Yes, Virginia, Social Justice Warriors Do Always Project

The Third Rule in action: Gold Level member of the Lucky Sperm Club Hugo Rifkind tries for a new angle on The Trumpening and comes up with possibly the worst analogy ever. The Donald is like one of those super evil Pick Up Artists, what use their cunning PUA ways to bamboozle innocent maidens into bed, except The Donald is seducing those dummy dumb-dumb hicks in fly-over country into voting for him.

The thing is that while folks were still trying to work out if Hugo had ever really met any PUAs, or even any women, this happened.

Yes, indeed: savvy, political insider Hugo was too stupid to recognise an obviously bogus quote. Guys running plumbing businesses in Bath or Toledo are easily fooled morons, but it always turns out to be the well-bred Certified Super Genii in the MSM that fall for obvious hoaxes.

This Is Why People Hate The MSM

The brass neck of these people:

The over-all impression of the meeting from the attendees I spoke with was that Trump showed no signs of having been sobered or changed by his elevation to the country's highest office.

Yes, indeed: the Golden Don has been given a resounding mandate by the American people, and they still think he should be tugging his forelock to the MSM.

Expecting the President Elect of the United States to grovel to a bunch of entitled buffoons would be absurd at the best of times but these guys spent months acting as a de facto part of the Clinton campaign. Her defeat was their defeat too, and now they're claiming he should be wearing sackcloth and ashes? Just what does it take to puncture the MSM's bizarre sense of self-importance?

It's Not Just The Money...

That small proportion of the left that are not currently huddling together in their safe spaces have settled on a comforting myth about the whole Brexit/Trumpening/2016 thing. They claim it's all about the economics. People are just hacked off with stagnant wages, ever-worsening conditions and rampant job insecurity.

What a relief, huh? It turns out the left just hasn't been leftist enough. No need for to look critically at the rest of the left's agenda, they just need more taxes and regulation.

Meanwhile, in the real world, people are turning away from the left because of stuff like this. How warped is this story? Let us count the ways:

1. Life sentence appears to work on dog years

2. Murderous loon gets fast-tracked into social housing ('yes we know you've killed people too, Steve, but you were in Helmand at the time so it don't count')

3. Government keeps people in the dark about having the Mad Axeman living next door

4. Government then refuses to listen to any complaints about said Mad Axeman

5. Once the Government can no longer find a carpet big enough to hide this case under, they issue a blandsville statement, then carry on regardless. No job insecurity in the public sector!

 That's what people are enraged about. We're living in a Bizarro World where the State harasses ordinary people in ways beyond the imagination of East Germany while letting actual nutcases run riot, sure that whatever happens, they will never face any actual consequences.

Hence 2016: the Year of Accountability.

Our Nation's Non-Playing Captains

Actual smart guy Nassim Nicholas Taleb tears into the self-appointed genius class:

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

It's all good but the key point is track record. The thing with our elite is that most of them don't seem to have ever actually done anything especially elite. Their qualification for elite status is based on a tautology: they're elite because they're the type of person who's in the elite, and if you don't buy that, well, it just proves you're too stoopid to understand anyway.

Needless to say, even these guys don't find their arguments all that convincing. Hence their constant desire to run down people with actual skills. Take the obsession with pushing ludicrous allegations of war crimes. This makes way more sense once you realise it's all down to our elites's jealousy and fear of people who really have been tested under maximum conditions, and in service of their country too.

Similarly, this is where the whole 'skin in the game' thing comes in. The point is not just that the elite are free to indulge in ludicrous virtue signalling, knowing full well they'll never have to deal with the consequences, it's that they very lunacy of their ideas is part of the attraction. They're advertising the fact that no matter how bad things get, it won't affect them. It's a subtle form of status signalling.

Confirmed: Nicky Morgan Is None Too Sharp

As further evidence of my theory that 50% of the attraction of liberalism is allowing idiots to pretend to be super smart, consider this from the Guardian's profile of Dan Han (spoiler: they claim he's like, totally, a weirdo):

[Nicky Morgan] didn’t hear much about free trade and parliamentary supremacy in May and June. “Talking to people who voted leave … ‘back’ was a very important word. One of the most depressing things was this, ‘I want to take our country back.’ Back to what?”

Huh? That's literally the whole parliamentary supremacy thing in a nutshell: we want to take our sovereignty back. We want to elect a Parliament and know that they will be able to govern the country, instead of having to go cap in hand to a foreign power to ask 'may I'?

Actually, it is an interesting philosophical question: is our former Very Special Education Minister stupid enough not to see that, or is she just stupid enough to think this is a brilliant rhetorical point: no one actually used the precise phrase 'Parliamentary Supremacy' so clearly there's some Very Secret Dark Agenda at play here?

If our alleged elite want to know why they lost the Referendum, they don't need paranoid profiles about evil geniuses, they just need to consider the sheer absurdity of Nicky Moran sneering at anyone else as a member of the unenlightened masses.

Clearly, They Need A Professional Audience

Further to my earlier point re: the inevitable decline of feminism, it looks like even some of the coven's top hags are, frankly, getting rather fed up with the refusal of their fellow wimminz to shut their stupid ho mouths and get a damn good liberatin'. 

Also jurors – in particular female ones – do not want to face the fact that those who commit rape include a broad cross section of men, and rarely fit the stereotype of a masked madman leaping out of a bush.

Yes, indeed: the lunatic fringe 91% are out of step with the mainstream. Hence the desire to switch from a 'jury of your peers' to a jury of, well, fellow fanatics, actually.

Call me suspicious, but I'm not sure I'd trust Julie Bindel with deciding whether or not men deserve to be jailed...

But it turns out though that it's not just the jury pool where the New Girl Order is having recruitment problems. In the world of pop culture, it turns out that they came, they saw.... they got their ass kicked, actually. 

But you can't have a Stalingrad without a Kursk afterwards. The SJWs might have taken a beating at the box office but if they couldn't actually launch their own films - or even other people's films that were done way better years ago - they could surely punish any Wrongthink... couldn't they?

The newly released superhero (or supervillain, to be precise) movie Suicide Squad has already outgrossed the feminist-friendly remake of Ghostbusters in its first weekend, despite Ghostbusters now being released almost a month ago.

Turns out the only people who got any payback were the investors.

And it gets even better:

Despite allegations of sexism, the film performed exceptionally well amongst women. As The Hollywood Reporter reveals: “The biggest surprise in terms of audience makeup was the strong turnout among females, who made up 46 percent of Friday’s audience, according to exit poling service CinemaScore. That’s unusual for a superhero film.” 

Who knew? Young girls would rather identify with sexy and funny characters doing cool stuff, than with a herd of Bitchapotamus with permanent PMT.

BTW, that's for a movie that has suffered one of the most absurd post-production butcherings in movie history, with the studio trying to edit what was filmed as a darker alternative to the Avengers into a Deadpool style comedy (see the change in the tone of the trailers here).

Failure to ram Ghostbusters down the public's throat showed that SJWs could no longer hector the public into leaving the house and paying £12 for a movie, but Suicide Squad is an even bigger defeat for them. It shows they can't even sell people on staying at home.

OTOH, there's always true feminist icon Emma Watson...

Public Service Announcement: Public Services Are Run By Crazy People

Much has been said about police in Shottingham deciding to abandon (not) dealing with real crime and starting a war on bad game, but there's a deeper point here. Consider that all this has been driven by something called 'Nottingham Women's Centre'. How does that work exactly?

Only 9% of British women identify as feminist.

To put it another way, if you took a woman's football team, then out of the 11 players only.... actually, all of them would be feminists. Forget that. But that just makes the point that outside the fever swamps of wimminz sport, university campuses and other notorious covens, these wimminz group seem to be a little short of actual women. 

That's not surprising all thing considered. The average Joanne Six-Pack may not know the ins and outs of feminism, but she can spot crazy when she sees it. The thing is though, no matter how crazy you think these people are, they're way crazier than that.

US journalist R S McCain has covered these people extensively both on his blog and in his excellent (and cheap) book The book's well worth buying but SPOILER it turns out deranged hatred of men is baked into the ideology of these loons - try this for starters. 

They think a guy chatting up a girl is outrageously outrageous because everything men do is outrageous. It's the feminist version of Schrodinger's Cat: it can be both alive or dead but it's always sexist. 

Say, Does Anyone Remember Talk Of A 'Referendum'?

Poor old Andrea Leadsom, huh? If only she'd joined ISIS Theresa May would have ignored her completely. As it is, she's been cast as a bigoted serial fraud and tax-cheat with a room temperature IQ.

Of course, the fact the Andrea Leadsom has now been appointed as a government minister should in no way be taken as a reason to question the sincerity of these charges.

Besides, if I was Theresa May, I'd be avoiding raising issues about dodgy CVs. Is there any real evidence she was ever actually Home Secretary? Apparently, none of the bad stuff was down to her, but no one can say what she was responsible for. There was the feminazi lunacy like the 'flash rape', but for the rest? Don't ask the MSM: she's totally brilliant, that's all you need to know.

Still, at least the establishment got their girl Theresa over the line, so it looks like the only real change in politics is that we've gone from a PM who was the embodiment of everything MSM journalists would like to be, to a PM who is the embodiment of what they really are. Fat Dave, with his blue blood, family fortune and breezy savoir faire was everything MSM journalists value (thus summing up why you should never trust the MSM to pick a PM), while his replacement is a preachy insular middlewit indistinguishable from any of the two bazillion wimminz writing columns on 'how cheese is sexist'.

Some say this is the Major Years Part II. We should be so lucky - at least the music was OK then. As it is, Theresa May is David Cameron's firm principles mixed with Gordon Brown's charm and personality, but even that's not all of it. The MSM keeps telling us she's a hugely experienced and skilled leader but everyone in Realville can see an uninspired plodding hack with a bunch of red flags: she's the Roy Hodgson of politics.

Quote of the Day

The Daily Caller interviews the guy behind the Conservative Pundit twitter account and - spoiler alert - he sums up what's wrong with modern politics far better than approximately 1 bazillion National Review or Spectator articles.

It's all good, but how about this on just why Professional Conservatives always seen like they're passing razor blades when called upon to actually defend conservatism:

The contemporary conservative pundit is in a precarious position. On the one hand, he agrees with his liberal friends that the United States prior to, say, the 1960s was a frightfully bigoted and hateful place, full of all sorts of phobias and -isms and other such indefensible attitudes. On the other hand, he wants his liberal friends to respect the political and cultural principles we’ve inherited from that evil and benighted past. It’s a weak position, and I don’t think many people besides other professional conservative pundits find it very compelling.

Exactly. Hence why The Donald's jibe about 'low energy' was so deadly. At least the left is going for the big stuff, the stuff they need to 'fundamentally transform' the world, as a famous Kenyan American once said. Professional Conservatives concede all they key issues to leftists but then try to quibble about the exact terms of the surrender.

Leon Brittan Was Not Available For Comment

Mr Plod is not happy with his employers:

For whatever reason, they have either refused to come forward, or have been economic with the truth. 'I am left with the inescapable conclusion that this case could still be solved if only people were honest with us. The fact that they are not is agonising for Claudia's family and they should be ashamed of themselves.'

Yes, it really is a mystery why people are reluctant to cooperate with these guys.

A 59-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of murder in May 2014 and was later released from bail and a 46-year-old man was arrested in July 2014 on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. He was later released without charge.

Fortunately, lessons were learned and from that day forward the police resolved only to move when they had real evidence of guilt.

Just kiddding!

Following the release of the [CCTV] footage, the four men, in their 50s and from the York area, were arrested on March 23 and April 22 on suspicion of murder. They were released from bail in September to allow time for the CPS to assess the file of evidence and consider whether to bring charges.

So, six months on the hook before they even got the adults involved. Hey, it's not like the Chap Persecution Service sets the bar high on these cases.

Bear in mind that by spreading things out over months the filth has ensured that each of these guys has been left with five figure legal bills. They'll also have had their houses turned over - almost literally in fact as this exert from 2010 shows:

Police confirm they have spent two days searching a house about 10 miles from Claudia's home as a result of a "recent development".

Two days! Either this guy lives in a palace or he got the full 'Lord Bramhall' treatment, aka Smear Theater. In fact, the police claimed to have carried out 1,270 searches of properties in the first months alone. That's not an investigation, that's carpet bombing. Who in their right mind would risk getting tangled up with these guys, when there's a good chance that you'll get your place trashed, your reputation destroyed and a legal bill for £30,000+ once they begrudgingly let your bail lapse after six months?

Of course, who knows what the truth is? They could still get a suspect to court one day, but one thing is certain: when they do, the defense will be sure to point out that these guys do seem quite happy to fixate on literally any guy they think they might be able to stick this thing on, irrespective of such squaresville considerations as 'evidence' and the like.

Attention Peasants! Stop Reading The Wrong Things

File this under true confessions - a liberal whining about Amazon admits their real problem with it:

In its early days, Amazon emulated a traditional bookstore model, with a bunch of editors and critics choosing which books were recommended on the site. Once Jeff Bezos realised an algorithm could do this better and more cheaply, the editorial team was canned. Over the years, this algorithm has been tuned into a supreme money-making engine – shaping the Amazon shopfront to appeal to your wallet via your existing preferences.

The beasts! Using their platform to show you stuff you might be interested in and not what a bunch of Certified Smart People want you to read.

Yeah, yeah, he knows what you people are like: without the guidance of Snootly T Snootlington you morons would be busy reading books with actual plots, believable dialog and likeable characters, instead of books that have a dragon on the cover, but turn out to be ham handed allegories for transgenderism.

While Amazon is accused of introducing people to books they might like, liberals are stopping books being produced in the first place. That's what happens when publishers get colonised by Social Justice Warriors. The agenda has to be shoehorned into everything, no matter how absurd that makes the story. Hence why novels set in the Napoleonic wars always include a female character who can take down six of the Imperial Guard while armed only with a teaspoon.

What the success of self-publishing proves is that a lot of the big publisher's potential customers are saying stop right there: a story where six guys sit round talking about how cool it is being gay is not science fiction, even if they are on a space station.