Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
User Journal

Journal Journal: Taking a Slashbattical 3

Gentlemen,

It's been real. I've found vast amusement verbally sparring, and refined my understanding thereby, so: thank you.

But both work and school are ramping up, and cutting some of the social media faffing about is needful.

Blessings to all of you in the New Year. I hope that there is an event in about a year that is recognizably an election, and that sanity prevails. I've no confidence in man, but infinite faith in the Lord.

Cheers,
Smitty
User Journal

Journal Journal: VDH: "Our Three Blind Mice" 55

Our Three Blind Mice

"Three blind mice. Three blind mice.
See how they run. See how they runâ¦"

The recent testimonies of the three university presidents (Claudine Gay of Harvard, Sally Kornbluth of MIT, and [soon to be departed?] University of Pennsylvania's Liz McGill) concerning their inaction about endemic anti-Semitism on their campuses have probably done more damage to higher education than any recent event in memory. (And note there was not a white, male, heterosexual supposed oppressor to be found among the enlightened).

We know they know they failed because two at least clumsily tried damage repair over the next few days that only confirmed their initial stupidity. And a herd of other scared university presidents suddenly have now issued their own memoranda professing their supposed zero tolerance politics for anti-Semitism on campus.

Still, do not believe that any are too sincere given they remain for now still more afraid of their DEI/woke/hard left faculty and students than they are of alumni, donors, or us the taxpayers.

But note the following:

1) The three blind mice could not even lie well. Like nearly all contemporary university presidents, they have long revoked admissions, suspended students, or relieved faculty from teaching for any language, expression, or advocacy they considered incorrect, which translates as anything not compatible with wokism or DEI.

Invoking 'freedom of speech' to disguise their moral cowardice is pathetic when they have never on their campuses believed in freedom of speech. One incorrect word about someone trans, a misplaced pronoun, or a clumsy reference to a non-white student, and the offender would be punished immediately--followed by the usual performance-art, virtue-signaling, "this is not who we are"/"there is no place for such hatred on this campus" memo from a careerist dean or bully provost.

Instead, they have excused their censorship by arguing that in their campus enclaves, as in a corporation, they have the right to set their own codes of behavior--without taxpayers subsidies.

But the issue is not so much "free speech", but the equal application of rules and laws. These presidents adhere to systemic prejudice, in which free speech and rules of behavior are predicated on ideology as well as race and ethnicity. Worse still, they cloak such neanderthal reactionaryism in gobbledygook progressive platitudes.

In their ridiculous white-oppressor/non-, white-oppressed reductionist world, advocating the destruction of Israel, and the Jewish people with it, is no big deal. Indeed, it pays dividends among their DEI and foreign student constituencies.

So they are upset not that they have de facto institutionalized anti-Semitism to such a degree that it is now inviting physical assaults on their own students, but that they have been caught and called out on it.

Bottom line: the nation learned that these people don't care about their own campuses cheering on mass rape, mutilation, and beheading or calling for the extinction of Israel and all the Jews in it, because Jews as whites are on the wrong side of their victim/victimizer DEI binary, and suffer the additional wage of anti-Semitism.

There is no career upside in their twisted worlds in defending Jews in Israel--or anywhere--from precivilizational barbarism.

2) All of these elite university presidents supposedly were once top scholars, seasoned faculty, and experienced deans and provosts. In other words, they are the purported best and brightest of what academia now has to offer us.

And it turns out to be not much at all.

Note in minutes they were utterly eviscerated by Republican congressional representatives with no such academic credentials, but with plenty of intelligence, logic, street smarts and common sense acquired from politics or business or non-academic experience.

When the president of Harvard or MIT is rendered a moral pygmy and intellectual lightweight by our local congressional representatives, it warns us of what higher education has become and perhaps reminds why academics should be kept as far away from governance as possible. (Professors--e.g., a Woodrow Wilson or Barack Obama--usually have proved poor if not dangerous presidents).

After such skilled grilling, we owe a great deal of respect for the abilities and moral sense of these Republican House members.

3) The only reason the three showed any remorse or the next day tried to reset, was transitory fear of financial consequences, as in being blamed for a temporary drop-off in donations.

But that reality underscores that we the people do have power over even our elite and private universities and can rescue them from themselves, if we understand that those who feign a supposed disdain for money are the most eager to acquire it, as we saw with the Bankman-Fried trio.

In other words, the taxpayer can reign in a Harvard or MIT--should the U.S. government condition billions of dollars in annual subsidies to campuses on non-discriminatory policies, reconsider tax-exemptions for university giving, tax their endowment income until higher education is truly disinterested and non-partisan, and remove the government from the $2 trillion student loan racket that ensures tuition inflation, administrative bloat, and generations of youth suffering from arrested development.

User Journal

Journal Journal: d_r's really not trying hard enough 31

Smitty's new / old conspiracy of the week! just isn't cutting it in the breathlessness department.

To get d_r worked up into a full lather, I suggest viewing the latest Tucker on X:

Ep. 46 The Alex Jones Interview

TIMESTAMPS:

2:46 Alex Jones predictions
15:07 Deplatforming
21:59 Dividing us on race
25:37 The border
28:09 Austin
32:12 New World Order
42:09 Brian Stelter demon video
50:57 Depopulation
1:07:51 Food
1:13:51 Whiskey
1:16:22 Presidential election

I didn't "watch" this. I took it in at 1.5X while out for a walk. The Stelter passage, even audio-only, was precisely why I had always thought Jones a buffoon. I'm still short of fully Jones-pilled in a granular way.

On the one hand, I can understand a Commander-in-Chief undertaking strategic, wartime decisions that are going to cost lives. That is the sheer ugliness of the job.

Understanding that the C-in-C can take wartime, military risks is one thing. The idea that 9/11 was an inside job, and that the C-in-C would sacrifice civilian lives, even to protect "sources and methods" is a harder sell.

That said, the broad sweep of the technocratic New World Order, with the WEF, depopulation, Replacement Theory, and the rest is quite near-fetched. Government corruption, e.g. 06Jan, is obvious and disgusting.

Hot, shrieking denials of the facts unfolding in front of us from d_r are so much insect buzzing.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Just to Clear the Decks 3

1. I am the one who isn't partisan--you guys are.
2. While sarcastic and given to hyperbole, I'm never lying--others may be fibbing, though.
3. The one who is transparent and never projects is me. You guys do all of the projecting.
4. My ideas are the ones that will break the status quo and lead to reform. You guys are the ones explicitly or implicitly supporting the ancien régime.
5. Whoever is treating their faction or leader with excessive regard, it ain't me.
6. The goalposts do not move. It's maximal individual liberty before God, or bust. And it looks like we're craving the latter.

OK, now that all of the bollocks are out of the way, I will point to this post whenever the conversation circles any of these drains.
User Journal

Journal Journal: damn_registrars for the Trifecta 58

It's almost a left-handed form of poetry:

You certainly didn't accuse GWB of being a stand-in for his father, or of his father of being a stand-in for Reagan just because they brought a lot of people with from previous administrations.

Whataboutism

The only reason why your Dear Leader had possibly fewer people in his administration who were from previous administrations of his same party were because he was fond of having ass-kissing yes men underneath him. Had he been smart enough to hire intelligent and qualified people (which of course he is and was himself neither) he would have likely had an administration that looked a lot like that of GWB.

Non-sequitur

Naturally, hiring ass-kissing yes men for an administration is also a common trait of a fascist leader. Fascists like your Dear Leader often lack thick enough skin to handle being told they are wrong in any way, shape, or form.

Ad hominem

---

Stay beautiful, d_r: stay_beautiful.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Blasphemy Against St. George Floyd 7

via d_r's favorite blog, PowerLine

Alpha News presents The Fall of Minneapolis. Alpha has just posted the crowdfunded film to Rumble (video below) so that it can be seen free of charge by the widest possible audience. The film is also accessible online at The Fall of Minneapolis. Viewers can contribute to support Alpha's work and help promote the film here. I attended the film's premiere at a showing for invited guests on Tuesday evening at a local theater. Hayley Feland reported on the premiere in this Alpha story. The film is based on Alpha News journalist Liz Collin's Amazon bestseller Theyâ(TM)re Lying: The Media, The Left, and The Death of George Floyd. The book and the film provide a contrarian take on the prevailing narrative surrounding George Floyd's death and the trial of Derek Chauvin as well as a powerful portrait of the consequences for Minneapolis.

I understand that contradicting a Holy Narrative this way makes me, somehow, personally culpable for every bad thing that ever happened to anyone with relatively more skin pigment than I, if I have understood the Doctrine of Equity correctly. If only I could have cared less, I suppose.

Sardonic humor aside, George Floyd's death is tragic. The ripple effects, in my opinion, have piled evil upon tragedy, and have not fully run their course. The country badly needs reform from the individual heart on outward.

User Journal

Journal Journal: "a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution" 46

Inside Mike Johnson's Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution

For the last 10 years, the "Convention of States" movement has sought to remake the Constitution and force a tea party vision of the framers' intent upon America. This group wants to wholesale rewrite wide swaths of the U.S. Constitution in one fell swoop. In the process, they hope to do away with regulatory agencies like the FDA and the CDC, virtually eliminate the federal government's ability to borrow money, and empower state legislatures to override federal law.

Now, fustakrakitch rightly blames the voters for the collapse of everything around us, but goes Full Bircher at the idea of those voters supporting a Convention of States

I endorse the COS as the only likely shot at improvement. If we can "just add a variable" (as fustakrakitch put it) The Powers That Be variable isn't going to accept any sort of reform.

What's needed is some analysis. The original, agrarian, island nation Constitution of 1787 is like a local machine script in your tool of choice that was put in production and has simply become swamped. The basic ideas, as Amended, are largely sound, but the feedback loops that should keep it stabilized were removed a century back by Woodrow, and the system has gone unstable.

Congress doesn't actually legislate; the Executive and its agencies (alphabet organizations especially) run amok and essentially unchecked; the sclerotic SCOTUS is awash in Commie fools and trying not to get shot for making feeble attempts to preserve the Constitution.

Mike Johnson seems like a straight shooter, but may prove too little, too late. We'll see. America can be great again, but there is much Commie folly that needs to be puked out to get the country back on course, and the Eminence Orange cannot be the only means of getting there.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Dude, Zombie Joe is barely alive! 17

I think you've beaten that silly GOP-endorsed refrain heavily enough. It doesn't match up to reality. You might as well go back to your old "president potted plant" bit instead, it makes more sense. Just because he doesn't say something stupid enough to make the front page of every newspaper every day - like your own Dear Leader - doesn't mean he's "barely alive". In several important metrics he is in better physical health than your Dear Leader.

Slashdot poll: Who thinks the ZOTUS is mentally competent for the office?

User Journal

Journal Journal: The Slide Into Totalitarianism Is Scary 69

Wow, the eagerness to embrace Correct Thought, where "liberals" used to cling to a benefit of the doubt, is worrisome.

One can only surmise that totalitarian states in prior centuries had similar non-inquisitive cheerleaders.

Global warming/climate change/; elections; police tragedy; international conflict: the willingness to fellate the first Narrative provided by the Zampolit, without question, bodes poorly for recovering the Republic from the ongoing crash.

I need to keep you guys in prayer.
User Journal

Journal Journal: One for fustakrakitch 23

Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth

A major missed point here is Nemrut Dag, which affords a general answer to POCM: possibly the cart is before the horse here?

The arrival of a Messiah occurred in a singular place and time. The Nativity (and Gospel in general) is counter-intuitive to all standard political thought.

That didn't mean the advertising was limited to the Israelites, though.
User Journal

Journal Journal: I've tried to avoid directly attacking my own religion 9

Or even resorting to religious arguments at all here on Slashdot. It really isn't "News for Nerds, Stuff that matters" at least as far as most people are concerned; morality clearly isn't a concern in cyberspace for 99.9999% of the internet (which explains porn).

Having said that, I'm doing catechism in a year, and today's study includes a pet peeve of mine.

Mainly because the war on this issue runs through my own head. I'm generally against the death penalty for completely pragmatic reasons- a man sentenced to heavy labor slavery at least will make some restitution for his crime, a man killed, won't.

Having said that, I'm at odds with Pope Francis on the issue.

Posted to the Catechism in a year group, but perhaps declined.

I struggle with day 293.

I struggle with the edits to today's reading, which has caused three revisions to the Catechism since 1992 as the Church also struggles with this teaching.
It has brought me into disagreement with the church, because advanced detainment techniques and technologies are neither worldwide nor wise in some areas.

I live in a county in Oregon where a cop killer was just arrested- part of his 5th arrest for giving drugs to and raping a 12 year old girl. It's pretty damn clear to me that justice is not being applied in his case. Though the death penalty is legal here it's been 30 years since anybody's been executed and the last 4 governors routinely pardon death row cases.

We routinely let violent criminals out of jail without rehabilitation.

Due to the violent nature of child sex abuse, I openly wondered if the most recent round of edits to the catechism were specifically to try to oppose death penalty laws in clerical abuse cases, as that has been as recently as the 1940s a common punishment for such cases.

It occurs to me that in at least some cases, where adequate detainment isn't available or where the due process laws fail to protect the public, paragraph 2267 is in direct violation of paragraph 2263-2264.

https://youtu.be/avbIiFbonnI?si=8PSDTKIsGmTl9eqw

User Journal

Journal Journal: No. 4 Will Warm Fusty's Heart 22

https://www.activistpost.com/2016/01/9-ways-to-stop-cooperating-with-the-ruling-elites-control-system.html

4. Don't vote for any of the major political parties

By voting for one of these parties you're only giving your power away to help the ruling criminals' further advance their NWO agenda. Stop believing the Republican-Democrat paradigm; or, if you're in the UK, the Lib-Lab-Con sock puppet campaign shows backed and financed by T.H.E.Y (The Hierarchy Enslaving You).

It doesn't matter who gets voted in. They're all funded and backed by the ruling elite. So whoever wins, the politicians who get in office will only be there to serve their lords and masters the ruling elite instead of the wishes of we-the-people.

Yes, there are a growing number of people who know this, but many still don't fully understand. Any advantages of selecting one party over the other because of, say, a policy in your favor or to your advantage will only be a short-term payoff. In the end, if you vote for one of the major parties because of this then you'll only have to suffer the far greater long-term cost for having chosen the party with their connections to the ruling elite's agenda.

Well, that's good as far as it goes. But how are we precluding THEY from controlling, say, a JFKjr?

The improved answer is to seize control at the local level. Fair enough.

But at that point, one discovers that the system runs backward; the money is borrowed and comes down the food chain, rather than having local taxes fund matters and move up the food chain to fund the government.

Money, we know, is mostly fungible with power. I'd fall short of directly equating them, but that amounts to a quibble.

The rest of The Famous Article is interesting and worth discussion as well.

Slashdot Top Deals

Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.

Working...