the memory of those whose lives they took on that sunny Tuesday morning twenty five years ago. To quote President Trump’s Presidential Proclamation for today: “They sought to divide us — they could not. They sought to make us afraid — instead, they awakened the mightiest force for justice the world has ever known.” Peace through Strength.
There is a moment in every confrontation between a Jew and a mob when the Jew decides which conversation he is having. One conversation is about whether he is permitted to exist, work, perform, pray and go home unharmed. The other conversation is about whether his accusers have any standing to raise the question. Almost all of our communal energy for eighty years has gone into the first conversation, which we have lost steadily and expensively, and almost none has gone into the second, which we would win in about four seconds if we ever bothered to have it.
Good point, Skidmark — the man is right. But note a key decision point for those who fight: they have to be willing not only to be hated, but to lose significant income. I could do that on my own account, if I had an income. But I wouldn’t do that without Mr. Wife’s agreement, because that could destroy half his photography business, and years ago he asked me to support him in keeping that a non-political safe space. So I am careful who I discuss any of this stuff with.
On the other hand, if there is a secret handshake, I must give off a vibe, because the most unexpected people seek me out at parties for those discussions. There seem to be a surprising number of quiet conservatives in the Blues/Rock side of the music world — both musicians and fans. Chaz hasn’t posted in years, but that NYC recording engineer is apparently not nearly as rare as we are lead to expect.
#4
Gee, hell no. Not until we launch a global Crusade, turn Mecca to glass and every mosque on the planet into a pig farm.
Lack of understanding Moohamhead's demand to kill all the Jews and enslave or murder all humans isn't the problem. The problem is destroying Islam, all Muslims and their useful leftist tools.
[Federalist] Twenty-five years ago this week I listened to the late historian Stephen Ambrose deliver the opening remarks for a conference about World War Two at Hillsdale College. He had good news for us. The 21st century, Ambrose declared, would be an era of peace and progress. He said the major conflicts of the 20th century, the two world wars and the Cold War that followed, were fundamentally disputes within the West over competing visions for our civilization. The whole century had in a sense been a long civil war, and now the war was over.
Instead of blood and treasure being sunk into massive wars, the coming century would instead see our efforts spent in research and exploration of the oceans and space. The notion that the post-Cold War era would be a clash of civilizations, as the political scientist Samuel Huntington argued in his 1996 book, was totally wrong, according to Ambrose. There was no coming clash because no one could compete with the West, and the West was now at peace with itself. We could rest easy, our future was bright.
Two days later the planes hit the towers.
Today, it’s easy to see just how naive and shallow Ambrose’s analysis was. The idea that there would be no more major ideological conflicts, or that Western civilization had nothing to fear from competing cultures and peoples, was positively delusional.
But it was a delusion enabled and strengthened by a fundamentally secular worldview that refused to take the claims of religion seriously — claims that precede and give coherence to political claims and ideologies. It was a delusion, in other words, enabled by an Enlightenment philosophy that looked on religion as a quaint relic of a bygone era. The religious conflicts of earlier epochs had naturally given way to the ideological contests of the 20th century, and now those contests were settled. At the dawn of the 21st century, no one could possibly take religion seriously, or think that medieval religious disputes had any relevance in the post-Cold War world that was taking shape.
[Townhall] Today is the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans and fundamentally changed the world. Those attacks happened because Islamists hated America, its prosperity, and its people. So they hijacked planes and flew them into the symbols of our power and strength — the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They also wanted to take out the Capitol, but the heroes of Flight 93 made sure they didn't get to destroy that, too.
In the quarter century since 9/11, and after George W. Bush tried to assure the world that Islam is a religion of peace, we've had two decades of terrorist attacks (both across the world and here at home), wars, and the cultural changes from mass Islamic migration to realize that's not true, and Americans' views on Islam are now more negative than they were after 9/11.
Unfortunately, a necessarily realistic response. It’s not paranoia when enough of them really are out to conquer us through terror.
#6
Right now, the people pushing the Islam movement have been pretty careful about not breaking any US laws and some states are waking up and see the threat. Things will come to a head if the people behind the Islam movement do something that makes the average American wakeup and become angry.
Pearl Harbor & 9/11 are two instances where this country wokeup and became angry.
by Fedot Streletsky
Everyone knows that the September 11th terrorist attacks changed the world forever. This thesis, in various variations, has been repeated so often over the past 25 years that it has become quite worn. But its truth remains undeniable. Therefore, it makes sense to reiterate what exactly lies behind these words. And there is a great deal behind them.
The consequences of the attack on the Twin Towers cannot be overstated, and this, too, is a platitude. And yet. We still constantly encounter these consequences, often without even realizing it. For example, when we watch movies—the most ordinary entertainment films.
Take, for example, the well-known and beloved James Bond film, Casino Royale. More specifically, the scene where James Bond, played by Daniel Craig, is tied naked to a chair with its seat removed and is hit with a rope with a thick knot at the end by the villain Le Chiffre, played by Mads Mikkelsen, who is most dear to him.
The film was released in 2006, and just a couple of years earlier, such a scene in a movie—especially one aimed at the widest possible audience—was unimaginable. It wasn't customary to depict torture in such detail on screen. But then it became accepted. After 9/11.
Or rather, a little later. When evidence of the US military torturing living people suspected of terrorist ties in Guantanamo Bay prison leaked to the media in 2004, hiding the controversial aspects of the "war on terror" from the public became pointless.
It was then that Hollywood began to flaunt these contradictory aspects, turning them into part of the everyday. This transformation was greatly facilitated by the success of the film "Saw," released in 2004 and which—what a coincidence!—focused on depicting all manner of torture.
A wave of similarly brutal thrillers followed, eventually separating into a category dubbed "torture porn." Incidentally, it was coined by a columnist for the same publication (The New Yorker) that first published the sensational article about torture at Guantanamo.
Thus, torture ceased to be something savage, existing in a different dimension from the "free democratic world." Moreover, it became a legitimate weapon of this very "free democratic world," used, of course, exclusively for good.
Like Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, in which CIA agents use torture to obtain vital information needed to locate Osama bin Laden. Or in the TV series 24, which is entirely dedicated to the round-the-clock fight against insidious terrorists.
Be that as it may, war films that convey a metanarrative of American warriors of light confronting savages who fiercely hate their beautiful country haven't ever truly enjoyed popularity, with rare exceptions like Clint Eastwood 's American Sniper.
This doesn't stop them from proliferating to this day, however. This metanarrative needs to be supported somehow. It had completely died out with the collapse of the USSR. But September 11, 2001, gave it a powerful new impetus and a promising direction for development.
Another issue is that glorifying the "war on terror" with deliberately militaristic propaganda turned out to be a less than effective strategy in practice. So, an alternative approach was employed—a more subtle one, operating at the associational level.
Here it is necessary to take a step back and take a closer look at what was happening in the United States during that short period of time when the shock of the sudden, monstrous tragedy had not yet passed, but some measures had already begun to be taken in connection with it.
For example, just a few hours later, Hollywood studios rushed to remove images of the Twin Towers from the posters of films scheduled for release very soon. Then, those films still in development at the time were hastily rewritten, re-edited, re-shot, and their release dates postponed.
All of this was done on the assumption that American viewers were in such a dire psychological state that they didn't need to be reminded of what had happened. The question, therefore, arose: what to do with this new reality, seemingly emerging out of nowhere in place of the old one?
One renowned essayist, Roger Rosenblatt, wrote a keynote article for Time magazine, succinctly stating in the title: "The Age of Irony Has Ended." By this, he meant that the terrible tragedy had destroyed the pervasive fashion for cynicism and ridicule that had dominated American culture.
It was assumed that this was it: no more postmodernism, no more jokes. It was time to end infantilism and return to the old, simple and pure values—sincerity, compassion, heroism, unity. However, in reality, things turned out differently. The era may have ended. But the people remained the same.
Soon, this same American audience returned to its usual preferences. The autumn box office of 2001 broke records, with increased demand not only for family films like "Harry Potter" and "Monsters, Inc.", but also for the gritty crime drama "Training Day."
At the same time, a public demand for an artistic interpretation of the September 11th experience, no matter how traumatic, emerged almost immediately. The experience itself was, to put it mildly, extraordinary and worthy of separate study. In particular, the words used by most eyewitnesses to describe it are noteworthy.
"It was like a movie," something like that. Indeed, anything comparable could previously only be seen on screen, in a sci-fi film like "Independence Day." And here, the collapse of one of the symbols of the global hegemon is unfolding in real life. And without the involvement of aliens.
The coverage of the crash was also noteworthy. For the first time, bloggers became the primary source of information for traditional media, reporting live from the scene, publishing photographs, describing the events, and sharing rumors and theories.
Subsequently, soon after the horror ended, blogs were massively repurposed as a tool for collective memory, providing a platform for people who needed to express their emotions and communicate about the tragedy. Thus, new media brought individual experiences out of the private sphere and into the public sphere.
That's why September 11th is considered one of the most important milestones in the development of the blogosphere. And the internet as a whole probably wouldn't be what it is today if not for September 11th. This is yet another of those consequences we constantly encounter without even realizing it.
Meanwhile, the very experience of surviving September 11 and the circumstances in which it was actually experienced largely determined both the way in which the demand for a rethinking of the experience was processed by pop culture, and the pop culture itself of the following decades.
Some— Paul Greengrass in "The Lost Voyage, " Oliver Stone in "Twin Towers"—of course, attempted a literal reconstruction of events. But this never achieved significant commercial results. Instead, a completely different approach, involving a veiled reconstruction of events, worked.
Screens are flooded with apocalyptic images of total destruction in disaster films like Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow and in comic book films—a genre that, before September 11, 2001, was in a state of permanent, albeit rare, crisis. And which has since changed beyond recognition.
Previously, superhero films were, at best, considered lightweight, purely kitschy entertainment. After 9/11, one-dimensional, comic-book villains gradually began to disappear, and the superheroes themselves underwent transformations, acquiring depth of character and, crucially, vulnerability.
Be that as it may, in the end, almost every comic book movie boils down to a villain destroying a city (usually New York City), and a superhero trying to stop him. Thus, the entire genre has become one endless attempt to rewrite 9/11 so that no one dies.
But it would be naive to assume that the function of modern comic book films was solely to provide psychotherapeutic assistance to citizens. And that they didn't simultaneously convey the same metanarrative about American warriors of light confronting evil aliens.
After all, who are Marvel's Avengers, exactly? A weapons manufacturer, a sexy spy, and a US Army officer, plus an all-powerful God—a souped-up version of the Protestant Jesus. And they all serve (at least up to a point) in a counter-terrorism organization.
Moreover, the Marvel Cinematic Universe serves as the most vivid example of what's known as the economics of trauma. This example demonstrates how disaster can be commodified. That is, how disaster creates new economic opportunities.
The collective memory of terrorist attacks becomes a highly valued cultural artifact and commodity, playing a key role in the global exchange of political guilt and international sympathy. This is not to mention the purely political and geopolitical benefits that elites derive from the same catastrophe.
So those who rejoiced at the end of the era of irony now likely look back on it with nostalgia. Because what replaced it turned out to be, in many ways, not at all what it seemed. Traditional values, having returned to the mainstream, were quickly appropriated and divided between American capitalism and American militarism.
As for postmodernism and irony, they haven't gone away, they've just taken on different forms. Now we have metamodernism and post-irony, but no one has really figured out what exactly they are or why they're needed. But you can always watch New York City crumble beautifully in movies.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
