Sunday: Hili dialogue

November 17, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Sabbath for goyische cats: Sunday, November 17, 2024, and National Baklava Day, celebrating the world’s very best pastry. Here’s a portion of baklava and related Turkish pastries I had in Istanbul in 2008. Yes, I ate it all; this is a famous baklava place, and I had to try everything. Oink!

It’s also Homemade Bread Day, National Butter Day, International Happy Gose Day, celebrating the sour, fermented wheat beer of Germany, International Students’ Day, and World Peace Day. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 17 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Here’s a clickbait title from the WSJ, but it bears on the new Secretary of Defense’s program: “How Heghseth’s tattoo got him barred from working at Biden’s inauguration.”

Days ahead of Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration, National Guard Master Sgt. DeRicko Gaither received what he describes as a disturbing email about then-Maj. Pete Hegseth, who was about to help provide security at the event.

The email, dated Jan. 14 and sent from a former Washington, D.C., Guard member, included an attachment showing a shirtless Hegseth with a tattoo on his bicep inscribed, “Deus Vult.”  [JAC: you can see a picture of the tattoo below.] A quick google search told Gaither the Latin phrase means “God wills it,” which served as a battle cry for Christians during the Crusades and has become associated with white extremist groups, he told The Wall Street Journal. The pictures also showed that Hegseth has a large Jerusalem cross tattoo. Gaither said he was not concerned about the cross—it was the “Deus Vult” that worried him.

The same phrase had been brandished on banners by the Jan. 6 rioters a few days earlier.

Hegseth, a former National Guardsman and Fox News commentator who was nominated Tuesday by President-elect Trump to be defense secretary, was pulled from inauguration service. Hegseth later wrote that he saw the incident as a rejection by the military.

“The feeling was mutual—I didn’t want this Army anymore either,” Hegseth said, recounting the episode in his book “The War on Warriors,” published earlier this year. “Twenty years, and the military I loved, I fought for, I revered spit me out.”

. . . For critics of his nomination, this incident—as well as Hegseth’s strident dismissal of the U.S. military’s efforts to screen service members for ties to extremist or white supremacist groups or ideologies—highlights questions about Trump’s unconventional Pentagon pick. Over a 10-year career at Fox, he scoffed at accusations of racism in the ranks, called for firing generals involved in programs to increase diversity in the military, declared that women should not serve in combat roles, criticized military vaccine mandates and lobbied for pardons of soldiers accused of war crimes.

. . . .Many of his controversial views endeared him to Trump. But in the days after the announcement, new allegations have surfaced that call into doubt how thoroughly he was vetted by Trump’s transition team.

Hegseth was investigated by local police for alleged sexual assault at a hotel in Monterey, Calif., in 2017. The incident was reported four days later, and the victim presented “contusions to the right thigh,” according to a statement by city authorities. A spokesperson for the Trump campaign said Hegseth has denied the allegations and no charges were filed.

Well, an allegation is just that–an allegation, and Hegseth should be regarded as innocent until proven otherwise. About his other attitudes I have mixed feelings. If women (or minorities) pass an unbiased but necessary bar for combat readiness, then they should be allowed to fight. But I’m not sure about screening potential soldiers for “ties to extremist or white supremacist groups or ideologies.”  Merit, not ideology, should be the sole criterion for membership in a military unit. If the soldier then makes trouble, give him/her the boot.

Here’s a video that shows the tattoo and summarizes the story:

Still Hegseth, the most powerful military official below the Commander in Chief (Trump) seems dangerous to me, and is one of the three Cabinet nominees I’m most worried about (the other two are, of course, RFK Jr. and Matt Gaetz). Given that even many in the military don’t think Hegseth qualified to the the DoD, I’m hoping that his nomination will run into trouble, along with the other two. But of course Trump has also threatened “recess appointments”.

*Conservative never-Trumper Andrew Sullivan does his postmortem on the election in his latest post, “Yes, the Democrats live on campus now.”  And, like many others I’ve written about, he blames the Dem’s loss on their wokeness, infused into the party’s image by the “progressive” left. And it’s that moiety of the left, which is the loudest and most censorious, that seems to run the show.

It was a trivial incident in the grand scheme of things. At one point in the campaign, Kamala Harris had to decide whether to go on Joe Rogan — a show with 18 million subscribers on YouTube alone. Here’s why she didn’t: “There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it, and how there would be a backlash,” Jennifer Palmieri, an aide to Doug Emhoff, explained. (Palmieri later implausibly tried to walk that back, citing a scheduling conflict.)

There you have the core dynamic that has crippled the Democrats for the last decade. A tiny faction of usually young, well-educated, very-online social justice activists have been using the classic campus tactics of the far left to capture the interest groups and nonprofits that dominate Democratic policy-making. The weapon the activists use: classic internal accusations of racism/sexism/transphobia, empowered by staff revolts, Twitter mobs, and other social media. And then the Democrats, believing these groups represent actual public opinion, especially among minorities, take positions far outside the mainstream with scarcely any public debate — and become paralyzed when challenged.

The groups do not represent anyone but the clique of well-financed, super-rich donors and activists caught up in the elite cult of social justice. The LatinX groups don’t represent most Latinos (that is now blindingly obvious); BLM hostility to the police is a distortion of far more nuanced views among African-Americans; the transqueer groups have very different — and far more radical — priorities than most normie gay men and lesbians, who just want to live their lives in peace. And yet all these groups have long nailed Democratic elites to the cross of left-extremism, never more fatally than this year.

And obviously this is partly why Trump won: Harris had no way to distance herself from the crazies. I’m not apologizing for airing the trans issue as Exhibit A in this respect — because I was proven right in this election to an extent even I didn’t fully grok. Not only did Trump’s ads on the trans issue shift viewers 2.7 percent toward Trump in the states they ran in (more than his margin of victory), the issue was particularly potent for swing voters.

When swing voters were given 25 possible reasons for why they didn’t vote for Harris, the statement that she “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” was the most-cited reason by those who chose Trump. Number One. I repeat: more swing voters voted for Trump on that issue than on inflation or immigration. In a focus group conducted by the NYT, a 25-year-old woman in DC said:

One more sign of Democratic sickness that Bill Maher mentioned in the video I posted yesterday afternoon:

If that’s a Gen Z woman in DC, imagine the impact in a swing state. Now look at the Democrats’ public response to this self-inflicted wound. One blue-state congressman, Seth Moulton, tried to learn a lesson after Election Day. While he reiterated his support for trans civil rights in general, he drew a line at biological boys competing with girls in high school sports:

I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.

Moulton’s view is shared by 69 percent of the public, and a slight 48-47 majority of Democrats. There are very few issues with public support as broad and bipartisan as this. But as soon as he opened his mouth, the backlash was instant and extreme:

The Massachusetts Democratic Party said Moulton’s comments “do not represent the broad view of our party.” In Moulton’s hometown, Salem City Councilor Kyle Davis called on Moulton to resign, and state Rep. Manny Cruz of Salem said he was “deeply disappointed in my congressman who has been doubling down on his transphobic views.” … Moulton’s campaign manager and director of his “Serve America’’ political committee, resigned.

Such is the power of gender activism, which has suppressed a debate about something bearing critically on fairness to women. Moulton should be applauded for his honesty.

*Is this a sign of the times?  AOC removed the pronouns (“she/her”) from her Twitter page, though it’s not certain that it happened after the election. Was she prescient? (h/t Luana)

The right-wing media sphere flew into a frenzy on Thursday when several users on social media pointed out that U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York had removed her pronouns from her bio on X, formerly Twitter.

The overarching sentiment was that Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to remove her pronouns from her bio underscored President-elect Donald Trump‘s decisive victory in the 2024 election, and was an inflection point in “woke” ideology—a derisive term that many conservatives use to describe identity politics and progressive values.

“JUST IN: AOC removed her pronouns from her bio,” read a post from the popular far-right Libs of TikTok X account.

Riley Gaines, the swimmer and political activist who is opposed to transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, wrote on X: “They’ll pretend they never embraced (or even celebrated) the insanity.

“Don’t forget who the compliant, virtue-signaling sheep were.”

The account EndWokeness, which says it is “Fighting, exposing, and mocking wokeness” and has more than 3 million followers, posted: “2 years ago, AOC posted an apology for forgetting to put pronouns in her bio. She just removed them on X.”

Gaines also responded to that video, writing: “We’re winning and its glorious.”

But this didn’t happen just because of the election; the removal preceded it, but clearly there was some reason, and I can think of only one, the one that Gaines singles out.

Here are the before and after; I’ve put a red box around the original incarnation. Somebody should ask her why she did this. Her response would be hilarious, I think.

*Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff of renegade Senator John Fetterman, had a NYT op-ed that I couldn’t resist, even though it says what everyone else is saying. I’m a sucker for titles like “When will Democrats learn to say no?“(archived here).  So what is the “no” about.  Divisive issues and identity politics, of course.

. . . . Unless Democrats want to be consigned to minority status and be locked out of the Senate for the foreseeable future, they need to counter by building a supermajority of their own.

That starts with picking an ambitious electoral goal — say, the 365 electoral votes Barack Obama won in 2008 — and thinking clearly about what Democrats need to do to achieve it.

Democrats cannot do this as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power. Whereas Mr. Trump has crafted an image as a different kind of Republican by routinely making claims that break with the party line on issues ranging from protecting Social Security and Medicare to mandating insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization, Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party.

Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win. Collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate.

. . .To cite a few examples, when Kamala Harris was running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, the A.C.L.U. pushed her to articulate a position on surgeries for transgender prisoners, needlessly elevating an obscure issue into the public debate as a purity test, despite the fact that current law already gave prisoners access to gender-affirming care. This became a major line of attack for Mr. Trump in the closing weeks of this year’s election. Now, with the G.O.P.’s ascent to dominance, transgender Americans are unquestionably going to be worse off.

The same year, a coalition of groups including the Sunrise Movement and the Working Families Party demanded that all Democrats running for president embrace decriminalizing border crossings. When candidates were asked at a debate if they would do so, every candidate on the stage that night raised a hand (except Michael Bennet). Groups like Justice Democrats pushed Democrats to defund the police and abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Positions taken a few years ago are fair game in campaigns, and by feeding into Republican attacks these efforts helped Mr. Trump and left the people and causes they claim to fight for under threat.

Ruthlessly prioritizing winning will make the groups mad, and that’s OK — in fact, it will be good for them. Groups have become too accustomed to enjoying access without holding themselves accountable; the question “is this tactic more likely to trigger backlash than to advance our goals?” is the single most important one, yet it seems to be rarely asked by many of the groups’ leaders or funders.

There have been enough analysts saying this that we should probably listen to them and at least try their remedy: lay off the identity politics, and lay off the wokeness!  We can at least test this in the midterms two years from now.

Jentleson gives several recommendations about how to free ourselves from the shackles of identity politics. Democrats, unite! We have nothing to lose except our status as also-rans.

*Finally, there’s no evidence for UFOs, at least according to this AP report.

The Pentagon’s latest report on UFOs has revealed hundreds of new reports of unidentified and unexplained aerial phenomena but no indications suggesting an extraterrestrial origin.

The review includes hundreds of cases of misidentified balloons, birds and satellites as well as some that defy easy explanation, such as a near-miss between a commercial airliner and a mysterious object off the coast of New York.

While it isn’t likely to settle any debates over the existence of alien life, the report reflects heightened public interest in the topic and the government’s efforts to provide some answers. Its publication comes a day after House lawmakers called for greater government transparency during a hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs — the government’s term for UFOs.

Federal efforts to study and identify UAPs have focused on potential threats to national security or air safety and not their science fiction aspects. Officials at the Pentagon office created in 2022 to track UAPs, known as the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, have said there’s no indication any of the cases they looked into have unearthly origins.

“It is important to underscore that, to date, AARO has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology,” the authors of the report wrote.

The great majority of the reported incidents occurred in airspace, but 49 occurred at altitudes estimated to be at least 100 kilometers (62 miles), which is considered space. None occurred underwater. Reporting witnesses included commercial and military pilots as well as ground-based observers.

Investigators found explanations for nearly 300 of the incidents. In many cases, the unknown objects were found to be balloons, birds, aircraft, drones or satellites. According to the report, Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system is one increasingly common source as people mistake chains of satellites for UFOs.

Hundreds of other cases remain unexplained, though the report’s authors stressed that is often because there isn’t enough information to draw firm conclusions.

Just like the Intelligent Design people cry “God” when they don’t understand how a trait evolved, so the UFO-philes cry “aliens” when they don’t have a solid explanation for an observation. As for me, I don’t buy them, as where would they come from? Why haven’t we heard from them if they have such great technology?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Kulka is coming down the manufactured stairs to the second-floor flat, and Hili doesn’t like it at all!:

Hili: Some like to peep into the neighbour’s window.
A: Invite Kulka for a little something.
Hili: She always invites herself.
In Polish:
Hili: Niektórzy lubią zaglądać sąsiadom w okna.
Ja: Zaproś Kulkę na małe conieco.
Hili: Ona zawsze sama się zaprasza.

*******************

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

A new word from Meow:

From Things with Faces:

From Masih; a tweet about the new “clinic” that Iran is setting up to treat women who don’t wear the hijab, and are supposedly mentally ill because of that.

Google translation of the Persian:

“It will not be a clinic… it will be a prison” The Guardian’s report about the government’s decision to establish a “clinic for the ‘treatment’ of hijab” I told the newspaper #گاردین #بریتانیا “It’s a shame… the idea of ​​setting up a clinic to ‘treat’ veiled women is terrible, it will be a place where people are separated from society simply because they don’t follow the government’s ideology.” Thanks to @DeepaParent

From Malgorzata; the MSM acting reprehensibly, ignoring a story, and a documented one, that does not fit their narrative. It simply cannot be true that Hamas tortures Gazan civilians, right?

From Luana, and about time this appeared! The article is here, and archived here.

From my feed: a feisty and aggressive bunny:

A tweet and a followup from Simon. (Matthew says it looks as if the cats swapped mustaches.)

Throwback to the time we sat our cats down and told them we were adopting a dog. I cannot stress enough that this is the ACTUAL picture from that conversation 🤣

— Jonathan Edward Durham (@thisone0verhere.bsky.social) 2024-11-15T19:25:12.006Z

The cat doesn’t look at all happy!:

How it’s going 🤣

— Jonathan Edward Durham (@thisone0verhere.bsky.social) 2024-11-15T19:34:56.791Z

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted:

Two tweets from Professor Emeritus Cobb. The first one may be a bit exaggerated:

Musk's lost the Morris dancers. It's Over.

— Jon Bounds 🇸🇩 (@bounder.info) 2024-11-15T10:09:14.689Z

 

This is an absolutely fantastic photo of wood ducks (Aix sponsa):

Show me your favorite duck photos! This one is definitely mine. These 6 wood ducks at my local park posed nearly perfectly in line on a log. I held my breath when I saw them, and the photo turned out great#birds #photography #wildlife 🌿

— Byron Hurley (KILX) (@byronhurley.bsky.social) 2024-11-12T13:19:55.705Z

14 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. My feeling about UFOs is that they could exist, but the immense distances between our star and other potentially life-supporting stars is so great that actual visits from aliens would be very unlikely. However, robotic devices might reach us.

      1. Good point. But if an alien civilization had a great deal of patience and confidence, they might have sent out a fleet of self-guiding drones to seek out civilizations and explore them, and they may have started doing this many thousands of years ago.

  2. The problem with the Dem’s post mortems is that the people whom they need to ask about why they lost voted for Trump, so they won’t talk to them.

  3. A thing that hit me about the Harris campaign is that she never seemed to be in charge. Maybe voters picked up on that impression of a lack of confident leadership from her. Trump, Clinton (both), Biden, Obama, Bush, all project an attitude that they believe what they say and that they are in charge. I never sensed that from Harris.
    It seemed like she did this interview or took that position because her team said she should, rather than it being her own conviction (teleprompter speeches and the well-prepared debate performance excluded). On the other hand, she did speak clearly on the trans prisoner surgery issue, and I think that’s why that clip was particularly damning. She couldn’t clarify her support for Israel, but she was able to say how she changed the policy in CA for gender change surgery to make sure it was available for all inmates.
    The other aspect that demonstrated this was how she didn’t tell us her positions, but almost every day was a new press release showing some celebrity endorsement (now we know they did it for the money). While at the same time, Trump did a lot of interviews (granted, most of them friendlies), and Vance took every chance he could to talk to whoever. On the Republican side, the candidates were at the forefront, while on the Democrat side, it was about the endorsements and “Trump is bad”.
    Regarding Rogan, I read that one of the terms was that he was not to ask about marijuana legalization. That indicates that her team put out similar terms to other outlets so that they could prepare her. Judging by Harris’s response (not her answer, but her freezing), Sonny Hostin’s question was not on the approved list either.

    To me it felt like she wasn’t running her own campaign. And if you can’t run a campaign how will you run the country?

    That the race was close at all talks more to the strong dislike of Trump and the fact that most Democratic voters would vote blue even if their candidate shot someone on Fifth Avenue. Harris was a poor candidate for president.

  4. Is the angry rabbit a Hare? I wonder if it is a male trying to do combat with the other bunny.

  5. Rhetorical questions since the people who made these quoted statements aren’t likely to answer me.

    1. What does it mean to be in favour of “civil rights for trans people”, even if the Congressman sensibly wants to draw the line at having his daughters injured by male athletes? Trans people are under-represented in the work force, being disproportionately homeless, mentally ill, and substance-addicted, so we are told by their activists. Would a conception of civil rights require employers to try to hire these unemployable people preferentially until their representation reached some desired outcome, in order to escape being sued by the federal Equal Opportunity Office?

    All people have civil rights arising from their moral status as humans. No one loses any by being trans. So is there some conception that trans people should gain the special rights under a DEI rubric that come from being an oppressed group, as for certain skin colours but not others? This is where the pronoun business comes in: the power, unique to trans ideology, to compel another person to profess belief in something that isn’t true. Even if in ordinary discourse there is no such power, at work there is. An employer must compel his employees to use demanded pronouns else face a suit alleging he violated the civil rights of his one trans employee or customer, neither of whom he can fire or tell to take his business elsewhere.

    Exactly what obligations does “civil rights for trans people” lumber the rest of us with? Because that’s the thing with civil rights (as opposed to civil liberties.) They are group rights. They curtail freedom of one group of individuals in order to give power to another group based on group identity.

    2. In what way does Mr. Jentleson mean trans people are going to be “unquestionably worse off” now that Donald Trump has been elected President? His recent announcement of his plans can be cited for reference. (I grant this may have been an attempt at hyperbolic irony and not a literal prediction. But still, the “unquestionably” is a bit strong, even coming from a renegade. What exactly is President-elect Trump fixing to do to trans people?)

    1. The coercion to express belief in something that’s not true is my main objection to genderism. I’ve tried to express this to my progressive friends. Their response is often a non sequitur like “But there are so few trans people, how does this affect you?”

    2. I believe it is more apt to say they are demanding trans privileges rather than mundane trans rights.

  7. So much to comment on that I won’t even try, but I will comment briefly on the UFO fracas. It’s not impossible that alien creatures evolved intelligence, developed advanced technologies, launched spacecraft, and all the rest, but the probability—if these antecedents occurred—that such spacecraft would reach our lonely earth during the 20th and 21st centuries to be discovered by the U.S. government and debated in Congress would be practically nil. Reason demands that we start there. The probabilities on their own effectively rule such visitations out. Add to that, when I listen to the proponents of such alien visitations in interviews, they always say that they are certain that such visitations have taken place, but they then can’t provide any evidence that cannot be explained otherwise. The “real” evidence is locked up under secrecy laws and cannot be revealed. Uh huh. I see. It’s most likely that these proponents are deceiving themselves (or have other motivations in mind).

    And Malgorzata is right. The silence regarding the Hamas torture report is deafening.

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