Links 31: Deep Penetration Edition

Putin-loving Farage, and twitter prosecutions

Russian state TV complaining about a deep penetration

via Reddit:

I should probably make a comment about male sexuality and war here.

Farage's support for Putin costs him votes.

TLDR news suggests that Farage's Reform Party has lost votes in the lead-in to the election on July 4th due to their leader's pro-Putin stance:

Why Hollywood gets Woke and goes Broke

Miles McStylez notes Progressives Have Become Cultural Parasites:

Get Woke/Go Broke is becoming the industry standard for (formerly) popular, commercially successful IPs1, from Lord of the Rings to the MSheU to Indiana Jones to Ghostbusters to Toy Story to... Watership Down.

Regarding Watership Down:

I’ve just watched the four-part animated series of Watership Down, shown on the BBC, with my daughter. She was slightly more aghast than me to discover that the aforementioned Bigwig was a bruv from the ’hood. And still more repelled by the elevation of a minor female rabbit character into a doughty campaigner for justice, the transgendering of a rabbit called Strawberry, and, most hilariously, the does calling each other ‘sister’ and keening a song of freedom in an orgy of #MeToo victimhood

I would have been much less offended if the BBC had commissioned a writer to confect a story about a group of incredibly woke SJW rabbits, led consensually by a female called perhaps ‘Roz’

Nobody would watch such arrant crap, of course, but it would at least be true to itself. But this isn’t done for precisely the reason to which I alluded: nobody would watch it. Instead, the BBC piggybacks on the enormous success and popularity of novels such as Watership Down and warps them until they are unrecognisable.

McStylez concludes:

This parasitic phenomenon of “Piggyback on Success and Warp Until Unrecognizable” concisely summarizes what progressives have done to most popular franchises and adaptations nowadays - the writing and casting becomes increasingly politicized over time and descends into moralizing self-parody until the franchises eventually go from cash cows to money-losers.

How Israel can become an ordinary country

Ben Koan writes on how Israel can become an ordinary country by achieving peace with the Palestinians:

This Zionist bid for normalization is enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which affirms “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations [emphasis mine], in their own sovereign State.“

Yet no other nation requires a term to recognize its right to a state that’s already been established. [for example] To recognize the existence of Pakistan today is not to belong to any movement: it is simply to acknowledge political reality.

So why is this? Koan answers:

the term “Zionism” is still current because large parts of the world do not acknowledge Israel’s legitimacy.

How to fix this:

in the long term, the goal for Zionists should be to make the continued use of the word “Zionism” unnecessary: not because Israel has been destroyed, but because it has been universally recognized.

The Road to Zion Lies Through Mecca

At its ideological core, anti-Zionism is an Arab and Muslim phenomenon. Ten of the 13 countries that voted against the 1947 UN Partition Plan for Palestine were Arab and/or Muslim. [...] If Arabs and Muslims were, en masse, to recognize Israel’s right to exist, their leftist fellow travelers would likely go along. [...] The fulfillment of Zionism, then, requires rapprochement with the Arab and Muslim worlds.

This rapprochement is important for Israel, even though it currently enjoys military superiority:

While Israel is militarily and technologically superior to any Arab or Muslim nation, sheer numbers make a lasting accommodation critical. There are 15.7 million Jews in the world, compared with over 400 million Arabs and 1.9 billion Muslims. Besides outnumbering Israelis in the Middle East, Arabs and Muslims are now larger minorities than Jews in most Western countries. In a democracy, those greater numbers—which will only increase due to mass migration—must lead to greater influence.

the resolution of the Israeli-Arab conflict requires normalization between Israel and all Arab countries—their peoples as well as leaders—which is only plausible in the context of an accord with the Palestinians. [...] the destruction wrought on Hamas, if coupled with an ambitious Israeli response to the Arab Peace Initiative, could lead to the belated fulfillment of Zionism itself.

Americans contra life satisfaction

About 43% of Americans are against embryo selection for life satisfaction, according to a survey done by the Harvard Medical School.

Only 39% were against screening for intelligence. I guess some Americans don't mind people being smart so long as they're unhappy too.

Overall people were much more supportive of screening for health conditions than for potentially desirable traits:

Gaza's death toll is much higher

Jonathan Cook writes that Gaza's death toll is higher than the number directly killed:

indirect deaths – of the kind I enumerate above – need to be factored in as well as the direct deaths from Israeli bombs. They very conservatively estimate that the total number who will die over the coming months – not just from bombs but as a result of the lack of medical care, insanitary conditions and famine – is 186,000, or 8 per cent of the population.

In the vast majority of wars more people have died from economic dislocation, disease and famine than directly from military violence, so this is likely to be true.

There is no cope

Konstantin Kisin says we're fucked: There is No Cope:

The right wing cope for what's happening in Britain is to go on about Keir Starmer. The left wing cope for what's happening is to blame the "far right". The reality is much, much worse.

Until very, very recently (2001) white British people made up nearly 90% of the population. Britain is not and has never been a "nation of immigrants". But it will be soon. Despite the fact that the British people voted against this at every opportunity. They voted against it in 2010, 2015, 2016 (Brexit), 2017 and 2019 when the people they elected promised to stop mass immigration and end illegal immigration. At the last election, they gave up on voting for the Conservatives and either voted for Nigel Farage's anti-immigration Reform Party or didn't vote at all, hence the lowest turnout for a century.

This is one of the reasons you see increasing levels of censorship and thought policing in the UK. As people begin to express dissent against what is happening, maintaining this state of affairs requires more and more suppression. That’s why they are going after Elon Musk - he has created a platform where we can see that the Emperor is naked with our own eyes.

The riots you are seeing have many underlying causes. Many of the people who are burning things down and looting shops are just violent thugs looking for a cheap thrill. The authorities will throw the book at them which they have to do.

But what they won't do is address the cause of the tensions which are bubbling away under the surface. They will give the can another big kick down the road.

Massive car insurance increases

Jimmy the Mower writes:

I'm increasingly convinced the insurance industry -- nay, the entire financial services industry -- is a conspiracy to rip off the public.

Two-Tier Policing

There's a hashtag going round Twitter, #TwoTierPolicing, which gives examples of where some types of people -- such as white British, or attending anti-immigration protests -- are treated more harshly than other types. Example:

Twitter prosecutions damage free speech, says DPP

In an article in The Telegraph the Director of Public Prosecutions warns that Too many Twitter prosecutions could damage free speech:

Freedom of speech will be under threat if too many people are taken to court over offensive messages on social media, the country’s top prosecutor warned yesterday.

The Director of Public Prosecutions said too many investigations into comments on networks such as Twitter would have a “chilling effect” for free speech.

[The DPP] said yesterday: “I think that if there are too many investigations and too many cases coming to court then that can have a chilling effect for free speech. This is about trying to get the balance right, making sure time and resources are spent on cases that really do need to go to court, and not spent on cases which people might think really would be better dealt with by a swift apology and removal of the offending tweet.”

The DPP stressed libellous tweets, or messages which broke court orders or were threatening, would still face prosecution regardless. But he added: “There's a lot of stuff out there that is highly offensive that is put out on a spontaneous basis that is quite often taken down pretty quickly and the view is that those sort of remarks don't necessarily need to be prosecuted.

The article was published in February 2013, and the then DPP was Keir Starmer. I'm sure Starmer still believes Twitter prosecutions harm free speech, which is why he now supports them.