Luke Ford

If you don’t know who the Inner Party is, you’re not chosen.

Comment: The Proles — the lower-class people who make up the majority of the US population — are largely ignored by the government. They don’t face the same kind of indoctrination that the Inner and Outer Party members do and for the most part they’re kept under control by rumors spread by the Thought Police and easy access to various vices.

Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, fill up the horizon of their minds. They’re also placated with easy access to Party-produced porn and certain crimes — including prostitution, drug-dealing and racketeering — go pretty much unchecked in the prole portions of town. Basically, the idea is to keep the proles placated and distracted, so that they don’t pay any attention to the political machinations moving the world around them.

Blog: #AmericanLivesMatter
This is, obviously, a take off of #blacklivesmatter. Regardless of your views on the righteousness (or not) of the BLM argument, at least 75% of Americans would like to move beyond it, after the BLM-inspired tragedies of Dallas and Baton Rouge. The easiest way to do that is not with the neo-reactionary #whitelivesmatter or the traditional #bluelivesmatter but, instead, with a slogan that unites all of these while, at the same time, proving the (sadly) necessary other for people to unify against. The most natural such grouping, in the context of a US Presidential election, is Americans. Hence: #AmericanLivesMatter.
Although Trump is the most natural proponent of such a slogan, Hillary Clinton is due for a Sister Souljah moment and could (easily?) pivot to ALM from BLM at the Democratic Convention. Perhaps presidential speech writer Jon Lovett ’04 knows someone in the Hillary campaign?
Or perhaps #AmericansMatter would be better. Or #AmericaMatters. These shift the focus away from an implicit repudiation of the BLM movement while still using the key word americans/america. Readers should feel free to chime in! What slogan/hashtag is most likely to win the presidential election for the candidate who first embraces it?

* Tweet: “The Japanese like Japan: its language, its culture, its cuisine, & its lack of illegal immigrants that hate Japan!”

Comments:

* Another popular fallacy is that American can’t do anything prudent about immigration policy, such as cutting back on new immigrants, because that would enrage the old immigrants so much that they will kill us, or something. So therefore we need more and more immigrants, and then more and more and more immigrants the day after that to keep tomorrow’s immigrants from killing us.

* One of the weird things about listening to the Limbaugh show is that it features PSAs from HUD talking about how great diversity is. Unfortunately, I can’t find a link to or transcript of any of them, but here’s a message at the HUD site:

“DIVERSE NEIGHBORHOODS PROMOTE UNDERSTANDING AND RESPECT … AND BEST OF ALL, FRIENDSHIP.
Neighborhood diversity promotes a greater sense of engagement, teaches that stereotypes are wrong and better prepares our children for the global community.”

Every single assertion in that statement is factually incorrect. Obviously, its only purpose is to humiliate us, as Dalrymple has pointed out.

* I drove a cab in NYC in the late 60s and early 70s and all the cabbies were loath to pick up blacks.

* Sailer: There were huge pro-law & order demonstrations by NYC cabbies, most of them immigrants (I would imagine) in the early 1990s to protest that they were being murdered at a rate of about 40 cabdrivers per year. Thousands would get together and drive up Park Avenue honking their horns.

It’s been forgotten because it doesn’t fit in the Narrative.

I spent a couple of weeks at 12th Street and 4th Avenue looking for a job in the summer of 1992. It was fine. Of course, you didn’t go more than a few blocks east. I can’t remember if the border was the middle of Second Avenue or the middle of First Avenue, but there wasn’t anything on the other side of interest unless you wanted to buy drugs. Alphabet City was then a wholly theoretical geographic concept, like the moons of Jupiter.

I can remember visiting Brooklyn once in 1982, eating dinner at an outdoor restaurant that was next to the Brooklyn Bridge and overlooking the skyscrapers of Wall Street across the water, and thinking this place is great, somebody could make a lot of money gentrifying Brooklyn.

One reason for Trump’s popularity among New Yorkers is he bet heavily on New York City when it was in the dumps — e.g., he started constructing a hotel on Times Square in the Taxi Driverish late 1970s.

There are a lot of similarities between Trump and New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who was convinced in the 1970s, against the reigning conventional wisdom that New York ought to be the #1 baseball town in America.