…

Eventually everything I have to tell will be told, worthy or not, whether it will find a receptive audience or not, I don’t care. It’s all in the telling for me now. If a tree falls in the forest…indeed. You will listen. You may not like what you hear, you’ll likely be bored to tears, let me tell you my friend: you should try having lived this pointless, directionless life. I envy you, and I don’t even know you. If I can’t have your life I will try to unload some of mine onto yours. I don’t care if you want to hear it or not. I am grabbing you by the collar, pulling you in close, you can smell my foul breath, you can see my dirt filled pores, you try to wiggle free but I have the strength of the psychotic and I’m leaning in on you, saying, you gotta hear this, buddy…

…

I came to laying on my side on a concrete bench. My head was at such an extreme angle and my neck so stiffened that I knew raising it would be painful, if not impossible; I opted to roll over onto my stomach and slowly push myself up into a sitting position while leaving my head, more or less, in its listing attitude. This too was no easy feat, accomplished by grunting, groaning effort. Laughter, accompanied by a lewdly malicious voice, attracted my attention from the other end of the cell. Two locals were sitting there watching me. He spoke again, the fat one with the leer in his voice and eyes, in a colloquial Spanish that I didn’t understand. I said nothing.

Looking down I noticed my pockets had been turned inside out; my shoes were gone. I did not yet know how I arrived there; I sensed a partially formed, vague memory lurking just below the surface of consciousness. I tried retracing my steps mentally: the girl in the bar, dancing, being led onto the beach, rolling around in the sand. So far so good; then she’s screaming at me; I was beseeching her to be quiet, asking in broken Spanish what was wrong: trying to ask

¿Cuál es la materia?

and just managing to stammer-shout, qual estimer! qual estimer! At the same time thinking her hysteria seemed odd, acted. I recall the impulse: Get away, get away from her. Several missing frames later and I’m struggling up an incline in the deep, loose Baja sand; wheezing, stagger-running, covering as much distance from side to side as forward but making progress back toward the plaza, and the hotel. Memory submerged, and only briefly resurfaced to reveal a glimpse of being herded into the back of a Mexican police car by baton blows, kicks, and epithets.

I was now staring at the wall across from me; it was covered in a profusion of graffiti, mostly vulgarities in Spanish. I realized I had been staring at a word. It shimmied and danced as a pair that separated, nearly aligned, and separated again repeatedly as I fought my double vision. I tried closing one stinging eye; I couldn’t, like a very young child who can’t yet wink. So I placed a hand, trembling slightly as if a small electric current was running through it, over one eye.
Slowly the word came into focus. No, I thought, no possible way. But there it was. Faint and weathered by countless years, crudely etched in jagged lines; I could just make out:
UNTETHERED

Scratch an SJW…

It played out like countless controversies: offense is taken, racism is charged, social media is mobilized, capitulation is achieved. Only this one played out in China:

Dolce Gabbana has postponed a catwalk show in Shanghai after an outcry over racially offensive posts on its Instagram account that the fashion brand has claimed were written by hackers. 

The controversy arose after the Italian fashion brand published a video on the Chinese social media site Weibo on Monday showing a Chinese model using chopsticks to try to eat a pizza, a cannoli and spaghetti. 

Weibo users accused the label of trivialising China’s culture and depicting Chinese women in a racist way. The video was taken down within 24 hours but it had already been shared widely on social media, where the hashtag #BoycottDolce began to circulate.

The accusations of racism and racial stereotyping intensified after what appeared to be an Instagram direct message conversation between Stefano Gabbana and the fashion writer Michaela Phuong was shared by Diet Prada, an Instagram account known for criticising the fashion industry.

American Renaissance subtitled their excerpt of the story: “China’s social justice warriors are as thin-skinned as America’s” but, as their comments section immediately noted, no. Not at all.
These are social justice tactics, but the warriors are nationalists.

If there is a social justice warrior contingent in China worthy of the name they are indifferent to or approving of an offense given to Han Chinese–they would have been more likely to take offense on behalf of Italians.

Thin-skinned the offended are, but out of the excess pride of an ascendant and confident nation. I suspect they are not snowflakes, either. What’s relatively new here is their adoption of the social justice logic and tactics cultivated by our own anti-nationalists on the left. As long as social justice reigns in the West its adversaries will take advantage of it, and we can probably expect more, not less, of this.

It isn’t new; Russian (and other) “hackers” seek out the divisions created by diversity and exploit them:

Many of the tactics that Russia experiments with could (and likely will) be enacted on a much larger scale two years from now [2020]. Some of these strategies and maneuvers appear grounded in reality, while others seem speculative, but all have the same sinister goal of breaking the system—by cleaving our polity, distracting us with feuds large and small—by sowing discord through technology platforms and services. 

“Having the U.S. at war with itself is giving Russia credit internationally,” explained Andrew Weiss, the vice president for research on Russia for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noting that we as a country are more divided on almost every issue than at any other time in history. “[Russia is] not the creator of this problem, but they have exploited it. Just creating mistrust, and throwing a question mark over the legitimacy of our government, is a pretty big prize for Russia.” 

Another distinction is made obsolete. The divide is between those who advocate on behalf of their own–whether via identity politics in the West or openly as ethnic nationalists–and those who don’t–white “social justice warriors”, who march shoulder-to-shoulder with these ethnic nationalists chanting the same slogans.

If I was China I’d look for ways to co-opt Asian activists and grievance in the West. Because, after all, there is no difference between the offense a Chinese patriot and an American-born Chinese take at such as the Dolce & Gabbana ad. The latter doesn’t even attempt any more to clad his ethnic pride in social justice scales: no, he’ll tell you he defends a proud, superior even, people and culture.

The legal and cultural structure set up by social justice is ready-made for the final looting of the American economic and cultural legacy, which seems to be well under way. China and other countries can be expected to merge with their minority US populations politically and culturally, as they are working hard to do now.

Global ethnic communities operating under cover of globalism is one very possible future. Cheerio.

Law and Order, Current Year Unit

You can almost hear the Law and Order clang when reading the FBI report on their take-down of a white prison gang no one has heard of outside of Georgia:

SAVANNAH, GA: More than 40 associates of the notorious Ghost Face Gangsters criminal street gang have been indicted on federal charges related to drug trafficking and firearms possession throughout eastern Georgia and beyond.

A 93-page, 83-count federal grand jury indictment unsealed Nov. 16 in U.S. District Court in Savannah lists the charges against 43 men and women for a multitude of offenses involving trafficking methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin, announced Bobby L. Christine, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Georgia. Federal, state and local agencies cooperated in the investigation dubbed Operation Vanilla Gorilla.

The indictment alleges that the narcotics-trafficking conspiracy began as early as 2015 and continued until the present, operating in Bryan, Chatham, Effingham, Emmanuel, Evans, and Tattnall Counties, in the Southern District of Georgia, and elsewhere. Members of the conspiracy associated with the Ghost Face Gangsters, a violent, white supremacist street gang operated largely from inside prisons, and with other criminal street gangs to aid in the distribution of controlled substances, for protection, and to promote a climate of fear.

Operation Vanilla Gorilla represents one of the largest takedowns of Ghost Face Gangsters associates to date, and follows the March 2018 arrests of 23 gang members in the Northern District of Georgia on federal charges, and multiple arrests in October 2018 on state charges in Spalding County, Ga.

Charges against the defendants in Operation Vanilla Gorilla include:

  • 25 counts alleging the possession of controlled substances with intent to distribute;
  • 18 counts alleging the unlawful distribution of controlled substances; 
  • 25 counts alleging prohibited persons (drug users and/or felons) in possession of firearms and/or ammunition; 
  • One count alleging the unlawful possession of a prohibited weapon – a sawed-off rifle; 
  • One count alleging the possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number; 
  • 10 counts alleging the possession of controlled substances, including methamphetamine, heroin, crack cocaine, marijuana, and prescription pills; and, 
  • 2 counts alleging the possession of counterfeit currency.

This sounds like a slow weekend for Detroit’s last remaining honest cops.

But these are “white supremacists” so…

Not that there’s anything wrong with arresting drug dealers.
Jeff Sessions re-focused the Justice Department on traditional law and order and announced indictments against California’s Mexican Mafia last May, and went after MS-13 in June.
I suspect and fear we’ll miss that man.

…

He stands on the corner addressing the cars that speed or creep by, oblivious to him. When traffic stops at the light he singles out a motorist whom he then appeals to directly, taking on a familiar air, as if speaking to an acquaintance, smiling. Most don’t see him, some give him a moment’s bored glance. None seem find him as alarming as his appearance should merit, long unwashed and transmitting the incoherent, insect energy of the manic; as the car moves on he effortlessly goes from intimate to stage manner of speech, back to engaging the multitude.
A crumpled cardboard sign lies at his feet, something is scrawled on it. Occasionally he turns about, addressing a pedestrian; none acknowledge him. His ranting grows more impassioned, his gestures grander, the longer you watch him. He pauses occasionally for effect, in a professorial manner stroking a beard that looks as if it’s made of cigar ash, with his other hand a fist pressed against his hip and pulling back an overcoat bearing the satiny sheen of of caked-on dirt; sometimes he nods with pursed lips, as if to punctuate some earnest and frank aphorism; he sighs as if having unloaded a weighty truth.

You can’t help yourself; you move in closer to try to catch what he’s saying. Bits of it come through the crashing, rising and falling sound waves of traffic and the continual hum of everything else: “…representation; representation not of reality–no! Representation of representation…” he repeatedly reaches a climax of excited declamation, then falls back to a quiet, musing tone, gradually ascending until reaching the next peak, against which the flood of his thoughts spends itself like a crashing wave, and back again, on and on, important-sounding and nonsensical: “…closed to the real; not an alternative, no; a refutation…” Everything is so very important, so vital, so much the release of concentrated and long restrained energy that you think at any moment he will simply blast off from his feet, whistling and spiraling in a failed arc like an errant firework, to smash himself against one of the buildings nearby.

He sees you watching him; his eyes somehow grow even more intense; he is delighted, enlivened anew, as he addresses you directly. You are across the broad and busy boulevard from him, but, unnerved, you find yourself stepping back slightly, alarmed and repulsed but more curious than ever.
He breaks into a chant. He is increasingly agitated now, from all the way across the street you can see that he is trembling. You can’t hear him, the wind-noise of the traffic seems to be coming out of his mouth as he repeats a single word over and over. Pedestrians are starting to notice him now, people are watching him warily as they hurry past behind him, cutting him a wider swath. He is leaning back, as if to give his words a higher trajectory to carry them farther, leaning back dangerously, deliriously, until finally he falls to the ground, and your stomach contracts in response to the crack of his head against the pavement.

Now a few people have stopped; most are merely staring; one man is kneeling near the fallen man. You move toward him reactively, without thought, stepping off the curb; as your foot lands in the street it somehow makes the sound of a foghorn; how odd, you think in the fraction of a second within which this occurs. But the sound is not coming from the ground, it’s coming from the side; still held within this clear, surreal pixel of a moment, you turn to face the noise.

The bus is so large, so impossible, you think that you are hallucinating; because if it is that near, coming that fast, it can only mean…
There is a flash of white, followed by a freeze-frame snapshot, the photo-finish produced by billions of synapses in unison sounding their last alarm, of what you know is your final glimpse of the world: the driver’s mouth in a little o, obscured behind the sunlight reflecting off of the big, flat windshield, and the destination sign above it. In this boundless split-second of final consciousness, only vaguely aware that you’re tumbling headlong in space, you realize the word over the windshield is familiar, and another realizaton follows, as now you find you’re reading the lips of the street corner lunatic after the fact, because this is the word he was repeating; it’s not possible, it simply cannot be, but there it is in black and white, printed on the brow of the bus that is bearing down on you:
UNTETHERED

Pozzland Dispatch, 11/19/18: Patriots v Hatriots

The pro-Trump group Patriot Prayer (routinely described as “far right” but somehow eluding the “hate group” distinction by the Southern Poverty Law Center) emerged from the street brawling days of the 2016 presidential campaign. Its founder says he started the group when he saw Trump supporters attacked on the street.

Its sole purpose seems to be to troll Seattle and, mostly, Portland (from across the Columbia in Vancouver) by organizing “free speech” demonstrations to elicit violent responses from the left, and has been doing this regularly since early 2017, with at least eight successful provocations by my quick count, with their most successful, measuring by trouble caused, the June riot of this year when a mob of antifa and the like attacked the group after it left a rally across from City Hall and the optics went global.

An August rally by about a hundred of them drew several hundred aggressive counter-protesters, who were held in check only by a massive police presence. The city is looking for ways out, but the city council earlier this week voted down a proposed ordinance targeting Patriot Prayer that would have limited street demonstrations. The progressives on the council and their supporters in the streets don’t trust the law won’t be applied to them as well–and the latter are having way too much fun.

Within days another scheduled Patriot demonstration punctuated the city’s failed effort. “Him Too” was the cause–advocating on behalf of men falsely accused of sexual assault. It proved suitably provocative, and the counter-demonstrations naturally formed around Me Too.

Hours before the rally leftists gave speeches in an adjacent park.

Flyers posted about town purported to reveal some Patriot Prayer members as sexual abusers:

As the hour approached more and more lefties filled the streets, but no sign of a right wing presence. At one point a lone young man with an American flag marched down the street dividing a knot of sneering antifa and police barricading the park.

Moments later a young man in black with a bandanna over his face emerged from the antifa lines and, literally pointing-and-sputtering, began shouting “that’s Andy Ngo! He’s a fascist rape apologist! That’s Andy Ngo! He’s a…”

Ngo is a Portland State graduate and writer for Quillette who’s despised by local antifa for, among other things, organizing a talk by James Damore of the Google Memo fame at the school and arguing against the leftist canon from a libertarian perspective.

Later I saw him in Chapman square, the small park block from which antifa was basing its operations. Antifa surrounded and harassed him, with one older member leaning in doing the I’m-a-tough-guy-smell-my-breath routine, threatening and calling him a “coward”.

(That’s me in the green and white jacket behind antifa messing with my dead phone).

Minutes before the start of the rally there were only a few dozen supporters in the park–cordoned off by metal barricades all around except for a single entry-exit point at one corner. I went through after a brief inspection that consisted of opening my jacket.A few dozen or so milled about the mini-amphitheater in the center of the park. Four or five cops swept through at one point and singled out one guy, then another for questioning. A Patriot leader made excuses for the turnout and no-show speakers who were “stuck in traffic”; the event was a bust.

It didn’t matter. There might not have been fifty right-wingers total, and few of them geared up for battle as in past demonstrations. Meanwhile across the street and all around them the left had amassed two or three hundred, a high proportion battle-clad.

At the end of the Patriot rally the typical scenario unfolded, with antifa descending on vulnerable smaller groups trying to get home. I trailed one group of maybe ten Patriots being stalked by hundreds of antifa.

Here Patriot strongman Tiny Toese is almost completely alone on the street trailed by antifa:

Antifa has women. I’m struck by how often the figure wrapped up like a black mummy emits the screech of the post-adolescent female.
This contingent of black-clad co-eds went about in black and yellow (I think the common black-and-yellow worn by antifa is designed to confuse them with cops, who wear black and yellow too–whatever the case, it gets confusing) with a “Fuck Proud Boys” sign and are typical:

As often as not you’ll see some 90-pound girl up in the front of the ranks relishing the feeling of power of standing down the cops. And they still reserve their fiercest ire for police.

But nobody seems to notice or care the Patriot rally was a flop. Had it been allowed to occur without attention this whole cycle might have stopped right there. Whatever the case, the Patriots seem to be running out of steam, whereas the left here is still itching for a fight. They say they want to be rid of Patriot Prayer and “hate”, but I think they doth counter-protest too much. And too enthusiastically.

Mind the Gapped

The nation is so cowed by political correctness controversy isn’t what it used to be.
When I heard a city councilman somewhere had used the phrase “master race” my morbid self rose to the clickbait, expecting to learn some poor soul went off-matrix and starting ranting about race and all that entails.

But no, it turns out “master race” is a phrase, like “nigger”, that not only offends when used in earnest, it can’t be uttered in context, and certainly not in jest.
Political correctness expanded beyond barring the (ever growing realm of) offensive to things that remind one of the offensive at some point. Now we can’t even be trusted with our own language, uttering child-like constructs such as “the N-word”. That this is the ineffable name of our time, like Yahweh, shows you who sits atop the hierarchy of grievance that is our quasi-religious order now.

Turns out the controversy was over a councilman making a joke about the concept of “master race” in front of a black woman, with whom he actually shared an affinity

 “I don’t want you to think I am picking on you because we are part of the master race,” Klemp told Penelton. “You have a gap in your teeth. We are part of the master race. Don’t you forget that.”
Klemp, chairman of the three-member commission, also has a gap in his teeth. Fellow commissioners Robert Holland and Doug Smith have also called for Klemp to leave.

We in the gap-toothed community were not consulted.