Useful Idiocy and Idiots – Maverick Philosopher

The Smart Home Blues

Sino-styled surveillance is upon us. No up-to-date police state without it. So only a dumbass would spring for a 'smart home.' Be smart, and keep your house dumb. How dumb? As dumb as a ding-dong dumbbell Dem.

In today’s world of politically correct insanity, it’s truly baffling that a significant number of Americans willingly invite in their homes these advanced devices that constantly eavesdrop on their conversations and actions. Yet, that’s become the norm with gadgets like Echo and Alexa, which feel like creepy spies sitting in the corner, recording every noise you make. Well, one guy learned the hard way just how risky that idea can be when his doorbell accused him of being “racist” and Amazon completely shut down his entire “smart home.” The guy’s name is Brandon Jackson, and he gave a detailed account of what went down that fateful day.

Story here.

David French Update

By Rod Dreher. My Substack take on French is entitled David French, Christianity, and Politics.

Filed under: Useful Idiocy and Idiots

Dreher readers on French. An insightful excerpt by one such reader. It earns the rarely-awarded MavPhil plenary endorsement:

French, like most of the people who inhabit social conservative ghettos within neoconservatism, still thinks it is basically the 2000s. He acts as though the events of 2008 — the year of the financial crash — and everything that has occurred since then never really happened, and that if Americans knew what was good for them, they would have longed for a third Bush term, or a McCain administration. To the extent that they will even acknowledge the Great Awokening as a problem, they assume they can weather it the same way that they did the radicalism of the 1960s. These people have not processed or internalized that the key institutions of Big Business and the security state are now on the side of the Woke. It's not so much that the woke have conquered these institutions definitively, but rather that they have made those who run these institutions understand who takes scalps and who doesn't — meaning that the Woke militants have made sure that the leadership class within American institutions knows what's going to happen to them if they don't comply. If the GOP isn't ready to start taking a few of their own like DeSantis has been willing to do with Disney, then social conservatives had best withdraw altogether from public life and try to insulate themselves from the next great purge.

Think about it: J.K. Rowling, Glenn Greenwald, Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and Elon Musk are all circa 2008 liberals who if anything are further to the left than French. But the moment they dissented on any issue they were turned into Enemies Of The People. And unless you have the kind of money that Musk and Rowling do, they have little to no recourse to fight back going through the motions and mechanisms that French believes in.

What to do? The alternative is for French to acknowledge that for all of his laudable legal efforts, he was completely incapable of preventing the Left from dominating every facet of modern life, and definitively winning the culture war to the point where the only debate is now the fate of the vanquished. And to do that he has to admit that the legal strategy he has dedicated his entire life to has failed. That's a high bar to ask anyone to clear.

……………………

Bro Inky writes,

"An insightful excerpt by one such reader. It earns the rarely-awarded MavPhil plenary endorsement:"

Thanks! And thanks, One Such Reader! I would like to forward this to many, in many places.

What do you recommend as attribution? This is EXCELLENT. So well composed AND written.

The identity of the writer is not supplied by Dreher. So, for purposes of attribution, cite the post in question and say something like, 'this is an excerpt from one of the responses that Dreher received.' It was at the bottom of the list of responses, but it might not be at the bottom now. You can check that for yourself.

Another Useful Idiot Crosses My Path

I'm the chess guy hereabouts. A year ago I got a call from an 86-year-old retired chemist with an interest in the game. A meeting was arranged, a game was played, and then the talk turned to politics. The old man told us that he had voted for Biden out of revulsion at Trump. He said he had been a Republican all his life but lately became a Democrat. Brian and I were gentle with him, drawing him out to see how deep he'd dig his hole. It was deep enough for us to write him off as an utterly clueless old man living in the past.

Part of the problem with such people is that they live by a code of civility that will get you killed in the present-day political world should you dare to enter it. They don't understand that the Left is at war with us, and leftists no longer hide the fact. Their stealth ideologues of, say, 10-15 years ago are now out in the open and brazen in their plans and proclamations. Leftists see politics as war, and if we don't, we lose.

Brian and I are a couple of patzers, which is not to say that we won't clean your clock at the local coffee house. We are 'B' players (1600-1800) in the USCF hierarchy. The game with the old man turned into a training session. He acquitted himself so poorly we never heard from him again despite our welcoming manner.

That is another fault of old men. Their outsized egos make them impermeable to instruction. They cannot stand to lose. But life is hierarchical and you will lose again and again and again. Wokesters with their promotion of 'equity' (equality of outcome) and their assault on merit rail against life's natural hierarchy, but to no ultimate avail. In the end, reality wins. With apologies to Ron DeSantis, reality is where 'woke' goes to die.

The Bootless Max Boot on Elon Musk

The bootless Max Boot has torpedoed his own boat. (Boot in German means boat.) I used to read him and had a good opinion of him, but that was before he lost his mind as so many did when Donald J. Trump was elected.

An excellent tweet if you replace 'democracy' with 'institution-wide hard-left hegemony.'

Musk understands how to battle the Left. You cannot reason with leftists and you cannot appeal to their nonexistent or ill-formed consciences. You have to outspend them and defund them. The 'lean green' is the currency of political warfare. And don't imagine it is not a war.

The Musk takeover of Twitter is the best thing thing that could happen to Twitter and the noble cause of free speech and open inquiry.