So, who is Tyler Robinson? A memelord? A groyper? Bit of both?

For starters, I don't think either Ken Klippenstein or Jeff St. Clair is totally right. 

On Wednesday, Ken dropped a piece about Robinson's Discord gaming server chats. And, although his may be an "exclusive" on actually publishing the chats, per old MSM The Guardian, the analysis is not, with its link to a piece at the Garbageday Substack have them picking up the "extremely online" nature of Robinson already last week Friday, in "Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme." They, in turn, take this back to the New Zealand mass murderer of 2019.

On him not fitting other profiles? At least Ken is open enough to print a comment from a Robinson friend that, IMO, undercuts the "he's not a loner" claim:

“Everyone who knew him liked him and he was always nice, a little quiet and kept to himself mostly but wasn't a recluse,” the childhood friend said.

There you go, and with that, St. Clair. 

The Counterpunch supremo said last week that he essentially thoughts Robinson DID "fit a profile." And, although I didn't post all 8 points on my quote-tweet of Klipp's Substack, I will here, because they show he's not totally right, either. He says Robinson was:

1. White 

2. Male 

3. Loner 

4. Smart but alienated 

5. Withdrawn 

6. Lived in fantasy/gamer world 

7. Access to guns, trained how to use them  

8. Incel 

Given that Garbageday and Klipp and all over the interwebz reports Robinson had a transgender partner of some sort (sexual? just a roommate? roommates with benefits?) and Klipp talks about bisexuality (perhaps without warrant, as sexual relationship identity, ie gay/straight/bi etc is NOT the same as gender identity, ie transgender, and gender is not the same as sex, before we forget), in any case, the "incel" is out of line, and potentially libelous I would think.

But, per Garbageday, the rest of the stuff is spot-on, if their speculative analysis is right.

But the conflicting tone of the bullet casings’ inscriptions may also point to a connection with the Com network and the 764 terror cell offshoot. We’ve covered these groups several times on Panic World. They primarily exist inside of Discord and Telegram group chats. They recruit vulnerable young people around the internet, including inside of multiplayer games like Minecraft and Roblox. They encourage their members to commit horrible crimes with the promise of internet clout, intentionally using conflicting political messages to obscure any larger motive besides inspiring other members of the group to do the same. A month after a school shooter made an “OK” hand sign post, mentioned above, another teenager in Nashville made the exact same joke before allegedly shooting classmates at their high school. ProPublica found they crossed paths several times in these online communities, and the Nashville shooter was making a deliberate reference to his fellow community member. Which is what is so existentially terrifying about our current political moment.

There you go. 

In addition, Ken, since he had multiple Discord accounts, how do you know you're seeing everything, or even a fairly representative amount of everything, that Robinson had on Discord? "Multiple" sounds like more than two, and two is as many as Ken cites.

For that matter, Ken, how do you know you're not being used in some way?

In addition, Garbageday talks about Tyler Robinson's possible links to Nick Fuentes and the groyper movement. Discussion about this, including quote-tweets of the alt-racist himself, were trending on Shitter Thursday evening. 

Hell, a couple of days after Ken, NPR was going deeper on the gaming culture with a story focused on Robinson engaging in "performative violence." 

==

Via Garbageday, to pivot back to Kirk, "shock me," given the reaction of conservative younger Catholics in my area, that he first launched to stardom, or whatever, at Benedictine University. 

Back to Robinson. That piece, as well as the previous one, wonders if, transgender roommate or whatever and all, if he didn't really have Nick Fuentes-type animus against Kirk. 

And, if the Utah County DA isn't lying out his ass, and Tyler does NOT have Fuentes-type animus against Kirk, it looks like his parents are throwing him halfway under the bus. 

So with that all in mind, my header punning on edgelord. 

And also thinking Klipp didn't dive deep, and may have been used. 

Glenn Loury is still a Player

Even more than as I noted in my original Goodreads review, that's the bottom line of his autobiography.

Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative by Glenn C. Loury
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

A Player is trying to play you. Period, bottom line and end of story.

Per a theme of Loury’s off and on throughout the book, I think that’s the best take on this. Yes, that's highly skeptical. It may even be a bit cynical, but it's skeptical far ahead of cynical. To Loury's fanbois and fangirrls who either loved or hated this book, I don't care if you think it's all cynicism, no skepticism.

Let's dive in, starting with stuff that presented itself right away.

First, per Loury’s hints in his intro that he thinks radical honesty will make him more likeable as well as more believable? Tosh. Ditto on implied claims that if he’s more believable on his personal story, then he’ll be more believable on his economic and political stances. Tosh again.

Second, per the front half of the inner dust cover flap, any swing to the left was relatively short and narrowly focused.

Third, no index.

Fourth, Hillsdale College early 1980s may not have been as big as today as far as conservative world imprint, but it wasn’t small. Writing for them? Loury had to know what he was doing. As far as his musings about a John Conyers and police brutality, he implies that Conyers was thinking about this to the exclusion of thinking about black family problems. With both this and Hillsdale, Loury had to know that white conservatives would use this as ammunition for “let’s move beyond affirmative action.” He either DID know this and decided to, early on, be a “Player,” or else he didn’t think about it and became a Sucker.

At this point, I am pretty sure the book won’t go above 3 stars. So, where within that will it land?

Well, next, we hit his cheap, caricatured and dishonest — to shove that word in his face — strawmanning of liberals on the 170s-180s pages. And, by the time I’m at 200, I am pretty sure this is no more than 2 stars. And, I'm thinking this is another part of being a Player.

And then, shortly after page 300, comes Charles Murray and The Bell Curve. Now, I know that Loury is no more a cognitive scientist or an evolutionary biologist than is, say, Andrew Sullivan, to cite another prominent personage who has both loathsome and stupid views on the book and the ideas behind it. And, contra Loury, it doesn’t matter that Herrnstein had died by the time the book came out. He was wrong, too. BOTH authors got money from the racist Pioneer Fund, like Frank Miele. Add in that Murray then moved from racism to sexism. Interestingly (perhaps in part because, reading between the lines in this book, Loury isn't very enlightened on feminism, either), he doesn't even mention this to try to explain it away. Surely, he knows this, too.

Contra Sully, though, Loury is an academic in a not totally distant field, and even less distant as far as some of his lectures and such. He’s surely read some of the material before, during and after The Bell Curve about the sociological influences on IQ even when not motivated by racism, the problems with “g” and more, problems detailed here. In addition, the fact that AEI, the American Enterprise Institute, simply threw aside his concerns, and basically just went on without him after he left, apparently opened no eyes in his soul.

To put it more bluntly than in my original review? Loury's lying to himself, lying to his readers, or lying to both. They're not mutually exclusive.

There’s also the fact that this connects to broader stupidity in Evolutionary Psychology, with some of its biggest stupidity detailed here.

There’s other lies by omission. Like overlooking that already by the late 1960s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was ignoring LBJ’s dictum that you don’t ask someone to run, but just walk, after removing the chains. Or, talking about equity once or twice, then ignoring the multigenerational transfer effects of racial differences in equity.

As for the radical honesty, one more time? Tying his conclusion to his introduction, it seems like he’s selling the idea of being an intellectual Player. I think his puffed up move from the right to the left was part of being a Player. And, other than mass incarceration, was it really much of a move? Nowhere in the book does Loury dive into the intersection of race and class, other than his personal anecdotes revealing how part of his being a Player in various ways involved forms of intersectional class-shifting. In light of that, I note that he doesn’t mention Isabel Wilkerson or her book Caste.

That said, he’s not 100 percent wrong on everything. Nor is new bosom buddy McWhorter. I don’t have a lot of use for Ta-Nehisi Coates nor for the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones. I have about none for Ibrahim Kendi and even less for Robin DiAngelo as a white race hustler.

Oherwise, as for his alleged move to the “left”? There’s NO Black leftists he mentions. Yes, Black liberals. No Black leftists, like, say, an Adolph Reed.

There’s zero engagement with Critical Race Theory, like Derrick Bell and his "Silent Covenants." Loury mentions some other Bell in the book, but since no index, I can’t remember who. So, on his "pivot to the left," at least on the depth of his pivot, as with the Murray angle, Loury would again seem to be lying.

Again — and assuming the lying is conscious — to whom first? Himself? (Which makes the lying at some point subconscious.) Black conservatives? White conservatives? All of the above? Black and/or White liberals? Is he even trying to lie beyond liberals to leftists?

So, why? Is Loury trafficking in the idea of being a Player due to laws of supply and demand on black conservatives? Was his shift allegedly to the “left” to build up Black cred when he moved back right?

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Middle-class precariat pseudo-leftist?

I wrote the following poem last month, and posted it on my second blog, since I discuss issues of aesthetics there, including some of my own poems, as well as philosophy, critical religion and general critical thinking.

Middle-class precariat pseudo-leftist

I know that I am the first and the second
And that they are intertwined.
Does this make me a pseudo-leftist as well?
Am I too afraid
Of giving up the scraps of security
In a bank account and elsewhere
That I have scraped for
To put myself in that middle class
And to try to avoid that precariat
(Even in a precariat career)
To be a "real leftist"?

As I get older
Maybe I'll know the answer
Or at least know it in larger part than now,
And as I learn it,
Maybe I'll be honest with myself.

It's easy to make excuses
But, in a dysfunctional life,
It's also easy to blame oneself,
Or to use the vocabulary of blaming oneself
To avoid deeper thought in general.

At the same time, where is there a dictionary
That can authoritatively, and unambiguously,
Define the term "real leftist"?
"If it feels leftist, then do it"?

Per old Idries Shah, sometimes overquoted
If there are more than two sides to this issue,
There's also a continuum of some sort.
And, I'm on that, and not at the zero point.
Real leftist in progress, or simpatico fellow traveler.

But, I wanted to offer some comments on it, so I reposted it here, with comment to follow.

I'm not Noam Chomsky, who has said that every president since World War II, not exempting Jimmy Carter, would swing from the gibbet if they were given a Nuremberg war crimes trial, but then continues to vote Democrat-only instead of moving outside the box. Ditto for the Adolph Reeds and Doug Henwoods of the world, and even self-proclaimed communist Angela Davis.

At the same time, I acknowledge, as an ex-Green, that too many Greens not only accept the unlikelihood of major Green Party candidates being elected, but perceive the party's ultimate role as nudging the Democrats leftward.

Ain't happening, and you're AccommoGreens, as I have called you, the Green equivalent of ConservaDems.

I also note the GP is not necessarily a "left" political party, unlike, say, the Socialist Party USA. Sorry, Greens, but the amount of "libertarian Greens" in the party, many "libertarian" on US terms, not European ones, and the anarchist Greens to somewhat lesser but not insignificant degree, negate the leftist claims for the party. (As if AccommoGreens don't.)

So, no, ultimately, I'm not a pseudo-leftist. I'm not a radical leftist, and I'm not an anarchist, but, in American terms (always a qualifier) per my header, I am a leftist. And more than some who are part of the problem, not solution, if they're voting Democrat only.

What I also am, as an ex-Green for now and probably through 2024, at least, someone who becomes ever more tired of electoral politics, even as I know the duopolists like seeing people like me drop out.

TPM tries Grassley head fake to avoid discussing Geithner

Trying to compare a relatively minor donor misfiling by the political action committee of Sen. Charles Grassley, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, is almost as laughable as Geithner’s own laughable lies, but not surprising.

Here’s why it’s laughable:
1. Apples and oranges, comparing this with Geithner.
2. The fact that TPM's new reporter, or the webmaster or whomever, said "go look for it yourself" rather than posting the actual PDF, indicates its small taters what Grassley's PAC did.
3. It was Grassley's PAC; we don't know if he knew anything about it.
4. It was, apparently, a one-off deal, not four years of malfeasance.

I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you that this is somehow supposed to make Geithner look better, or not so bad. I'm sure this will be a MSLB talking point.

If Obama REALLY wanted change at the Treasury, he would have excluded anybody with any of the following taints:
1. Worked for Goldman Sachs.
2. Works for Citigroup.
3. Worked for Larry Summers.
4. Worked for Robert Rubin.
5. Worked for the NY Fed.
6. Worked for The Fed.
7. Taught econ at either Chicago or Stanford.

Those would be good starting points.

But, Obama instead:
1. Had Goldman Sachs as his No. 1 contributor;
2. Had Bob Rubin as an advisor;
3. Hired Larry Summers for the "gray eminence" no-confirmation job he probably wanted all along;
4. Nominated a man as Treasury Secretary who had some degree of violation of the first five points above.

It looks like Just.Another.Politician.™ is quickly settling into the Oval Office.

But, back to the TPM "story."

Why isn't TPM reporter Elena Schor actually looking at Geithner's TurboTax claim rather than throwing crap against the wall? Who does assignment editing for her, or is she supposed to be a "self-starter"? In other words, was the Grassley story her own idea, or is she "carrying water" for somebody?

Caroline Kennedy allegedly had Geithner problems

A person connected to New York Gov. David Patterson says the real reason Caroline Kennedy withdrew herself from wanting to be appointed to Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat is that she, like Tim Geithner, has a taxes and housekeeper skeleton or two in the closet.

And, in a slap to the Kennedy face, and Kennedy brand, too, Paterson apparently wasn’t going to appoint her, even without the skeletons, because he didn’t consider her ready for the position, although Kennedy’s corner is saying she was always the front-runner.

A comeuppance for the Kennedy dynasty, in any case. Now, we just need the Bushes to get slapped around a little more.

And, here’s the latest on the serial-lying Tim Geithner.