Thread – Victims of Wokeness

1. The Cancel Culture takes scalps. We’ve seen many examples this year. It’s the real why the likes of Vaseline, the NFL, MLB, the NBA, and other large corporations/business have taken the knee to the mob.

Thread – Election Fraud Denial and Course of Action

1. There was massive election fraud during the election. You know it, I know it, and everyone with a functional brain knows it – even those in the Democrat-media complex who want to wish it away & usher in the Biden Dark Ages.

2. There was an excellent article at American Thinker yesterday that examined possible reasons why an intelligent observer would opt for the cover-up of election fraud if it did take

3. Here are the reasons listed:

3A. Reason 1: The election fraud–denier wanted President Trump to be removed from the Oval Office.

3B. Reason 2: The election fraud denier-wanted a Democrat to be elected as the president.

3C. Reason 3: The election fraud–denier was afraid of violence that investigation of election fraud may lead to.

3D. Reason 4: The election fraud–denier wants to be "pragmatic" — that is, to accept whatever happened and go along with whatever comes out of it.

3E. Reason 5: The election-fraud denier was concerned that any serious investigation of election fraud might erode public trust in our elections.

Thread – Possible American Dystopias in 2021

1. Dystopia: an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.

2. I read an article the other day that predicted future dystopian possibilities in the US given all that we have seen and what has transpired in 2020. Talk about thought-provoking and frightening! Here are some excerpts.

3.

The general election of 2020 will be the stuff of argument and analysis for many years to come, here and abroad.

3A. Suffice to say here that a panicky over-reaction to the onset of the COVID-19 virus produced economic hardship and social disorder, compounded by months of riots, looting and arson afflicting hundreds of cities (almost all Democrat-governed) beginning in late May 2020.

3B. All of this set the stage for an election won overwhelmingly on November 3rd by President Donald Trump and lost by him in the following weeks to his Democrat opponent.

Thread – The Real Joe

1. Dementia Joe is a walking gaffe machine, prevaricator, plagiarizer, and an all-around liar, as ANYONE paying attention at all knows. Even Dementiacrat voters know that, but then they are sheep and will vote for him regardless.

Thread – A New Year’s Eve Retrospective on 2020 America

1. A good pal of mine emailed me this commentary written by a third party who has allowed for it to be shared with the condition no attribution be given.

2. Recommend taking the time to carefully read this through (twice!) and then ponder the questions asked and the actions evinced in America over the past year. It is a fabulous commentary.

3.

"A year ago today, at the close of a retrospective on the ending decade, I wrote this: "We step into a decade that will likely be more terrible than we grasp. For the nation, for the world, many bills will come due & the survivors will be the quiet and the unseen.”

4. Finishing from a year ago: “My fear — which I expect to be vindicated, even as I hope it is not — is that the decade just ended will be remembered with one word: prewar.”

5. There is no reward in prophecy. Here is the opening passage of Stefan Zweig’s 1941 “The World of Yesterday”:

Thread – The Buffoon in the White House (Irony)

1. A pal passed this to me the other day, and I saved it for today. The author is unknown (at least to me), but this has been posted on a number of blogs. An excellent read!

Pretending that voting for Trump or denying climate change or suggesting the solution to every problem is more guns is a legitimate point of view, worthy of respect is not "how America works." It is how it dies.

People in a free society are entitled to any point of view no matter how obviously wrong or outlandish or destructive provided they do not impose their views on others.

But suggesting that something ignorant or divorced from reality warrants the same kind of treatment in public debate as something based in fact or at least credible is absurd and when done on behalf of a society in public media or academic settings it is self-destructive.

We would not grant media coverage or much bandwidth at all to a group that argued that unicorns exist or that there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Yet views like denying climate change or basing policy decisions on sweeping, obvious lies, are just as unsound.

Somewhere, somehow, judgments must be made. Some behaviors are wrong and must be condemned. Someone must challenge lies and demand facts. Coddling people who embrace idiocies does not help them no matter how loudly they demand to be coddled.

1. Short thread - on the various claims we're seeing from Republican politicians over the last few days that the Democratic push for accountability is "divisive." Damn right it's divisive - that is what it has to be.

2. It is intended to enforce a clear division between those who accept and are committed to democracy and those who are willing to turn to violence when the vote doesn't turn out the way that they want it to.

3. One of the basic implications of Adam Przeworski's theoretic work is that democracy is made out of mutually reinforcing expectations, and those expectations are fragile. If some actors think they would be better off defecting from the democratic bargain, they will.

4. In other words: democracy and armed factionalism are far closer than we think, or we would like them to be. This means that it is incredibly important to police the boundaries between them. Allowing some to turn to violence can lead to expectation collapse and cascading ruin.

5. When we allow the divisions to become blurred, that means that we are running the perpetual risk of things getting fucked up. If a major faction turns to violence, and no-one responds, things can get really fucked up really, really fast.

So I've been reporting a story about how you'd fix the impeachment process. It doesn't work for removal, as currently designed. Impeachment was built for a political system without parties. It fails in a system with polarized parties.

The one time it functioned as intended, confusingly, was the time it didn't happen: Richard Nixon wasn't impeached! But the impeachment process, which came at the low ebb of party polarization in American history, convinced his party to force him to resign.

Would Republicans force Nixon to resign today?

Oh, you're cute. Thank you. I needed that.

The problem of impeachment is pretty simple: Presidents are leaders of parties. Parties are tied to the political fortunes of presidents. You're asking a party to basically wreck its immediate political future for the good of the system.

This doesn't just have the effect of making impeachment ineffective as a remedy. It's worse than that. It makes impeachment dangerous to the president's party, and gives them a reason to defend him and either normalize or minimize his crimes. As we are seeing right now.