Archive for June 2018
South Dakota v. Wayfair (2018)
This is one of the strangest Supreme Court decisions ever.
First of all, there is the oddness of two Justices, Kennedy and Thomas, overruling themselves. They were both on the other side of the issue in Quill v. North Dakota (1992).
And then you have the conservative wing of the Court (1) ruling in favor of more taxes; and (2) ruling against stare decisis.
Meanwhile, except for the strange cross-over of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the other liberals on the Court, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan, sign on with Chief Justice Robert’s dissenting opinion in which he writes:
E-commerce has grown into a significant and vibrant part of our national economy against the backdrop of established rules, including the physical-presence rule. Any alteration to those rules with the potential to disrupt the development of such a critical segment of the economy should be undertaken by Congress.
Conservatives see their decision as supporting states’ rights.
How would I have decided if I were on the Court? I would have decided with Roberts and the three liberal Justices. I don’t buy into the states’ rights angle at all. I support states’ rights more than most, but the right to tax E-commerce businesses in other states is not something that anyone was thinking about when the Constitution was written.
I think that the situation we had before Wayfair was economically stupid and unfairly discriminated against local bricks and mortar businesses, but the judicially imposed cure is even worse. If every state is allowed to impose its own weird sales tax rules on very small-time merchant, it will create a nightmare of compliance issues. And what happens if merchants just ignore it and don’t remit any sales taxes? How will the states ever know about it?
I think that the conservative thing for the Supreme Court to do is to not try to solve every problem that Congress refuses to deal with.
There shall be no more WoW-shaming
By shaming people for playing World of Warcraft, you are buying into the gynocentric culture that elevates hobbies approved of by women and looks down with disdain on those which are not.
WoW is a virtual simulation of our proud Paleolithic past when groups of men would go out hunting prey. It’s certainly no worse of a pastime than watching football or other sports on TV.
I bet that in Muslim countries, where men are real men and the culture isn’t gynocentric, the men can play WoW in peace while their womenfolk keep the house clean, cook for them, and take care of the brats.
WoW players, being disproportionately prole whites, are therefore disproportionately Trump voters, so don’t shame your fellow Trump voters. (However, the last time I played an MMORPG, my guild had a Puerto Rican guy from Newark and a Turkish model living in Sweden. The guild split up because it didn’t have enough people in it, and that’s when I quit playing. I also discovered I wasn’t good at the parts of the game that required video-gaming skills like dodging damage in boss fights.)
Voice chats in videogames are the only time I get to talk to people from other social classes. Although I have to lie about my age, because I don’t want to freak out people young enough to be my kids.
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Now, about the free-play weekend. This was an illusion because you can always play WoW for free below level 20, and the advice on the internet is that if you haven’t played WoW for an extremely long time, the best way to re-learn the game is to start from the beginning.
And they were right, when you create a new character, you get all sorts of tutorial information telling you what to do. In fact, it’s my belief that the primary reason why WoW became such a big hit back then is because they made the game so easy to learn, while all other multi-player RPG games in 2004 made it very difficult to figure out what you were supposed to do.
I started out as a Tauren Druid. The Taurens have a Native American like culture, full of teepees and totem poles. If this game were created today instead of in 2004, would that be considered cultural appropriation?
Graphics have a very 2004 quality to them. I guess that’s a good thing if you have an old computer, but your old computer may be out of luck with the coming expansion which has much higher system requirements. Luckily, I am sure that my NVidia GTX 1050 Ti graphics card can handle it. The great thing about the end of Moore’s law for desktop CPUs is that I don’t have to keep buying a new computer. There has been a big improvement in graphics cards since I bought the computer, but a graphics card swap fixed that problem easily.
Unfortunately, I can’t necessarily say that I find the low-level game very interesting. It’s just a never-ending cycle of quest-givers telling you to kill X monsters and come back. I hear that it takes at least 60 hours of doing this to build your character up to end-game level. That’s why, when you buy a new expansion, you get a free level boost, so you can start playing at the same place as everyone else.
I understand that WoW is adding built-in voice-chat to the next release, Battle for Azeroth, coming August 14th, so it will be like Overwatch where you join a random pickup group and get to voice-chat with them. That sounds like good news!
Billionaire heiresses support Cynthia Nixon
She’s the extreme-left candidate, with no actual experience holding an elected office or managing a large organization, who will help De Blasio destroy Stuyvesant High School. Of course, if Toby ever gets married and has kids (or does the single mother thing like Georgina Bloomberg), the kids will go to the best private schools that money can buy, so that’s not a problem for her.
Nixon also wants to raise taxes on the rich. As you see, rich people WANT their taxes to be raised! Which is why Republicans are so stupid to lower taxes for the class of people who vote against them.
Westworld season 2 finale
Eh. Big deal.
Fired for using “N-word”
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/jonathan-friedland-exits-netflix-1122675
When you read the headline that the chief of public relations for Netflix was fired for using a bad word, you may have assumed he referred to black people or a specific a person as a n*****. But no, that’s not what happened at all.
At an internal meeting about forbidden words, instead of saying “the N-word,” Mr. Friedland slipped up and said the actual word.
And his other transgression is that three months later, at a meeting with black employees, he didn’t mention the incident at all! The complaint was that he ignored the issue instead of properly groveling and apologizing.
Here is the key quote from the memo written by the CEO:
For non-Black people, the word should not be spoken as there is almost no context in which it is appropriate or constructive (even when singing a song or reading a script). There is not a way to neutralize the emotion and history behind the word in any context. The use of the phrase “N-word” was created as a euphemism, and the norm, with the intention of providing an acceptable replacement and moving people away from using the specific word. When a person violates this norm, it creates resentment, intense frustration, and great offense for many.
Meanwhile, ghetto black people use the word all the time. Living in Manhattan, occasionally I pass by some ghetto blacks on the subway or on the streets, and they rarely speak a single sentence without that word in it.
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Commenter Roli has the best observation:
Political correctness used to be mainly a tool for SWPLs to keep keep the proles in check, and for the longest time things went along just fine. Post Trump however, SWPLs lost control of political correctness and since then, more often than not, it turned into a monster that came back to bite their own liberal asses. The east coast (and west coast) elites need to see more of their own kind sacrificed to the Gods of political correctness before they come to understand just how destructive their ideas have been for American society.
Installing World of Warcraft…
You can play for free until Sunday evening, and there’s a new expansion coming in August that will reset everything and pretty much put you at the same level as someone who has been playing the game for ten years, so this seems like a good time to give it a try.
And I suck at Overwatch because it requires skill that I simply don’t have. I think it’s easier to succeed at WoW because it’s just based on how much time you put into it, so you always feel like you’re advancing in the game.
I’ll let you know how it turns out.
UPDATE
Well this is boring, the character I used to have is gone and I had to start out as Level 1, and I don’t remember anything about the game or what I’m supposed to do.
UPDATE 2
I found my Level 73 Priest (I just had to log into the right server) and he’s in some very inhospitable place called the “Maw of Neltharion” and I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. I guess I need to start with some tutorials. WoW is not a game you can just casually start playing. You need to study for it.
Democracy vs. populism
Democracy is when blacks and Hispanics vote for candidates who promise affirmative action, and when poor people in general vote for candidates who promise generous welfare benefits.
Populism is when prole whites vote for candidates who promise to reduce immigration.
Hope that helps.
Yes, we need to do something about dumb proles who borrow money for vacations
Many commenters’ reaction to the previous post was joyous schadenfreude that some of the dumb proles would face financial ruin when they lose their job and can’t pay back the 20%+ interest rate loan for their unnecessary vacation.
You should be ashamed of yourselves. People are born stupid because of their genes, they don’t magically become smart because of life lessons learned. Don’t become an SJW who thinks that with the right “education” they will become great scientists, only replacing college education with school-of-hard-knocks education.
Furthermore, susceptibility to peer pressure is also genetic, related to the personality factor called “agreeableness.” Only those with low agreeableness (like Donald Trump) are able to resist the siren call of peer pressure that says they are a loser unless they go on an expensive vacation.
Only people with high IQ and low agreeableness have true free will, the rest of the masses need to be benevolently directed towards self-beneficial behavior and not be handed nooses that they can use to hang themselves.
And then when the economy crashes because everyone is over-levered and financial institutions have to be bailed out again because they are too big to fail, it’s YOUR TAXES that will be used to pay for the bailouts! So yes, you are doing yourself a favor by supporting laws that protect the dumb proles from themselves.
Why conservatives should never cuck to liberals
Did Trump get a single person on the other side to say “Trump isn’t so bad after all” as a result of cucking to the demands about child separation? No, not at all. Instead, as reported by Fox News, Trump immigration order met with shrugs and new demands from Dems: ‘This isn’t over’
Every act of caving in only results in more demands because it emboldens the enemy.
Furthermore, child separation was the right thing to do. There are over two million people in prison, lots of them have children, they are separated from their children. It’s not safe for children to be housed with criminals. If people from foreign countries don’t want to deal with being arrested and held in prison, they shouldn’t break our immigration laws.
Gay pastor lets loose on limousine liberals
A Silicon Valley pastor has resigned from his church after calling the city of Palo Alto an “elitist shit den of hate” and criticizing the hypocrisy of “social justice” activism in the region.
Gregory Stevens confirmed on Monday that he had stepped down from the First Baptist church of Palo Alto, an LGBT-inclusive congregation, after his personal tweets calling out the contradictions of wealthy liberals in northern California surfaced at a recent council hearing.
In emails to the Guardian, the 28-year-old minister detailed his “exasperation” with Palo Alto, a city in the heart of the technology industry, surrounded by severe income inequality and poverty.
“I believe Palo Alto is a ghetto of wealth, power, and elitist liberalism by proxy, meaning that many community members claim to want to fight for social justice issues, but that desire doesn’t translate into action,” Stevens wrote, lamenting that it was impossible for low-income people to live in the city. “The insane wealth inequality and the ignorance toward actual social justice is absolutely terrifying.”
He later added: “The tech industry is motivated by endless profit, elite status, rampant greed, and the myth that their technologies are somehow always improving the world.”
I sometimes appreciate honest non-hypocritical liberals. I like this guy a lot more than the people he rails against.
Lion of the Blogosphere 