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Silicon Valley has historically had a reputation for being quite libertarian, but it appears to be becoming increasingly intolerant towards conservatives and even libertarians. Companies seem to be rapidly adopting a culture of social justice that is far more consciously activist than the libertarianism and/or moderate liberalism that preceded it. As a consequence, conservatives and libertarians are now viewed less as people with different views, and more as obstacles to moral progress, thus justifying their harassment.

Most corporations these days are developing the atmosphere of a Communist re-education camp, in which ‘diversity’ is the unquestionable Party Line and those who don’t Love Big Brother are in danger of finding themselves on the street. In part this is just a response to modern culture: Those companies who don’t toe the Party Line open themselves to expensive lawsuits and boycotts; the NRA and its (former) partners are just the most recent poster children to be marched through the streets with their hands bound behind them and insulting placards around their necks.

There’s something missing from the social justice narrative though, demonstrated by the situation in Silicon Valley and those other fields I mentioned: it doesn’t take into account the power and oppression it exerts itself. In a society where social justice advocates are outside the dominant power structure—as was the case when these ideas were originally articulated—this doesn’t matter much, since their power is negligible. That’s increasingly no longer the case, as social justice advocates have come to exert major influence over central areas of society, and consequently have also gained substantial power over society as a whole. Clearly, an accurate model of societal power must include social justice ideology and its advocates.

I object to the term ‘social justice’ in its entirety. There is no qualified justice: Justice is Justice, and sticking an adjective on the front of it is an attempt to hijack a term in pursuit of a political agenda. (This is of a piece with other statist propaganda tools: ‘price gouging’, ‘war profiteering’, ‘black market’, etc.) Justice is inherently social — there is no ‘justice’ outside of society, so saying ‘social justice’ is like saying ‘damp water’. The use of the term ‘social justice’ is like the use of ‘gay marriage’, an attempt to steal the positive connotation of a social institution in promotion of a program that, objectively viewed, would be entirely outside, if not contrary to, the historic meanings of the term.

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The tech oligarchs who already dominate our culture and commerce, manipulate our moods, and shape the behaviors of our children while accumulating capital at a rate unprecedented in at least a century want to fashion our urban future in a way that dramatically extends the reach of the surveillance state already evident in airports and on our phones.

…

This drive is the latest expansion of the Valley’s narcissistic notion of “changing the world” through disruption of its existing structures and governments and the limits those still place on the tech giants’ grandest ambitions. This new urban vision negates the notion of organic city-building and replaces it with an algorithmic regime that seeks to rationalize, and control, our way of life.

The problem with everyone wanting to change the world is that they don’t leave any room for those of us who don’t want our world changed.

The drive to redesign our cities, however, is not really the end of the agenda of those who Aldous Huxley described as the top of the “scientific caste system.” The oligarchy has also worked to make our homes, our personal space, “connected” to their monitoring and money machines. This may be a multibillion-dollar market soon, but many who have employed such devices at home—appliances that track our activities and speak to us like loyal servants—find them “creepy,” as they should, given that their daily activities are fed back to enrich the high-tech hive mind. Both the city and house the future may owe more to Brave New World than Better Homes and Gardens.

This is a vision of the urban future in which the tech companies’ own workers and whatever other people with skills the machines haven’t yet replaced are a new class of urban serfs living in small apartments, along with a much larger class of dependent persons living on “income maintenance” and housing or housing subsidies provided by the state. “Bees exist on Earth to pollinate flowers, and maybe humans are here to build the machines,” observes professor Andrew Hudson-Smith, from University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. “The city will be one big joined-up urban machine, and humans’ role on Earth will be done.”

This is why ‘urbanism’ is all the rage with the Cloud People — they want us all herded into high-tech barracks where we can be more easily controlled, not out wandering loose like free people.

Read it.

MI5 agents are allowed to carry out criminal activity in the UK, the government has acknowledged for the first time.

The prime minister was on Thursday forced to publish the text of a direction to the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office, the spying watchdog, on governing “security service participation in criminality”.

It instructs the IPCO to oversee the participation of MI5 agents in criminal activity, which was previously conducted by the now-defunct office of the Intelligence Services Commissioner, under a secret order referred to as the “third direction”.

However, guidance about when British spies can commit crimes, and how far they can go, remains confidential.

This is from The Guardian, so it might just be Left-wing propaganda. But it’s still disturbing.

The problem with ‘the sovereignty of Parliament’ is that a government with a majority in Parliament can do any damned thing they please, without any protections for the rights of individual citizens.

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Several press outlets have noted that in its latest annual “Hate Tracker,” the Thought Police at the Southern Poverty Law Center have added “Male Supremacy” as a “hate group” category.

Associated Press and Reuters stories on SPLC Wednesday ignored their new “Male Supremacy” category. A story at the Arizona Republic and a Newsy video found at many local and regional news sites recognized it, but ignored the group’s smear of women allegedly backing “male supremacy.” The New York Times only carried the AP story and the Reuters story. Predictably, several women’s magazines — including Elle and Ms. — celebrated this development.

What they aren’t reporting is that the SPLC has also begun laying the foundation for marginalizing anyone providing intellectual support for mainstream men’s rights activists.

The SPLC long ago recognized that tracking the small number of relatively powerless people in white and black nationalist groups (yet somehow exempting the violent, hate-filled, exclusionary Black Lives Matter movement) was a losing proposition. Thus, SPLC has in recent years expanded the scope of its identified “hate groups” to those holding non-violent conservative beliefs.

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And the star certainly didn’t hold back when it came to Donald Trump’s proposals to arm teachers, declaring on Twitter: “Can someone that’s been in a Gunfight tell that Muthaf*kka that’s Never been in a Gunfight, the flaws of his Arm The Teachers plan??!!”

Scott Adams asks the obvious question: What is the advantage of being in a gunfight without a gun? A subject on which Samuel L. Jackson has been silent.

To the best of my knowledge, Samuel L. Jackson has never been ‘in a gunfight’ either (playing one in the movies doesn’t really count), so I fail to see how he has any expertise over Trump on the subject.

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Yet Another Crooked Democrat Politician.  Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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Former nine-year Google employee Arne Wilberg claims the company started canceling interviews in 2016 and 2017 with people who are not black, Hispanic or female because the website was trying to improve its diversity, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Google had “irrefutable policies, memorialized in writing and consistently implemented in practice, of systematically discriminating in favor job applicants who are Hispanic, African American, or female, and against Caucasian and Asian men,” the lawsuit claims.

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I guess he isn’t Hitler after all. Who knew?

(Be cool. It’s just more Red Dot Exercise for the media.)

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Hey, Mugabe got away with that for decades. How hard can it be?

Also: This Is What Democracy Looks Like

The wolves have voted: The sheep are to become dinner. There’s a joke that goes “What’s the difference between South Africa and Zimbabwe? About 10 years.” Turns out, it wasn’t a joke.

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Wonder what would have happened if he had had a gun?

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I have no doubt that he does.

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Apparently, not every DREAMer is a high school valedictorian headed for Med School.

Who knew?

John Wright assembles the roll shame:

Here is a list of companies with whom you will want to avoid dealing if you support the U.S. Constitution and the Second Amendment.

• Allied Van Lines/North American Van Lines
• Avis and Budget
• Avis Car Rental
• Chubb Insurance
• Delta
• Enterprise Rent-a-Car
• First National Bank of Omaha
• Hertz
• MetLife
• National Rent a Car
• Paramount Rx
• Starkey Hearing Technologies
• Symantec
• TrueCar
• United Airlines
• Wyndham Hotel Group

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Yet another reason not to live in Mexifornia.

All of the talking heads yelling ‘Trump is Hitler!’ never take a look at California, where the ghost of Hitler (and Stalin, and Mao) is rubbing his hands with glee.

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Yet another hipster fashion debunked.

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I moved to San Francisco for its radical politics. Lots of people did, for generations. Maybe it was like moving to Los Angeles if you longed to be a movie star: If you wanted to be part of the grand project of reconstructing the American Left in the petri dish of a single city, San Francisco beckoned.

The quirky, counter-cultural San Francisco so many of us fell in love with is almost gone now, destroyed by high housing costs. We’ve lost not only the politics, but all kinds of cultural experimentation that just doesn’t thrive in places that are expensive.

We are watching the old San Francisco slip away before our eyes. Every time a housing unit becomes vacant, it goes on the market at a price so high that no organizer, writer, teacher, activist or artist could dream of affording it. Trying things that don’t have monetary potential just isn’t possible anymore.

Read it.

Sometimes the lesson that not everybody is a Silicon-Valley hipster needs to be reinforced by losing a lot of money.

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How about that fantastic government-provided health care! Don’t you wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Read it.

Look around you—all the “news” stories covering the recent Florida tragedy talk about shooters and shooting. Shooting is not the problem. Murder is the problem.

These aberrant kids have been conditioned into thinking it’s OK to murder their classmates. There are no consequences that matter. Killing is fun. Heaven and hell are pipe dreams. No sense of morality or decent social conduct has been inculcated into their behavior.

Back in the day, no one could have imagined going into a school, or anywhere, and just randomly killing everyone in sight. Where would a person even get such an idea? Where would a person even get such an idea? Read that again. You know the answer. We had the guns, they were even easier to get—no papers at all.

When I was a kid — Hell, when I was in the Navy — nobody getting on a plane worried about it being hijacked, or blown up, or flown into a building. The prospect literally did not occur to us. Then some bright psychopath had an idea, and life became uglier for everybody else.

No one in mass media is talking about murder and murderers. Watch. They’re only talking about shooting and shooters. By itself, shooters and shooting is not anything bad—and they know that. Being a shooter and shooting is what good Americans do all the time.

Murder is ugly, too ugly to bear. Murderers are horrible, to be rejected outright by society. No glory in being a murderer. Especially no prize for being a mass murderer. So the media avoids it, and in their conspicuous campaign against private arms, they avoid dealing with the murder angle.

The media are leading the nation down a path of perdition, turning shooters and shooting—people and activities with wonderful, excellent attributes—into targets for fear, loathing and legislative assault. And they’re good at it.

Look at the stories. It’s all about the guns, never about the gunner. Somehow we are supposed to believe that merely picking up a firearm turns an ordinary person into a deranged killer.

That’s perfectly understandable when you realize the sort of people who are writing the stories. To them, anyone who would contemplate for even a second picking up a firearm is deeply flawed and, in their inner soul, is essentially a deranged shooter merely looking for a place to happen. Like keeping alcohol from a potential alcoholic, we must therefore keep guns from potential mass-murderers. It’s for their own good. (And For The Children! Can’t forget that one….)

Read it.

Depending on government employees would be a solution if government employees always, or even usually, did the jobs they are supposed to be doing.

One of the most pervasive fantasies of Lefty statists is the notion that a government employee is always the best possible choice for doing a particular thing; history teaches us that a government employee is usually the WORST possible choice for doing a particular thing.

Also: 3 Broward County Police Officers Made No Attempt to Enter the School and Stop Nikolas Cruz

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Although domestic crude oil production has reached heights not seen since the early-1970s, and will actually be setting new records this year, California’s oil output has plummeted nearly 60% since peaking in 1985 — with no sign of reversing. In stark contrast, mighty Texas has seen its crude production triple since 2010 alone to 3.6 million b/d.

Mexifornians probably think that this is a good thing.

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n the annual letter about the state of their philanthropic foundation released earlier this month, Bill and Melinda Gates answered “ten tough questions” that they get commonly asked. The Gateses are honest and cheerful in their responses, and the letter reveals more about their critics than it does about them.

“Why don’t you give money to fight climate change?” they are asked. The Gates Foundation underwrites undeniably worthwhile causes that most liberals would support. The Gateses want to end malaria and HIV, give poor kids a better chance at a good education, and empower women around the globe to provide for their families. But if you don’t tick off every liberal cause, then you are not really committed to change, apparently. Why not global warming, too? (And what about nuclear disarmament and saving the whales?) The Gateses point out that “in philanthropy, you look for problems that can’t be fixed by the market or governments. The clean-energy problem can be fixed by both.” But this is unlikely to assuage critics who believe that the market is the problem, and philanthropy is just there to help government.

“Why do you work with corporations?” others ask. Bill Gates replies: “We think poor people should benefit from the same kind of innovation in health and agriculture that has improved life in the richest parts of the world. Much of that innovation comes out of the private sector.” What does it say about the people asking these questions that they need Gates to explain that corporations make money by creating products that the rest of us find useful, and that make life better?

The Left is a mish-mash of interest groups who all have a single Burning Issue on their minds, and — while they generally agree that other Lefty special interests are more or less on the same team — their own particular Burning Issue is obviously to even the casual observer the most important. Hence, whenever one of their Lefty fellow-travelers seems to be suggesting that there is some higher priority than the actor’s Burning Issue, they are greeted as potential Heretics or Sinners who might need to be burned at the stake in order to preserve the purity of the Lefty movement.

The critics are not satisfied simply with the improvement of life for the world’s most poor and desperate; they also want to see those at the top taken down a notch. “Is it fair that you have so much influence?” the Gateses are asked. “No,” they answer, but they have too much tact to tell the questioners that “fairness” in itself is not the goal of philanthropy. They note, however, that this question implies another: “If we think it’s unfair that we have so much wealth, why don’t we give it all to the government?” And here they say that, unlike government, foundations can “take a long-term approach to solving problems, and manage high-risk projects that governments can’t take on and corporations won’t.”

Unaddressed is how it is more ‘fair’ for the government to have that money than the individual who earned it, whether or not you think that the earning was ‘fair’.

A good example is the question, “Does saving kids’ lives lead to overpopulation?” Is this a serious question? It appears that we are now at a point where a foundation has to justify its efforts to save the lives of suffering children. Though the Gateses respond that when children are more likely to survive into adulthood, parents have smaller families, they also note, “saving the lives of children is its own justification.”

Not, obviously, in the eyes of the person who asked that particular question. The problem with focusing on One Burning Issue is that it leads actors into extreme the-ends-justify-the-means thinking, and brings them to support methods from which, if just sprung on them cold, they would recoil in horror. (Think of some of the things being said about Trump, the only justification seeming to be that Trump Is Actually Hitler.)

Victor Davis Hanson turns over a rock.

We dare not mention illegal immigration in California as a factor in the state’s implosion. But privately, residents assume it has something to do with the 20 percent of the state’s population that lives below the poverty level. Illegal immigration plays a role in the fact that one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients lives in California and that one of four state residents was not born in the United States—or that one-half of all immigrant households receives some sort of government assistance, and that one in four homeless people lives in California.

Note a final statistic. A record of nearly $30 billion a year is forecast to be sent this year as remittances home to Mexico. If the sum is assumed to be wired largely by the reported 11 million illegal aliens, then illegal immigrants are sending per capita around $2,700 home per year. Again, in per capita terms, a household of five would average about $1,100 sent home per month to Mexico—a generosity impossible without the subsidies of the American taxpayer. (Some might wonder whether the U.S. could tax that sum to build the wall or at least declare that proof of remittances disqualifies one for public support.)

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Put them on the borders, so the illegals can come into Mexifornia freely but can’t move on from there.

Be careful what you wish for….

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You probably didn’t hear this because few media organizations have even mentioned it, but Russia committed an act of war against the United States a little more than a week ago. No, this is not about more social media and election shenanigans. Russia mounted an armed assault against American soldiers and our allies in Syria, including Kurdish security forces affiliated with the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, at a military base in the city of Deir Ezzor, the largest in eastern Syria. Russian combatants fought alongside Assad regime fighters and Shia militias armed, funded and directed by Iran.

Read it.

They can dish it out, but they can’t take it.

This is the world in which non-proglodytes have to live; welcome to it.

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It certainly wouldn’t surprise me.

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There’s a reason that most teenagers aren’t allowed to vote, and this demonstrates the biggest one.

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The ugly comes out no matter how much lipstick you put on the pig.

Read it. And weep.

Sometimes people send me houses that they describe as “cult compounds.” While it’s unlikely that every house fitting the description is occupied by a sinister death cult, it is interesting that there is a type of house tied to the idea of cults. Usually it’s a very large, plain looking house with small windows that has an almost hotel-like appearance. On the inside, they usually look like normal McMansions, not to say that that by itself isn’t sinister…

Just when you thought that the rot had gone as far as it could go….

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When you REALLY ‘speak truth to power’, power has a tendency to smack you a good one.

Actually, this demonstrates the modern definition of ‘ethics complaint’: a complaint that somebody actually has ethics.

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To those on the Left, shrieking for the government to make the pain stop by exerting more control — you celebrities, politicians, editors, and yes, you goodthinkful liberals that I know personally here in New York, many of whom I have called friends — I’ll say this:

While you were, over the last half-century, systematically destroying, displacing, denouncing, and dismantling the historic American nation and its civil society — all moral norms, every basis of public commonality, all respect for our history and heritage, public expression of religion, the nuclear family, sexual restraint, and every natural structure and category and hierarchy that held civilization together and gave young people a framework within which to learn dignity and duty and gratitude and belonging and meaning and self-control — while you were doing all that, what did you think was going to happen? And now you want to “fix” the moral and social wreckage you’ve created by disarming us against your future predations upon our rights, our culture, and upon the society we still hope, against hope, to restore and preserve?

Go to hell. This sickness is your fault, not ours. You will not degrade us any longer. If you want our arms, come and take them.

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Or, more accurately, what they assume is his’stance on gun control’. I doubt that any one of them, or any one of the adults shepherding them along, know the first thing about what Trump’s ‘stance on gun control’ might be.

If some nutcase had come by with a rifle, they’d have been in real trouble. ‘The bodies were just lying there. I can take a hint.’

Mr Trump is at his Florida golf club.

Yup. And he’ll spend less time thinking about their ‘protest’ than he will on how many eggs to have for breakfast.

These kids need to learn that Lefty virtue-signalling doesn’t get anything useful done.

Read it. You may or may not want to watch the video.

Let’s see Black Lives Matter deal with that.

‘Hispanic Gunman Cruz Conducts School Massacre in Florida’

For purposes of White Oppression, Hispanics apparently count as white, especially in Florida — until they don’t.

Of course, if you want actual facts, go read Guns & Violence, Again…, where JayMan runs the numbers.

Read it.

The only thing the NRA trains people in is gun safety.

They WANT it to be true, therefore in their minds it IS true.

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If the Democrats have a motto other than ‘white people suck’, it’s ‘if it moves, tax it’.

Democrat politicians ought to be banned from speaking in public on the grounds that all of their hot air contributes to Global Warming.

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Huh. Perhaps cruise liners aren’t as boring as I had always thought.

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Must have really hit a nerve with that one.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.

From the Associated Press:

Kept out: How banks block people of color from homeownership
AARON GLANTZ

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Fifty years after the federal Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in lending, African Americans and Latinos continue to be routinely denied conventional mortgage loans at rates far higher than their white counterparts.

By the way, if blacks and browns are People of Color, but whites and Asians are not, then what color are Asians?

Invisible color?

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Doesn’t surprise me a bit.

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You still have to deal with the same yuppie hipster SWPL attitudes, but at least the state isn’t trying to confiscate all your money.

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Why does Hollywood think that a lefty hate group deserves donations on Valentine’s Day?

The leap of logic was promoted by actress Alyssa Milano, who partnered with the organization Love is Louder to fundraise for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Milano tweeted an encouragement to her followers, “Let’s inspire young people to embrace diversity and practice tolerance, respect, and acceptance,” and linked to the SPLC website. CNN’s Van Jones also tweeted his support for the project.

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Waiting for The Press to figure out some way to claim that this is Trump’s fault.

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Brown has long been the pinkest of the Ivies, and traditionally the place where Eurotrash go to experience an American upper-class education.

Steve Sailer lets reality intrude on proglodyte fantasy.

In our disillusioning modern world, where it’s too easy to look up what life is actually like in the remote real places that used to serve our desire for utopias, Americans now apparently feel the need to believe in CGI movie fictions, such as Wakanda, a technologically advanced isolationist kingdom in northeastern Africa featured in the upcoming Marvel comic-book blockbuster Black Panther.

Wakanda, as you may have heard, is vibrant due to its massive deposits of vibranium, a literal Magic Dirt, which proves Trump is racist. Or something.

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Obviously Trump is in Putin’s pocket. Throw the bum out!

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Police have not confirmed whether the vehicle was a planned target. Officers have appealed for witnesses, describing one of the suspects as a black male wearing an orange hoodie. They offered no descriptions for the two remaining suspects.

Thank God it wasn’t a Trump supporter or we’d never hear the end of it.

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Why can’t we all just get along? Why do Democrats have to be such haters?