“9-11 never forget” to me means never again by any means necessary.
My apologies to those who view the world differently from me.
Today is a day of remembrance.
We must bow our heads and reflect upon the passing of Beau Biden. Beau was the pride and joy of the grifting Biden clan. His widow Hallie honored his memory by embarking on an affair with Beau’s noble brother Hunter. Hunter honored Beau by bedding Hallie while still married to Beau’s sister-in-law Kathleen. Hunter further honored Beau, Hallie, and Kathleen by also impregnating Ms. Lunden Roberts – an Arkansan basketball player and exotic dancer.
Patriarch Joe Biden has never acknowledged his grandchild birthed by Ms. Roberts. There is no evidence that President Biden has ever made the acquaintance of Ms. Roberts, much less sniffed her hair.
Hunter Biden is now an internationally acclaimed artist and a chip off the old block grifter like his dear old dad.
I tried posting a link here to a great YouTube video released today but I got an error message and now, can’t even read Neo-Neocon from my PC. Only from my phone.
Anyway, I suggest people who like the orchestral or ‘epic’ covers if pop music check out the timely release of Epic Orchestra’s (a YouTube channel) cover of Muse’s Uprising.
The timing is impeccable what with both Biden’s speech two days ago and 9/11’s anniversary today.
It has been a most strange 20 years since that morning, September 11, 2001 when we suffered a terrible loss of life and ended up with the crazy strange hoops we jump through to get on airplanes. Instead of profiling Middle-Eastern type young males our nation bent over backwards searching little children and old ladies so we would not hurt the feelings of those most likely to crash airplanes into important buildings.
Our learning curve that day was three planes and the forth plane the passengers took down, after the first three the unthinkable became thinkable and we would never have lost planes if we had just continued flying the same way we did on September 10, 2001.
Of course our intel folks could have been doing a better job and would certainly known what to look for, training people to fly planes without having to land them, what a sorry sad day 9-11 was and is.
OldTexan:
Back in 2003 or so I had a long debate with a guy about profiling at airports. He claimed that it would lead inevitably to concentration camps. I replied that the British, French and, of course, Israel profiled for terrorists without going the Auschwitz route.
But it didn’t have any effect on him. He just kept repeating his claim.
huxley, I wonder if that guy thinks, today, that demanding vaccine passports will lead to concentration camps.
An Australian commented here few weeks ago saying Australia wasn’t as bad as some news items seemed to indicate. I’d like to hear more from him. This sounds pretty bad.
I guess Australia is trying to go their version of the China route. Zaphod was persuasive that the Chinese managed to zero out Covid, at least until Delta, but I still have my doubts.
Worldometers shows Australia is having by far their worst surge of cases since the beginning: ~1700 cases/day. However deaths are low: ~6 deaths/day.
Zaphod was persuasive that the Chinese managed to zero out Covid, at least until Delta, but I still have my doubts.
Or they managed to engineer a virus that doesn’t attack Orientals vigorously.
I’m unconvinced that any country will be able to zero out COVID.
The photo reminds me of Andrew Wyeth…
Hi Neo! Is that picture just south of Portsmouth, around Rye? Landscape looks very familiar.
Lots of salt marshes along the Connecticut shore, especially around the Groten area.
T– “Doctor” Jill Biden is not an MD, or a DO, DDS, DPH, or DVM, all of whom are entitled to be addressed as “Doctor.” She has an Ed.D. from Delaware’s state university on the basis of a limp dissertation about the only community college in Delaware: “Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs.” If you’re so inclined, you can read the PDF here: http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/jill_biden_dissertation.pdf
From the introduction: “Delaware Technical and Community College serves a highly diverse student body in terms of age, gender, race, and socio-economic status. The needs of the student population are often undeserved, resulting in a student drop-out rate of almost one third. This Executive Position Paper (EPP) will look at the needs of students in order to ensure a higher rate of student retention.”
Interesting that “Doctor” Biden– who used to teach English there– gets the name of the school wrong: There is no “and” between “Technical” and “Community.”
Here is an image related to 9/11. That flag with the lights arranged around it was put up by someone the day after 9/11 in 2001. It is just outside of Newtown, CT on I-84 eastbound. I saw it nearly every day for the next 10 years before I moved to TN permanently. According to Google street view, it was still there in November of last year.
All I hear is ” remembering the victims”..Lets not forget the motive behind 9/11.. HATE..HATE..Hate by muslims against our very being..hate that we treat women with respect.hate that we respect other religions..hate that our God is not vengeful..search the internet to find the muslims dancing in the streets after 9/11…They HATE us to our very core..STOP the whitewash and act on it..ISLAM is a cult of HATE…..find the interview with the airline employee who checked the hijackers in on 9/11..he said he had never seen such hate in a man’s eyes
.
” “Doctor” Jill Biden is not an MD, or a DO, DDS, DPH, or DVM . . . . She has an Ed.D . . . .”[PA+CAT @ 2:00 pm]
Yes, I know. That was the very reason for my post. In the media, (even at Fox) a degree in education requires the honorific title more so than an actual MD degree as long as you are on their proper side of the narrative.
It’s like Joe Biden’s well known bragging about his superior IQ. When you have to constantly flaunt the issue you probably lack its substance.
Perhaps my sarcasm was not overly sarcastic enough; I must be losing my touch.
DRcool#1 @ 2:10 pm,
Sounds like your talking about our ruling class.
T:
As I recall, Jill Biden made a stink about her “Dr.” title not being used and the media fell into line.
Which is not to say I disagree with you.
One wonders how we will commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the January 6 “insurrection”, which is presumably a much more dire event than September 11.
I can imagine the detainees, still awaiting trial, being allowed out to sing the prisoners’ chorus from Fidelio, then back to the dungeon. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RhMdMD9tXB0
So the former English teacher who wrote this and all the reviewers who read it didn’t spot the typo that jumped off the page at me: “The needs of the student population are often undeserved” – check out the last word in that sentence.
I’m unconvinced that any country will be able to zero out COVID.
Kate:
Well, me too. Although if you check the graphs on the countries like Vietnam and Australia it looks they came close until Delta.
Of course, one way to read their vulnerability to Delta is that because of their low early rates, they became the new low-hanging fruit for the virus.
huxley,
It’s very shocking. Week by week, the news out of Australia looks more surreal. Regarding, the comments a few weeks back by an Australian, I watch a YouTube channel called Shadiversity. Shad Brooks is a medieval weapons and history expert from Australia. I’m not sure where, since he keeps it somewhat vague for privacy.
But he was shooting a video out in public at a store couple days ago and there were no masks to be seen among any of the people shopping. I didn’t see any lockdown measures of any kind.
So, I don’t know what kind of government differences (like some kind of Down Under form of Federalism might be in play) or lockdown differences there are by territory. I’m just not informed enough about Australian civics and government.
Doctor” Jill Biden is not an MD, or a DO, DDS, DPH, or DVM, all of whom are entitled to be addressed as “Doctor.”
I think people with a serious research degree are properly so addressed. Podiatrists as well. Musicians (DMA), optometrists and holders of the PsyD degree, judgment call.
Not sure ‘public health’ is an occupation more serious than social work. (Epidemiology may be).
Sept 11, 2001
The TV was tuned to the morning news in my Brooklyn apartment
I was not watching, but heard unusual sounds coming from the TV
Watching, I saw that Tower One was on fire having “been hit by an airplane”
Leaving the apartment and walking a few blocks to the promenade, a walkway on the waterfront, I stood in shock seeing Tower One had been hit right where I had had an office just a few years ago
Hundreds of folks, maybe thousands, came to the promenade
There were no sounds of people talking, only the sounds of sirens on the other side of the river. The flashing emergency vehicle lights were uninterrupted on the FDR drive
Then I saw it. An airliner was making an odd maneuver over New Jersey. It flew into Tower Two. The sound was terrifying
Tears flowed, but there was complete silence
About an hour later, Tower One came down. No one could believe it. Then Tower Two
Grey soot started to blow toward us
All of the firemen in my neighborhood firehouse had been killed, their trucks destroyed
I discovered after almost an hour of fruitless phone calls that all my family members were OK
I have never been the same. I will never be the same
@Huxley:
Here’s Taiwan’s story with Delta. Everyone loves Taiwan. It’s a veritable Oriental Open Society, after all. Have a look at the graph.
Delta got into Taiwan. They clubbed it down like a baby fur seal without creating a police state.
This despite PRC with malice aforethought pulling a bunch of stunts which meant that very few vaccines had arrived in TW before Delta.
Can be done without gulags and police state. Just requires magic sauce admixture of intelligent, non reflexively obstreperous, non-riddled with obesity, T2D, Metabolic Syndrome first world educated population and a competent government which doesn’t actively *hate* its population (this last bit true even of PRC).
Happy to add in some ArtDeco Race is Real Genetic Sauce. Is certainly possible this virus is easier on East Asians. Corona Viruses are nothing new here. So they may well have evolved as well as acquired during lifetimes more immunity. Pretty much every expat who moved to East Asia has tales of getting as sick as a dog during first one or two winters as they encountered new and unknown viruses. Happened to me way back too.
Beyond that could also be engineered to go easier on the Han. But like I said, Coronaviruses are less of a deal, naturally, here. Most of the time anyway. SARS1.0 was rather an outlier in that regard.
Only add the obvious, 20 years ago we went to war, half way maybe against some Islamic terrorists, today the American government armed them better than most small countries are.
Sad to add this to a beautiful picture I think could be South Carolina coast.
T, huxley, et al.: Jill Biden evidently told some media person that she went after her Ed.D. in the first place because she resented having mail delivered to “Senator and Mrs. Biden,” and decided on a doctorate as a way of confirming her independent identity. And she insists on being addressed as “Doctor” for the same reason.
As for JoJo’s superior IQ, it’s generally known that he finished in the bottom third of his class at an undistinguished law school, and he had had to admit plagiarism during his first year in law school–which sank his first run for the presidency in 1987.
Meanwhile, anyone having trouble with insomnia can read Jill’s dissertation.
As I recall, Jill Biden made a stink about her “Dr.” title not being used and the media fell into line. [huxley @ 2:25 pm]
Right. Therefore my comment: “When you have to constantly flaunt the issue you probably lack its substance.” This, unfortunately is especially common in social sciences and education.
“I think people with a serious research degree are properly so addressed.” [Art Deco @ 2:44 pm]
It’s not how they are properly addressed, it ‘s how they demand to be addressed. The underlying problem with many social science and education doctorates is that they are not necessarily awarded on the basis of critical thinking or critical thinking skills; i.e., in your own terminology, they are not serious degrees. That is NOT to say that all education or social science graduate degrees are unserious. Rather many of them are process degrees; put in your residential study time (i.e., coursework) and write a dissertation based upon some kind of survey which you design and carry out with minimal sampling because one person can only do so much.
Many of these terminal degrees (I’m tempted to say the majority of them) do not foster or demand the quality critical thinking skills that serious degrees require. IMO and experience, the more serious a person’s research and degree is, the less likely they are to flaunt it and demand its recognition — and vice versa..
JD Keene:
Thanks for telling your story. There were many casualties of that day that don’t appear in the statistics.
Art Deco:
I know a great many PhDs, and none of them use the title “Doctor”. They are allowed to, of course, but they don’t. This even includes the university professors I know personally, although it is more common among professors and is certainly sometimes used.
And the people I know have far more rigorous degrees than Jill Biden.
I don’t know what kind of government differences (like some kind of Down Under form of Federalism might be in play) or lockdown differences there are by territory. — Fractal Rabbit
I don’t have the reference, but I did read that in the area of health and health safety, the Australian states do have great autonomy to do as they wish. It probably isn’t generally equivalent to our U.S. federalism, but for the purposes of covid management it is roughly equivalent.
Which makes me wonder; is there possibly some interstate hatred developing? That is, the tightly locked down people hating on the AU states that are more open?
Like the photo and the gentle transition of green plant life that indicates it is low tide. So that some salt-water tolerant plants are high and dry at the moment.
Looks like 20 years is where they start to tell us that we should “move on” and “stop hating”. That it is pretty much all our own fault. We had it coming.
It’s noteworthy that Trump (prominent NYC citizen who made a huge contribution to the recovery effort) and Giuliani (who was the actual NYC mayor on 9/11) are not invited to the Deep State festivities.
I discovered after almost an hour of fruitless phone calls that all my family members were OK. — JD Keene
That reminds me that apparently the cell phone system was swamped and largely useless for making phone calls on that day. But someone said then and in possible future crises, text messages are the way to go. They reduce the load on the cell system by a 100-fold or more.
Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, the eruption of Mt. St Helens, the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, and 9/11. All memories that I can recall exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news. Only Pearl Harbor and 9/11 resulted in big changes to my life.
One of the things that has been so different about 9/11 is how fleeting the time of unity and national resolve was. The years of WWII were a time when people really sacrificed, stood together, and stayed the course. Yes, there were people who grumbled, a few with little faith in the government (A friend’s father refused to buy war bonds because he was sure the government would default)., and some who profiteered of the war effort. But we never saw the kind of antiwar protests and open antiwar activity as has been customary almost from the beginning of the War on Terror.
Like many Americans I knew little about Islam. The first book I read was “The Haj” by Leo Uris. It gave me a sense of the animosity between the Muslims and the Jews in the Middle East. Then I began reading about the Muslim Brotherhood and al Banna and Qutb. That gave me an insight to the thinking of radical Muslims who are basically Wahhabis. Although the Saudis are Wahhabis, they have carefully concealed their support for the Muslim Brotherhood and other anti-Israel, anti- American terrorist groups. Also, their oil reserves have been a shield for them. The world needs their oil.
Then I learned of the schism between the Sunnis and the Shias. That led to understanding that the fundamentalist Shias, represented by the theocrats that control Iran, are also deeply anti-modernity mirroring the Wahhabis.
I supported the idea of trying to turn Iraq into a Muslim democracy. Iraq had institutions – courts, lawyers, judges, property laws, an educational system, a functioning oil extraction industry, etc. – that seemed to offer an opportunity for democracy to take root. Although a minority of Iraqis are fundamentalists, they are the ones wiling to wage jihad and control the rest of the population. Any efforts to create democracy will fail because of their ideology and willingness to die for it.
So, here we are 20 years later. We have spent much blood and treasure and we are not that much safer from terror attacks than we were on 9/11/2001. What is the way forward? I believe it is in rethinking our strategy and tactics to deal with the realities. We can defeat the jihadis on the field of battle, but that does not change the way they view modernity. Their war on us will continue. Time for us to come up with ways to deter them that will work long term. Isolate them from the West? No more Muslim immigration? Refuse to do business with them? Start a Muslim reform organization that has worldwide scope? Ruthlessly retaliate whenever attacked? Always project an image of strength and resolve? Always live up to promises made to allies and enemies? I’m sure there ae people who know much more than me who have ideas that are worth pursuing. We have to learn from our mistakes.
JimNorCal,
Regarding Trump and Giuliani not being invited to the festivities, did you see GWB’s speech?
He denounced ‘domestic extremists’. But given his record on Trump and Trump supporters and, Liz Cheney’s words of support for his speech, it’ a pretty good guess that he wasn’t referring to BLM/Antifa but to the Jan. 6th “Insurrectionists”.
GWB just has his nose out of joint because Trump made Jeb! look like an idiot.
Alf Tupper > “The needs of the student population are often undeserved”
Considering how much the bulk of the student population needs certain things that are lacking in their lives – stable two-parent families, gainful employment, decent (non-union) pre-college education – their deficits really are undeserved, and cannot be redressed by the college.
Legitimate pedagogical needs will remain both undeserved and under-served because of the mediocrity and mendacity of our educational institutions.
Some of their “needs” are not part of any reasonable educational curriculum, and are peripheral things that they want to have (just like the Big Name Universities), and should remain under-served, because they don’t need them.
Whether or not they deserve them is debatable.
Dictionary trivia: a “want” did not formerly mean a “desire,” but a “lack” of something necessary. As in the hymn line, “Make all my wants and wishes known,” they were distinctly different things. Which makes a lot of old literature and nonfiction more understandable.
It is a pity we have conflated want with desire rather than lack, because now people’s “wants” are viewed as entitlements rather than privileges.
We were in Lyon, France on 9/11/01. It took us about 24 hours to be able to call our college-age children in NC.
J.J., one thing we can do, and must do, is stop avoiding honest criticism of radical Islam for fear of being labeled “Islamophobic.” The violent passages in the Koran and traditions are there. It’s up to American Muslims to teach their children that they must not follow the violent path. And Islam, like any other religion in our country, must deal peaceably with criticism.
@ Fractal > “Well, check out Australia:”
I might be open to the idea of quarantine facilities specifically for incoming migrants (aka illegal aliens) and the Afghanistan evacuees.
Period.
When are conservatives and right-wing media going to quit feeding the beast that eats them?
J.J. —
I started studying Islam in college in the mid-80s, probably the last time it was acceptable for a professor to assign both Edward Said and Bernard Lewis. (I came down on the Lewis side, to be sure.) I’ve read and learned a lot more since, and nothing has changed my mind that of all the world’s great-as-in-large religions, Islam is the least conducive to human flourishing.
Yes, there was the Islamic “Renaissance” in the 800s. But it was mostly by and for and limited to Persians, and in any case was squashed when the Islamic scholarly authorities decided there would be no more speculation about natural law or religion allowed, in around 900.
I don’t know what we can do about Islam. It doesn’t seem like it can ever peacefully co-exist with nonbelievers over the long term, and if it were to “reform” it would cease to be Islam, so no believer will ever allow that.
For that matter, Islam doesn’t seem like it can co-exist with itself. Most of its internal problems historically stem from the conflict between the commandment that all Muslims should be brothers in the Umma under a single Caliph, and the reality that different ethnicities and nations want to have their own rulers.
I know a great many PhDs, and none of them use the title “Doctor”. They are allowed to, of course, but they don’t. This even includes the university professors I know personally, although it is more common among professors and is certainly sometimes used.
Worked for colleges and universities for 21 years. Absolutely standard for formal address. Never heard one object. In class, they generally refer to other faculty that way when they’re behind the lectern. Of course, their friends do not use courtesy titles, and neither do work-friends. And, no, they don’t answer the phone ‘Dr. Burnett’ as a physician might. But they get called ‘doctor’ or ‘professor’ a score of times every day by students and staff.
(I think my brother is introduced as ‘Doctor’ at professional conferences. Must check).
Yes, of course people with advanced degrees use them routinely in their professional settings. My daughter is referred to as “Dr.” at her university by students and colleagues. The question with Jill Biden is why she insists on “Dr.” when she’s not teaching or at professional conferences.
The underlying problem with many social science and education doctorates is that they are not necessarily awarded on the basis of critical thinking or critical thinking skills; i.e., in your own terminology, they are not serious degrees. That is NOT to say that all education or social science graduate degrees are unserious. Rather many of them are process degrees; put in your residential study time (i.e., coursework) and write a dissertation based upon some kind of survey which you design and carry out with minimal sampling because one person can only do so much.
Again, ‘education’ is a practice, not an academic discipline. Ideally, teacher-training programs are concerned with classroom instruction and hands-on learning in technique. The study of educational practice is properly distributed across several departments of the arts-and-sciences faculty – primarily psychology but also history, sociology, and political science depending on what aspect of the practice of education you are studying. You can also conceive of degrees in public policy which study educational practice and institutions. There should be no research degree in ‘education’. There is insufficient content in technical training to justify a clinical practice degree you’d call a doctorate, either. Have a gander at EdD programs. It’s wheel-spinning hooey.
You should not conflate doctorates in ‘education’ with those in ‘social sciences’. There are scads of bad scholars and bad programs as we live in a decadent age. There is nothing about the subject matter of social research disciplines which makes a research degree a pantomime.
Art Deco:
I already indicated it’s done in university settings by professors with some regularity: “This even includes the university professors I know personally, although it is more common among professors and is certainly sometimes used.” I am exceedingly familiar with university settings and PhDs.
But that’s not what I’m talking about when I say that the people I know don’t use it. One was a professor and was regularly called “Doctor” at the university, but never wanted to be called that outside of that setting (and didn’t even want it within that setting, although it was okay with him if people just naturally used it, which they sometimes did).
So what happens at the university is mostly irrelevant to this discussion. Jill Biden is not at a university nor is she presenting professional papers. We are talking about her non-university demand to be called “Doctor.”
and he had had to admit plagiarism during his first year in law school–which sank his first run for the presidency in 1987.
Stealing that woman’s law review article word-for-word didn’t help. The hammer blow was John Sasso’s video showing he’d appropriated Neil Kinnock’s family history lock-stock-and-barrel. That should have gotten him laughed out of office in Delaware three years later. Not sure Delaware Republicans ever made a vigorous effort to get rid of him.
but never wanted to be called that outside of that setting
Yes, the one faculty member I called a personal friend preferred ‘Sarah’. She was funny that way. My mother counted several medical doctors among her personal friends. They preferred ‘Edward’, ‘Don’, ‘David’, and ‘Porter’.
Art Deco:
I am not talking about what my friends wanted me or other friends to call them outside of professional settings. I am talking about what they wanted anyone to call them, even people they didn’t know well and with whom they were not on a first name basis. They just used their full names or “Mr.” or “Ms” outside of university settings (and for most of them, even within university settings).
Are you trying to be cute? I think you well understand I don’t mean what personal friends wanted me or other personal friends to call them.
One interpretation of the picture at the top of this post is that it shows what’s left of the ship of state, up Shit Creek, with no paddle.
Kate and Bryan, thanks for the input. In thinking about trying to live peacefully with Muslims, I have often wondered if eventually, when they realize that infidels don’t want to live with or near them because of their intolerance they might decide to reform. It took years of carnage before the Catholics and Protestants came to that conclusion. (With a few exceptions along the way.) Refusing entry to Muslims from certain Muslim countries (As Trump did) is one way of isolating them. Refusing to do business with bad actors (As Trump did with Iran) is another way to isolate them. There are some efforts by American Muslims to reform the religion towards tolerance for other beliefs. Zhudi Jasser is one Muslim in the U.S. that has been working toward reform. See this: http://www.mzuhdijasser.com/
If he and his organization received more support from government he might make more progress. I’m convinced that we need such an organization with a global reach to make a difference. More Muslim leaders such as General al Sisi of Egypt need to speak out about the issue of intolerance.
I happen to live next door to a Muslim family. They are devout in dress and habit . I observe the old grandfather out praying frequently. They have been nice neighbors. We haven’t talked religion, but we converse regularly about other topics of the day. Three years living as neighbors and all is quiet and peaceful. I believe, until they prove differently, that they are reformed Muslims. 🙂
Are you trying to be cute?
I’m cute naturally. No trying necessary.
In commemoration, and for your celebrations of liberty, here’s Chet Atkins playing Stars and Stripes Forever:
A nice History of Jihad read from Robert Spencer will open eyes on why the jihad is a ongoing forevermore event humanity will never get rid of.
“You should not conflate doctorates in ‘education’ with those in ‘social sciences’.” [Art Deco @ 5:290pm]
I am not. My experience has led me to believe that these two disciplines are where the most numerous abuses take place. Rigorous dissertations demand that your work make an original contribution to the scholarship of the discipline. Social science and education dissertations are oftentimes more interested in the process (i.e., the pedagogy) of the discipline rather than in the findings. With the caveat that there is only so much one student can do, any study or survey with only 150 data points (say survey responses) presents no usable findings to further the profession; it is, at best, a starting point for future research. The cure for that is to take longer and do a more comprehensive study to expand the data, but then the department doesn’t crank out Ph.D.s at the rate that catches administrative eyes.
The faculty and departments, themselves, dilute the degree to the detriment of the discipline.
J.J. —
I have a friend who is a lapsed Muslim, although I hardly ever see him since most of my friends dumped me after my divorce. I also work with several Muslims (or did when I was still going in to the office). As far as I can tell, they’re all Westernized, but I still keep an eye out for symptoms of Sudden Jihadi Syndrome, like badmouthing their wife and daughter, or growing a chin beard, or switching to “traditional” dress.
When I lived in Indonesia (world’s most populous Muslim country), we couldn’t drive, being ‘infidels’ and thus subject to revenge killings if we were in an accident. I had a driver: Abdul was peacefully devout. His Saturdays were spent, with his family, in mosque. Most of his Sundays were spent in service to the mosque community, ensuring widows/orphans/impoverished were having their needs met. I found quite a bit to admire in this sincere devotion, and we had many conversations. He was representative of the country’s religious character I think, although there are other areas where the beliefs run more to the extremes (Aceh).
One can be peacefully Muslim, but it’s not the norm, in my experience living for some time in a few of these places (Egypt, Tunisia, Kazakhstan, Indonesia). Simple ignorance and fear of outsiders is the source of a lot of abuse toward ‘infidels’, and a good bit of it is the state-sponsored education in the Madrassas that are sponsored by Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Arab nations, that furthers this particular antipathy. The preponderance of violence-prone fundamentalists is above the critical mass required to bully the remaining larger fractions into submission, and keep them there. You won’t often find Muslim moderates that will muster the courage to take a stand. They are irrelevant, therefore.
One can win in places like Afghanistan if one approaches it with the type of iron will of, say, a Curtis LeMay, adopting a position of temporary murderous resolve without margins, that doesn’t stop until the enemy admits unconditional defeat or is dead. Do this with the rebels; put the women finally in charge of running society with a small remaining foreign peace force and let them raise their boys. That would have a chance of working. Highly Illiberal, unsparing of religious freedoms, and more than likely effective, which of course means the vocally squeamish could never let it happen. Better for the world to have our 9-11’s and Charlie Hebdo’s than confront the poison and appear un-progressive.
@Aggie:
“put the women finally in charge of running society …. and let them raise their boys. That would have a chance of working. Highly Illiberal, unsparing of religious freedoms, and more than likely effective, which of course means the vocally squeamish could never let it happen.”
But it happened to your society. And the one I grew to adulthood in.
🙂
Look around you. The problem is that the Gelded (once gelded) cannot Geld. All they can do is think that Others should suffer their own fate. But thinking is not doing.
The Eunuch’s Lament.
FWIW I lived in Indonesia, too… and was pleasantly surprised by the gentleness and devotion of especially the Central and Eastern Javanese more Abangan Muslim types. But remember those ones killed more ‘Communists’ per capita in 1965/6. This is one of the ‘Amok’ SE Asian Cultures. Which pre-dates Islam and Islam does not ameliorate. They’re very nice and gentle until they’re not. And then you’re beastly dead.
Aceh is really something. I’ve been to the Mesjid Aceh (Acehnese Mosque) in Georgetown Malaysia.. Some Acehnese moved there back in the day and immediately built a *fortress* for their mosque. Very warlike people.
@Zaphod, you almost seem to be objecting to Muslims killing off Commies. I’m well aware of the tendency of those people to run amok. It hasn’t been that long since some of them stopped hunting heads, in the eastern provinces. But they’re mostly not Muslim.
I contend that the Eunuch’s lament is preferable to the implacable jihadis rampaging their way across various failed states while destroying antiquities, and preferable to hijacked airliners used as attack weapons to slaughter and cause mayhem – the primary reason being they would be lamenting there.
In any case it’s all armchair Field Marshalling so…..
@Aggie:
Do you seriously believe there were 1M+ ‘Commies’ needed killing in Central and East Java in the 1960s? There’s a Mister McNamara has a great financing deal for you on a Ford Edsel.
The point is not to let Jihadis win. The point is to become as Men again.
Zaphod:
Those are impressive graphs on Taiwan and Covid. Readers interested in the issue should take a peek. It’s a powerful glimpse into a country which seems to handling Covid right.
You explained, if that’s the word:
___________________________
Delta got into Taiwan. They clubbed it down like a baby fur seal without creating a police state.
This despite PRC with malice aforethought pulling a bunch of stunts which meant that very few vaccines had arrived in TW before Delta.
Can be done without gulags and police state. Just requires magic sauce admixture of intelligent, non reflexively obstreperous, non-riddled with obesity, T2D, Metabolic Syndrome first world educated population and a competent government which doesn’t actively *hate* its population (this last bit true even of PRC).
___________________________
I’d like to know more specifically what that means beyond a mostly non-obese population and Asian, which may or may not be as vulnerable as other races.
Is there any relationship between Taiwan’s strategy and Australia’s?
@Zaphod: “..not to let Jihadis win” Got it. You mean, like finding ..say, a Curtis LeMay, adopting a position of temporary murderous resolve without margins, that doesn’t stop until the enemy admits unconditional defeat or is dead. “?
@Huxley:
Covid policy is pretty much apolitical in Hong Kong, Taiwan, PRC. (Edge cases of PRC trying to mess with TW’s vaccine choices and some bleating from Hong Kong Indians and Pakistanis about their relatives caught overseas not being allowed in to start a Delta outbreak excepted). ~65-70% of the Hong Kong population utterly loathe the local government as being PRC stooges and Quislings.. but still grudgingly admit that they have handled Covid quite competently. The people at the top might be scum, but the rank and file are competent and not your Post Office and DMV types.
My contention is that Covid containment strategies in PRC / Hong Kong / Taiwan are roughly similar. PRC certainly has more rigor than the latter two and one could argue about whether Hong Kong or TW is tougher on control measures. Both have effectively zero local transmission and Hong Kong hasn’t had a single patient die since early July. PRC not famous for its honest statistics, but we’re all pretty good at China Watching and figuring out if things add up and cohere, and seems that they’ve had a handle on Covid since ca. July 2020. We’ve discussed that before.
Everyone just gets on with it. Might be some grumbling about slowness of adoption or illogicality of this or that policy and how long it sometimes takes to recalibrate as new data becomes available, but people realise that these are not hills to die on. There are elements of Them and Us in Hong Kong/Taiwan but politics doesn’t permeate *everything* — this is a disease of ‘advanced’ ‘democracies’. Separate quotes deliberate.
So if the government says ‘Wear Masks’ there isn’t a national panty-wetting about mask-wearing. People just wear masks. Surgical masks. Not great, but certainly better than getting on a crowded subway train and not wearing a mask or some useless unhygienic unwashed cloth face diaper. People get that masks offer marginal benefit, but marginal gains are good. They’re not going to LARP about Muh Liberty over them. Same goes for quarantine rules and testing.
Contrary to Western misunderstandings, Chinese are not Oriental Hive-Mind Automatons. They’re often extremely selfish and individualistic (i.e. Muh Kentucky Long Rifle + Lexington Green) but also *PRAGMATIC*. They tend to rapidly iterate toward whatever works, discarding what does not work — they disdain intellectuals who talk about what *ought* to work. So they quickly figured out that strict quarantine rules for incoming travelers work, targeted building and district lockdowns work, and keeping the population relatively calm by not hyping fear also works. And it has worked. I’m sitting in my regular Sunday coffee shop. Nobody in here is wearing a mask. Obviously you can’t eat and drink and wear one. Outside the monthly craft market is going on in the Plaza. Everyone out there is wearing a mask because that is the Rule. There are no police around, but the private security will politely ask you to put one on if you don’t wear one. Outside the Plaza where it’s beaches and lanes and houses and condos in parkland nobody cares whether or not you’re wearing a mask. In other words, rules are strict when need to be strict and relaxed where they don’t need to be. This seems to be beyond Western Governments.
Look, I can’t give simple answers. A lot of my long posts about this Covid thing are trying to give a flavor for how things work out here. Statistics and recital of rules just doesn’t get anywhere near explaining the whole Gestalt of it.
I don’t see Australia as being anything like Taiwan. Similar size populations sure. But utterly different peoples. In Australia a lot of the serious cases are amongst recent ‘Immigrants’ from places shouldn’t be allowed into the West… But it’s literally illegal to criticize other races in Australia so if a bunch of fat Arabs are dying in Sydney’s West, well too bad… have to lock down the entire city. If the Chinese Diaspora on Sydney’s North Shore are doing much better than everyone else… well can’t look at what they’re doing differently either. Lock everyone down.
And again you’re in a Western country where the Managerialist Elite have contempt for the ordinary people and get passive aggressive thrills out of locking them down and stopping them from earning income which the Managerial Class doesn’t have to worry about because can ‘work’ online manipulating words and BS.
This kind of divide doesn’t quite exist in the Chinese World. Rulers might think mighty highly of themselves cf. Joe Chinaman in his sampan, or his factory job… but they don’t actively *despise* him. They’re all in the same boat lifted on the same hopefully rising tide. This has not applied in the West for at least a generation now.
Frankly I’m sick and tired unto disgust and death with the West. Which makes me rant. As you know.
@Aggie:
Pashtuns might be even harder to eradicate than Jews. Both are very persistent peoples.
I think Whitey would do well to emulate their stiff-necked hardiness rather than go all in on Eunuchry.
Regular culling of Pashtun herd from orbit is OK by me. Wouldn’t expect even the most vigorous social engineering to work on them… Besides it’s cleaner to kill your enemy even if it be indiscriminately than to debase and pussify him.
Doing the latter dishonors oneself as much as it does the victim. Please consider this point.
Zaphod:
Thanks for the reply. Sorry to soak up that much of your time. Unfortunately, I still don’t get it.
In any event it seems weird that Taiwan et al. are doing *something* right, something different and beyond masks from the rest of the world, yet it’s not discussed at all.
Instead we compare Texas and California, or Sweden and Norway, which has been of marginal use at best IMO.
@Huxley:
I don’t think it’s very difficult to get the broad outline:
1) Have strict border controls and test and quarantine everyone who enters.
2) If there’s an outbreak in Building X then lock down Building X for 24 hours and make everyone in it get a compulsory nucleic acid test for the virus. Anyone who has it gets carted off to spartan but OK quarantine for 2-3 weeks until clear.
3) Contact Tracing. In order of decreasing rigor I would guess PRC > Hong Kong > TW.
4) Compulsory masking in public places. Enforced very strictly in crowded public spaces. Less so elsewhere.
5) Compliance with above is not a badge of political affiliation.
6) Possibly that wonderful social construct, Race / Genetics has something to do with it too re relative immunity to Covid-19. Too early to say.
7) Thing work better when your population is more intelligent. The USA and most Western countries have more just plain stupid uneducable NPCs wandering around generally effing things up.
Plus a bunch of intangible stuff, the flavor of which I may be unable to adequately transmit. but I think 1-7 explains most of the variance.
Zaphod:
That’s more clear. Thanks. Though I’d like to see official discussion.
How does nucleic acid test compare with PCR?
@Huxley:
Nucleic Acid test doesn’t have that x30+ Amplification Factor. False positives don’t make for good policy decisions if your policy is to actually contain the disease and not grow your bureaucracy.
I should add (8) a pragmatic willingness to iterate solutions to above list.
It’s actually not hard.
Watch Vietnam and Singapore over next few weeks too.
Vietnam is dealing with similar situation to TW off low vaccination threshold.
Singapore is mostly vaccinated and is attempting to open up and let Delta be Delta… If it doesn’t work they’ll quickly adjust approach.
@Huxley:
“Though I’d like to see official discussion”
Has the last year or so not cured you of this malady?
NPC: Citations?
BAP: Both Barrels.
🙂
PS: If you don’t know who BAP (Bronze Age Pervert) is, you’re in for a real treat!
“Pashtuns might be even harder to eradicate than Jews….”
..And BTW (of course), “[f]alse positives [DO] make for [fabulous] policy decisions if your policy is to [totally screw over your political opponents and destroy the body politic you were elected to serve]…”
…which is, to be sure, exactly what you intimated…
(Goes without saying that it must be a Democratic Party sorta thang….Hobby? Pastime? Game?)
Never rains but it pours. Then again you should see some of my relatives.
Um, er, no thanks….
But coming right up:
The Taliban apply for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return!!
(Of course, this is precisely what the Palestinians oughtta do…after mass converting to Judaism!… I really can’t imagine a more genuine reason to convert…though the love of such delicacies as roasted lamb in yoghurt sauce might prove a bit of an impediment, but then isn’t that why they invented soy- or cashew-based yoghurt, etc?…)
Re: Official discussion…
Zaphod:
Yes, I would like there to be official discussion of Taiwan’s Covid measures. If what they are doing is working — I have reasonable trust in their statistics — we should be learning from them.
It would be a measure of our society working, trying to solve a serious problem, rather than turning everything into a crisis which must not be wasted and used to forward a political agenda.
I take no pleasure in seeing things this screwed up.
Alas not all is peaches and cream (dates and rose water?) in the new Afghani Tribal Paradise:
(Though it is not all that dissimilar from Israeli politics and they could likely adapt with perhaps not too much effort.)
Anyway, everything one wanted to know about Taliban2.0 but were afraid to ask: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/313329
(In fact, their good friend “Biden” may well be called in to “mediate” out the wrinkles between them….)
“…solve a serious problem…”
All very well and good.
Except that the CDC and its Democratic Party/Deep State masters are NOT (and never have been) trying to “solve the “serious problem” of COVID-19.
Perhaps this should be put differently:
The Democratic Party/Deep State are going all out to solve the “serious problem” of Donald Trump and his supporters, IOW solve the “serious” problem that is more than half of the USA…
…leading to the absolute need for across-the-board “mail-in voting” in 2022 and, if necessary, 2024.
…IOW, leading to the cementing in place of the Union of Soviet Socialist States.
…which the prolongation of the COVID crisis will, as they see it, enable them to accomplish.
…so that the definition of “solve” here is not what it appears to (or ought to) be.
Except that the CDC and its Democratic Party/Deep State masters are NOT (and never have been) trying to “solve the “serious problem” of COVID-19.
Barry Meislin:
Which was my point.
@Huxley:
“Yes, I would like there to be official discussion of Taiwan’s Covid measures. If what they are doing is working — I have reasonable trust in their statistics — we should be learning from them.
It would be a measure of our society working, trying to solve a serious problem, rather than turning everything into a crisis which must not be wasted and used to forward a political agenda.”
Ah.. Gotcha.
What you’re describing is some Civics Class version of how enlightened liberal democracies / open societies supposedly work. Seems like FT and The Economist and WaPo and just about everybody went to the same elementary school. Except that’s not how Liberal Democracies *are* working in Base Reality at present. The model is obviously wrong. So it makes sense to look for a model which describes more accurately how things are being done and looks for explanations as to how and why it evolved to be this way.
Well Curtis Yarvin’s theory here in a nutshell is that the problem is that the technocratic experts have been corrupted by power. Ideally they shouldn’t have any power at all. Once you give scientists and technocratic types real power, they cannot help but be Gollumed by it.
He talked about this in an interview with Tucker Carlson a few days ago:
Political Correctness, Baizuos, all that other stuff doesn’t help… but even if they didn’t exist, there would still be problems with corruption of ¡Science! — less of a problem when Emperor Xi or Buonaparte or some King has all the Power and Scientists serve at his pleasure. This goes against our most sacred current Western religion though.
IOW, EVERYTHING has been politicized.
EVERYTHING is now being exploited and manipulated as an excuse to achieve absolute power, while destroying one’s PERCEIVED political opponents (IOW, all those one believes are obstacles, or potential obstacles, to one’s achievement of SACRED ABSOLUTE POWER).
Pretty simple. Pretty basic. (And you can’t get more anti-Founding Fathers than that.)
Me? I blame Foucault. (And all those “sophisticates” who bought into his twisted analysis all the while making the supreme effort to ignore his hypocritical love affair with the Mullahs…but then hypocrisy IS the name of the game.)
Fantastic article on the debt the Founding Fathers paid to Ancient Rome (and in particular Aneneas, its founder), on the personal, civic and national virtues, on America’s current predicament and, tangentially, on why the barbaric Progressive wave must destroy the Classics at all costs. https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/a-new-order-for-the-ages/
H/T Powerline blog.
Interim numbers showing the downside of Dem Party rule. It’s still early, too
this is precisely what the Palestinians oughtta do…after mass converting to Judaism!…
They’d have to travel to Britain or North America and locate an Orthodox rabbi willing to instruct them. Pretty sure Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist conversions do not cut it under Israeli law. If I’m not mistaken, the number of f/t Orthodox rabbis in the US and Britain is under 500.
If you’re married to someone born of a Jewish mother, or are a 1st or 2d degree relative of someone born of a Jewish mother, you can settle in Israel in conjunction with your Jewish relation, but you’ll be recorded in official data as a gentile resident.
All very true; but perhaps this fellow and his org. will help them out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavei_Israel
After all, many of those villages were Jewish before the Arab/Mohammedan conquest.
(OK, that’s about 1350-1400 years ago but who’s counting?…)
Note: “Shavei Israel” means “Those who return to Israel”.
Art Deco:
There’s no reason a gentile married to a Jew should be considered Jewish, unless that person has converted to Judaism.
But by the way, Reform and Conservative conversions are now accepted in Israel. All conversions including Reform were already acceptable if they are done outside of Israel, but this new ruling apparently allows Israeli ones as well.
As far as who is entitled to be a Jew according to the Law of Return, it goes like this:
The rights of a Jew under this Law and the rights of an oleh under the Nationality Law, 5712-1952***, as well as the rights of an oleh under any other enactment, are also vested in a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew, except for a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion.
If I am reading that statute correctly, all those people have VESTED rights to come to Israel as Jews, which means they would not need to be coming with the Jewish grandparent, etc.. At least, that’s the way it reads; I haven’t looked at the case law and don’t have time to do so right now, but in a quick search I didn’t find anything that says otherwise. Nor did I find anything that indicates such people would be considered gentiles, but I did find some articles on Russian immigrants that indicates that some percentage of them have until recently been considered “no religion.”
With the more recent change in conversion laws I think some of the things you describe have changed or are changing.
God bless Ed Driscoll.
During the recent Left/Education topic I was trying to remember an old quote distilling the literary contempt for the middle class. This afternoon Ed dug it up, synchronicity-style, for me:
______________________________
In his 2014 history of the American left, The Revolt Against the Masses, Fred Siegel wrote, “The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s.‘Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class.’”
The one time I met neo in person was when she was visiting Ed Driscoll in the Bay Area.
“If you’re married to someone born of a Jewish mother, or are a 1st or 2d degree relative of someone born of a Jewish mother, you can settle in Israel in conjunction with your Jewish relation, but you’ll be recorded in official data as a gentile resident.”
I just *Looooooove* Ethno-States. My Archaic Farmyard Dutch and Bog Flemish are a bit fuzzy and I can’t quite remember the technical term for Apartness / Separateness(*).. Never mind.. I’ll look it up later. So can I start one too for Whites? Pretty please! Which forms do I need to fill out at which window?
*Ironic, really, that the South African Jews supported, the ANC en-masse and then having helped collapse the ***Apartheid*** regime for Plain Old Unchosen Whypeepo promptly decamped en-masse for their own Levantine Ethno-state or Greater Hampstead (practically the same thing :P).
Zaphod:
How is South Africa doing these days in your view?
Are they close to going full Zimbabwe? (Never go full Zimbabwe.)
@Huxley:
And what do you live under but the Dictatorship of the Upper Middle Class?
Obviously there are a bunch of Oligarchs pulling strings to navigate the barque of state in certain directions which suit them, but the daily tyranny you may experience is more than likely to be conceived, directed, and enforced by members of the Middle Class.
The Good Bourgeois Rules Best is just another Civics Class Myth. It’s a fable we tell ourselves of how things ought to be. Is/Ought. I’m not the resident philosopher, but I dimly recall someone had something to say about the distinction once. Or twice.
In reality, the Middle Class *is* tyrannical. I’m not saying that’s good or bad or proposing alternatives here. I’m merely gnawing away at the leg of the chair you’re sitting on. As always, welcome! 😛
@Huxley:
Re Seffrica:
Not well.
Ed Dutton interviewed an Afrikaner several days ago about daily life there.
Look at your local university or city government and all the associated little tyrants and busybodies. Are they working class? Are they oligarchs? Nope… They’re Middle Class. Every time someone makes you sort your trash in some ridiculous way or forces you to sit through some Diversity Training or rubs some sexual degeneracy in your face while you’re just trying to catch up on the news — the people who did that to you mostly were Middle Class from long line of Middle Class ancestors.
You *do* live under the Dictatorship of the Vanguard of the Middle Class. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Maybe the Middle Class is not all that it’s cracked up to be?
Yes… I know you don’t like listening to YouTube videos and similar. Still… if you want to understand how things are in Albuquerque and you’ve only just arrived in town… Would you not go looking for a mix of taxi drivers and people in bars and coffee shops and supermarkets as well as reading the Albuquerque Journal? Because if you want something you can read, it’s probably going to be written by Progressives … or it wouldn’t be in print. And there’s something about the back and forth of conversation which conveys more than the written word can.
Now I am a voracious reader and have a low tolerance for the low information density of human back and forth conversation…. But I reluctantly concede that we miss out on much of the bigger picture when we ignore it.
Zaphod:
I confess I’ve lost track of your background. I know you’re not American and you’ve been around much more than I have, particularly in the East.
Glad to have you aboard.
However, there is a huge American difference between the Middle Class and the Upper Middle Class, at least in the terminology I would use. The Middle Class happily includes the Working Class, for now at least. The Upper Middle Class are the college grads who made good or their children who hope to make good and sup at the bottom of the Elite table.
The Upper Middle Class and its wannabes are the people like Parrington who spit upon the Middle Class folk — those who do their jobs, raise their children, used to watch football on the weekends and now cheer for Trump.
***
As to podcasts/Youtubes… Sure I’ll go to cafes, talk to people in the shops etc. to get a feel for the pulse of Abq. But there are googly-hours of audio/video out there and I just won’t sit through almost any of it, unless it looks good or someone really, really makes it sound worth it.
Tossing a link at me doesn’t cut it.
[Daryl Hall & John Oates] remain the most successful duo, ahead of the Carpenters, the Everly Brothers, and Simon & Garfunkel.
The upper middle class used to be the small business owners which included the lawyers and the doctors who had their own offices. Middle class is as you stated and included so called working class with the distinction being white collar or blue. Middle class had some assets.
Lower class didn’t and lived pretty much paycheck to paycheck and owned little but could move up by saving what they could.
The change is that now the Democrats see the upper middle class as the college educated who work for government, NGOs, and large corporations. The rest and the old middle/working class are just said to be the always hated bourgeois now.
There was a few days ago questions on the rifles of the Boers.
Here’s a video about rifles for the Transvaal as opposed to the Orange Free State which I commented on then.
@ huxley > “The one time I met neo in person was when she was visiting Ed Driscoll in the Bay Area.’
I’m jealous.
I’m also peeved that I had to look up all three of those people in Wikipedia – clearly, I should already be familiar with their work! (I do occasionally see Ed’s posts at Insty.)
This old article helped me partially remedy that situation; it’s an excellent interview with Siegel reviewing his book again after Trump’s election, and presents much of the same information and arguments we cycle through here. https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/02/02/the-revolt-against-the-masses/
This section, however, did not age well.
Siegel: A lot will depend on events. First we have to see what happens with the 2018 midterm elections. The party of first-term presidents usually does terribly in the first midterm election – Obama lost 62 seats in 2010. So it’s entirely possible that the Democrats could take control of Congress. Trump’s tax plans alone have imperilled Republicans in high-tax states like New York and California. But if the economy holds up in 2020, it’s going to be very hard for Democrats to defeat Trump. Who’s going to run against him? Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker – it’s hard for me to see any of them being particularly strong. The strongest candidate really is Oprah Winfrey.
My biggest complaint about Siegel’s views (and I agree with him nearly 100%) is that the use of the word “liberals” to denote what we now recognize as socialist-progressives aka The Left does a great disservice to the original Liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment.
He is not unique in that regard.
@geoffb:
Thanks for that Forgotten Weapons YouTube link. Some of the comments are very interesting too.
Still quite a few Jews left in The Republic of South Africa.
True that more than a few decamped (mostly to Oz, Canada, the US, the UK, and some to Israel).
Even more interesting/amazing is that in spite of the antagonism and hostility of the South African government (such as it is) and much of the “progressive” (so-called) academic, political and media—as well as some radical Jewish—cohorts toward the Jewish State, there is a considerable amount of philo-semitism and admiration for Israel (mostly) amongst the significant Black Christian population.
Some of that support is outspoken, emphatic and unwavering. Those people are truly heroic given what they’re up against….
@Barry Meislin:
(Discussing Philosemitic Black Christians)
“Some of that support is outspoken, emphatic and unwavering. Those people are truly heroic given what they’re up against…”
A bit more concern for Afrikaner White Christians might be in order. Even if their ancestors stopped your ancestors killing Spinoza 🙂
And fact remains that there is a bit of a stereotypical tendency to Tikkun things up a bit and then decamp to greener pastures when the tinkering effs things up (as it generally does). My fervent wish is for some ceasing and desisting with this behaviour pattern. And be it noted that I’m no fan of the USA or other Western countries or any country for that matter messing with other people’s ways of living. Recent events have taught us just how fraught this can be.
@ huxley – The post that follows Driscoll’s quotes from our own Gerard’s memories about 9-11.
The smoke and the ash still moved in the street outside and high overhead. The day was still darkened but the initial violence of the blast and the wind had passed.
In time, everyone had passed by as well and the street was empty except for the settling smoke. I looked outside the window where a Japanese maple grew and noticed that its wine-dark leaves were covered with small yellow flecks. I looked down at the sill outside the windows and saw the yellow flecks there as well.
At some point in the next few minutes, it dawned on me that there would be few bodies found in the incinerating rubble across the river. I knew then — as certainly as I have ever known anything — that all those who had still been in the towers had now gone into the flame and the smoke and that, in some way, the gleaming bits of yellow ash were their tokens, were what they had become in that plunging crematorium.
And I knew that all they had become had fallen upon us as we ran in the smoke; that we had breathed them in when the wind reached us; that they were covering the houses and the sills and the cars and the sidewalks and the benches and the shrubs and the trees all about us.
What they had become was what the wind without a storm had left behind.
“[First published in real time on The Well, as it unfolded, September 11. And to be republished on this day as long as I shall live. Never forget. Never forgive.]”
Yes, you’re absolutely correct about that. The plight of South Africa’s impoverished Whites is dire—as is the plight of SA’s other impoverished populations, all of whom suffer when the government is an unrepentant kleptocracy—and yes, they do fall under the radar.
While I don’t know enough (or much at all, actually) about the subject, I would assume that Black Christians in SA, or most of them, are equal-opportunity worshipers and do-gooders; i.e., concerned about all who are in need (in keeping with their faith, at least in theory—though surely, it is not unnatural or blameworthy to focus on one’s own group).
And yes, the problem with “Tikkun Olam” is that it has too often been misunderstood and thus usurped by an overarching top-down socialist ethic, which all too often proves the adage that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
It should be noted, though, that this is not always the case and that good intentions, including philanthropy (though this last can be—and has been—maligned) are intended to help—and do help—the larger society, with a stress on the less privileged. This is, certainly, not only a Jewish issue: one has only to look at all the benefits and assistance provided by the 19th-20th “Robber Barons” to American society, for example.
(N.B. I’m not referring to such psychopaths as the Sackler family…but it can be a very fine line…)
BTW, AFAIK, Spinoza was excommunicated (place in a state of Herem or Cherem—similar to Haram, in Arabic) by the Jewish leadership in Amsterdam and therefore commanded to be shunned by the Jewish community; however, nowhere do I recall him placed under sentence of death; in fact, the Jewish leadership could NOT have done that…
A commenter on Driscoll’s post had a book recommendation.
I have been reading a book called Humankind by Rutger Bregman. In it I found this on how power corrupts, on page 229:
“Power appears to work like an anaesthetic that makes you insensate to other people. In a 2004 study, three American neurologists used a ‘transcranial magnetic stimulation machine’ nto test the cognitive functioning of powerful and less powerful people. They discovered that a sense of power disrupts what is known as mirroring, a mental process which plays a key role in empathy. Ordinarily, we mirror all the time. Someone laughs, you laugh, too; someone yawns, so do you. But powerful individuals mirror much less. It is almost as if they no longer fell connected to their fellow human beings”
That would really explain much of what we see in politicians
Or, as another one remarked, “They are all sociopaths.”
Here are two reviews of the book, positive and negative (despite the URL), although neither includes the above excerpt.
Now *this* is a movie needs to be pirated and disseminated widely.
Antonioni’s Big Chinky Film it ain’t.
@ Zaphod –
You quote Curtis Yarvin quite often, so I thought you might be interested in this article. It’s not a fan letter, but it does clarify the viewpoint of at least one NR author.
How did the red pill go from pop culture to right-wing Internet politics? In an excellent essay for The New Atlantis, Geoff Shullenberger identifies a kind of dual-track origin for the red pill as a political neologism. It seems to have come out of the “manosphere,” which he describes as “an array of misogynist subcultures united around the belief that feminism controls modern culture and men must free their minds of its influence,” around 2009. Contemporaneously, it also popped up in the writings of California computer programmer, neoreactionary blogger, Peter Thiel associate, and now Tucker Carlson interviewee Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin, as Shullenberger puts it, “claimed to offer readers an alternative to the propaganda of the ‘Cathedral,’ his term for the complex of state bureaucracies, the university system, and the mainstream media that together prop up liberal rule.” Yarvin’s thought has been promoted by The American Mind, a publication affiliated with the Claremont Institute. In 2019, The American Mind introduced an essay written by Yarvin by calling him “one of the most influential and controversial figures on the online Right” and claiming that “as the political scene across the internet has fragmented with explosive growth, some factions have taken concepts Yarvin introduced — such as the ‘red pill’ metaphor associated with The Matrix — and popularized them, sometimes in unhealthy and extremist ways.” It decided to give him a platform to explain and defend himself and has since featured work by him and other, similar writers.
@BarryMeislin:
“While I don’t know enough (or much at all, actually) about the subject, I would assume that Black Christians in SA, or most of them, are equal-opportunity worshipers and do-gooders; i.e., concerned about all who are in need (in keeping with their faith, at least in theory—though surely, it is not unnatural or blameworthy to focus on one’s own group).”
Christian Universalism seems to be a one-way street in that it’s usually or even mostly overly-altruistic Whites doing that thing. So far as I can tell — and doubtless there are exceptions — in non-Western parts of the world Christianity tends to work along ethnic and/or socioeconomic lines.
e.g.
In South Korea, basically being Christian and not Buddhist marks you out as belonging to the more educated scholar class.
In HK there is more social cachet to being Roman Catholic because it is associated with the most academically exclusive private schools.
In South America or the Philippines being a Mormon or a Seventh Day Adventist is kind of associated with having your #$%^ more together and having a metaphorical White Picket Fence cf. the more drinking, gambling, fornicating, lackadaisical Popish Syncretic Fellaheen.
In India there’s a definite Lower Caste whiff about Christianity (If you were a Brahmin or Bombay Stock-jobbing Millionaire Jain why give it all up?).
etc… etc.
But in all cases there’s almost something, you know, Tribal and In-Group about them. Very different to your average White Christian who thinks he’s doing everyone a favour by sponsoring Hmong, Sudanese, Afghans to come live in his community.
Africa… Well I’ll bet you Shekels to Bagels that the proponents on both sides in the late Rwandan Unpleasantness were belting out hymns on any given Sunday prior those unhappy events.
So, I don’t necessarily set much store by Christian affiliation of a minority in a sea of Zulu and Xhosa traditional juju worshippers (Witch Doctoring and the Medical Cannibalism of Albino Body Parts are making a big comeback). Doubtless there will be some martyrs. There always will. But I wouldn’t expect to go knocking on their doors for sanctuary when it kicks off either.
When the Mau Maus kicked off in Kenya, trustworthy old family retainers flipped overnight and murdered their White employers in their beds. Africa is kind of like that. Not all bad. They’re not all terrible. But you just never know.
Curiously I can remember small Bantu congregations doing full immersion baptisms along Durban Main Beach at dawn. Of course they sang. African harmonizing is incredible. Credit where due. My grandparents had a flat just off the Esplanade and I’d stay over sometimes and we would go out early for walks. In those days (early 70s) it was safe to walk unarmed in that area and in poor light. That was the beach early: Africans being baptised in the surf and Indian fishermen and their rowboats and sardine nets. I was too young to think in these terms, but it seemed in retrospect to be timeless.
I’m very much in favour of in-group preference and altruism. If everybody minded their own business the world would (mostly) be a better place. It’s not just a Jewish thing, of course. If anything the Puritan Strain is worse.
Zaphod:
Do you have a single clue why Israel was founded as a Jewish state?
And that quote about the law of return from another commenter (which is somewhat incorrect, by the way, as I pointed out in another comment of mine) is about who is automatically entitled to emigrate to Israel. There are plenty of non-Jewish citizens in Israel, and that includes Arabs, some of whom constitute a fifth column within the country.
But, funny thing, there are virtually no Jewish citizens anymore in most of the Arab countries where Jews had lived for millennia.
@AesopFan:
Thanks for the link.
Funny thing is that this morning I listened to a Z Man subscriber only podcast from last night and he was mocking Shullenberger for taking until 2021 to notice in print that there are these things such as the Red Pill (lucky he hasn’t met the Black Pill) and Yarvin. It’s like NR guys are living and grifting under a rock.
YMMV 🙂
But I will read him and see what he has to say. In advance of doing so, I’ll just state that NR & Cohorts have sat atop the commanding (hah) heights (hoh) of Conservatism (I die!) for like the last aeon or so… and yet look at where we are now today. So I’m somewhat prejudiced in favour of fresh approaches by fresh faces. Tomorrow certainly doesn’t belong to those doddering Neocons (I know, I know).
@Neo:
We’re all aware of why Israel exists. Some of us are a trifle rose-tinted when it comes to just how that nuclear-armed sausage was made. It was very far from all sweetness and light on one side and all darkness and savagery on the other. Personally I couldn’t care less about the dirty stuff. Everybody deserves their own ethno-state or at the very least the right to live separately and with rights of free association if it must be within a multi-racial state. Even if they don’t own nearly all the networks, studios and printing presses.
If White Americans could miraculously gain political power, would you object if they banned all immigration or only permitted (say) European Immigration? How about if they decided to build some lovely big walls… For example not just at the border. I mean black cities and ghettos are full of dangerous people… Kind of like Gaza, you might say.
I’m not criticizing these aspects of Israel. I totally love them. Even unto the get hold of your land by hook or by crook and then make up rules to suit your own people and nobody else. What I fail to understand (rhetorically speaking.. in reality it’s Humpty Dumpy and Who is to be Master) why it’s OK for Jews to pull these stunts but not White People in their own countries.
A lot of folks seem to have major cogdis about this. What’s good for the goose is not good for the gander… in fact the gander is being some kind of racist Nazi when he promotes doing as the goose does. But we’re never likely to agree on this.
Another Vesuvian belch from Fu Manchu’s flunky.
It appears that Xl’s concubine thinks that ancient offal and excrement can be sold as something new and shiney. As in, can you polish a turd? It appears that he is and does so.
No counting for taste, but remember, “eat sh”t, and die” is an unstated law of the copybook.
Zaphod:
Even your first sentence is silly and/or stupid: “We’re all aware of why Israel exists.” Who is this “we,” kemosabe? You don’t know what all of the people on this blog are aware of, much less most people in the US or elsewhere.
I have been astounded, actually, at how many intelligent (in the sense of high degrees from university) people I have spoken to who haven’t much knowledge if any of how Israel was created or why it exists. If you and I were to have an in-depth discussion on the subject – which I don’t have time to have here – I would bet that there are quite a few gaps in your knowledge as well. Of course, mine is not utterly comprehensive either. But I cannot speak for others, except for those with whom I’ve actually exchanged fairly lengthy words.
If you did know the how and why, then you would know why “White People in their own countries” are not analogous to Jews.
However, I defend the right of any country to limit immigration. I’ve never, for example, criticized Japan for its policies regarding immigration. It’s the right of a sovereign country to make such decisions.
The US has long been founded on immigration, and has decided to let a certain number of immigrants in every year. The method by which this occurs is (or is supposed to be) governed by law, and can be limited in any way. However, once people are here, the government does not and should not officially forbid ethnic or racial groups from living somewhere. We have a Constitution and amendments that forbid that, and you’ve given no indication of understanding the reasons behind that.
People are free to associate with whomever they wish, however. They are also free to live in cities or rural areas that are relatively homogeneous racially and ethnically – so far, anyway.
PS: Gaza is not Israel, so why you brought Gaza into the discussion is unclear. We are discussing internal/national regulations and barriers.
@ Neo et al.
You do realize that Zaphod is just pushing our buttons?
Or rattling our cages, or yanking our chains.
Whatever.
He reminds me of Milo Y – totally outrageous, until he starts talking seriously about something, and then quite lucid (for want of a better word just now).
However, there is definitely some value in presenting the alternative sides of the questions when he goes on a tear.
The chain yanking in question is a sublimated form of masturbation.
AesopFan:
Of course I realize Zaphod is trying to push our buttons. That’s why I said weeks ago that he is troll-like.
But not quite a troll. He has some interesting things to say at times, and sometimes is not pushing buttons, either. I actually think he’s not as well-informed as he thinks he is and that every now and then something actually penetrates and makes him think one iota differently. Perhaps I’m being too optimistic there, though.
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“9-11 never forget” to me means never again by any means necessary.
My apologies to those who view the world differently from me.
Today is a day of remembrance.
We must bow our heads and reflect upon the passing of Beau Biden. Beau was the pride and joy of the grifting Biden clan. His widow Hallie honored his memory by embarking on an affair with Beau’s noble brother Hunter. Hunter honored Beau by bedding Hallie while still married to Beau’s sister-in-law Kathleen. Hunter further honored Beau, Hallie, and Kathleen by also impregnating Ms. Lunden Roberts – an Arkansan basketball player and exotic dancer.
Patriarch Joe Biden has never acknowledged his grandchild birthed by Ms. Roberts. There is no evidence that President Biden has ever made the acquaintance of Ms. Roberts, much less sniffed her hair.
Hunter Biden is now an internationally acclaimed artist and a chip off the old block grifter like his dear old dad.
I tried posting a link here to a great YouTube video released today but I got an error message and now, can’t even read Neo-Neocon from my PC. Only from my phone.
Anyway, I suggest people who like the orchestral or ‘epic’ covers if pop music check out the timely release of Epic Orchestra’s (a YouTube channel) cover of Muse’s Uprising.
The timing is impeccable what with both Biden’s speech two days ago and 9/11’s anniversary today.
It has been a most strange 20 years since that morning, September 11, 2001 when we suffered a terrible loss of life and ended up with the crazy strange hoops we jump through to get on airplanes. Instead of profiling Middle-Eastern type young males our nation bent over backwards searching little children and old ladies so we would not hurt the feelings of those most likely to crash airplanes into important buildings.
Our learning curve that day was three planes and the forth plane the passengers took down, after the first three the unthinkable became thinkable and we would never have lost planes if we had just continued flying the same way we did on September 10, 2001.
Of course our intel folks could have been doing a better job and would certainly known what to look for, training people to fly planes without having to land them, what a sorry sad day 9-11 was and is.
OldTexan:
Back in 2003 or so I had a long debate with a guy about profiling at airports. He claimed that it would lead inevitably to concentration camps. I replied that the British, French and, of course, Israel profiled for terrorists without going the Auschwitz route.
But it didn’t have any effect on him. He just kept repeating his claim.
huxley, I wonder if that guy thinks, today, that demanding vaccine passports will lead to concentration camps.
Kate and huxley,
Well, check out Australia:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/08/26/australia-has-begun-building-covid-concentration-camps-n2594763
President Biden and Dr. Jill Biden attend a wreath laying ceremony at the Flight 93 National Memorial [Fox News]
Just noticed this headline at Fox News.
Why is is always DR. Jill Biden in the headlines and never DR. Rand Paul, DR. John Barasso, etc.?
Here is a list of actual MDs in the 117th Congress. Notice that 15 of the 17 are Republicans. That answers THAT question.
https://patientsactionnetwork.com/physicians-117th-congress
Fractal Rabbit:
Shocking.
An Australian commented here few weeks ago saying Australia wasn’t as bad as some news items seemed to indicate. I’d like to hear more from him. This sounds pretty bad.
I guess Australia is trying to go their version of the China route. Zaphod was persuasive that the Chinese managed to zero out Covid, at least until Delta, but I still have my doubts.
Worldometers shows Australia is having by far their worst surge of cases since the beginning: ~1700 cases/day. However deaths are low: ~6 deaths/day.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/australia/
Zaphod was persuasive that the Chinese managed to zero out Covid, at least until Delta, but I still have my doubts.
Or they managed to engineer a virus that doesn’t attack Orientals vigorously.
I’m unconvinced that any country will be able to zero out COVID.
The photo reminds me of Andrew Wyeth…
Hi Neo! Is that picture just south of Portsmouth, around Rye? Landscape looks very familiar.
Lots of salt marshes along the Connecticut shore, especially around the Groten area.
T– “Doctor” Jill Biden is not an MD, or a DO, DDS, DPH, or DVM, all of whom are entitled to be addressed as “Doctor.” She has an Ed.D. from Delaware’s state university on the basis of a limp dissertation about the only community college in Delaware: “Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs.” If you’re so inclined, you can read the PDF here:
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/jill_biden_dissertation.pdf
From the introduction: “Delaware Technical and Community College serves a highly diverse student body in terms of age, gender, race, and socio-economic status. The needs of the student population are often undeserved, resulting in a student drop-out rate of almost one third. This Executive Position Paper (EPP) will look at the needs of students in order to ensure a higher rate of student retention.”
Interesting that “Doctor” Biden– who used to teach English there– gets the name of the school wrong: There is no “and” between “Technical” and “Community.”
Demographics and other details about DTCC here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_Technical_Community_College
Here is an image related to 9/11. That flag with the lights arranged around it was put up by someone the day after 9/11 in 2001. It is just outside of Newtown, CT on I-84 eastbound. I saw it nearly every day for the next 10 years before I moved to TN permanently. According to Google street view, it was still there in November of last year.
All I hear is ” remembering the victims”..Lets not forget the motive behind 9/11.. HATE..HATE..Hate by muslims against our very being..hate that we treat women with respect.hate that we respect other religions..hate that our God is not vengeful..search the internet to find the muslims dancing in the streets after 9/11…They HATE us to our very core..STOP the whitewash and act on it..ISLAM is a cult of HATE…..find the interview with the airline employee who checked the hijackers in on 9/11..he said he had never seen such hate in a man’s eyes
.
” “Doctor” Jill Biden is not an MD, or a DO, DDS, DPH, or DVM . . . . She has an Ed.D . . . .”[PA+CAT @ 2:00 pm]
Yes, I know. That was the very reason for my post. In the media, (even at Fox) a degree in education requires the honorific title more so than an actual MD degree as long as you are on their proper side of the narrative.
It’s like Joe Biden’s well known bragging about his superior IQ. When you have to constantly flaunt the issue you probably lack its substance.
Perhaps my sarcasm was not overly sarcastic enough; I must be losing my touch.
DRcool#1 @ 2:10 pm,
Sounds like your talking about our ruling class.
T:
As I recall, Jill Biden made a stink about her “Dr.” title not being used and the media fell into line.
Which is not to say I disagree with you.
One wonders how we will commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the January 6 “insurrection”, which is presumably a much more dire event than September 11.
I can imagine the detainees, still awaiting trial, being allowed out to sing the prisoners’ chorus from Fidelio, then back to the dungeon.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RhMdMD9tXB0
So the former English teacher who wrote this and all the reviewers who read it didn’t spot the typo that jumped off the page at me: “The needs of the student population are often undeserved” – check out the last word in that sentence.
I’m unconvinced that any country will be able to zero out COVID.
Kate:
Well, me too. Although if you check the graphs on the countries like Vietnam and Australia it looks they came close until Delta.
Of course, one way to read their vulnerability to Delta is that because of their low early rates, they became the new low-hanging fruit for the virus.
huxley,
It’s very shocking. Week by week, the news out of Australia looks more surreal. Regarding, the comments a few weeks back by an Australian, I watch a YouTube channel called Shadiversity. Shad Brooks is a medieval weapons and history expert from Australia. I’m not sure where, since he keeps it somewhat vague for privacy.
But he was shooting a video out in public at a store couple days ago and there were no masks to be seen among any of the people shopping. I didn’t see any lockdown measures of any kind.
So, I don’t know what kind of government differences (like some kind of Down Under form of Federalism might be in play) or lockdown differences there are by territory. I’m just not informed enough about Australian civics and government.
Doctor” Jill Biden is not an MD, or a DO, DDS, DPH, or DVM, all of whom are entitled to be addressed as “Doctor.”
I think people with a serious research degree are properly so addressed. Podiatrists as well. Musicians (DMA), optometrists and holders of the PsyD degree, judgment call.
Not sure ‘public health’ is an occupation more serious than social work. (Epidemiology may be).
Sept 11, 2001
The TV was tuned to the morning news in my Brooklyn apartment
I was not watching, but heard unusual sounds coming from the TV
Watching, I saw that Tower One was on fire having “been hit by an airplane”
Leaving the apartment and walking a few blocks to the promenade, a walkway on the waterfront, I stood in shock seeing Tower One had been hit right where I had had an office just a few years ago
Hundreds of folks, maybe thousands, came to the promenade
There were no sounds of people talking, only the sounds of sirens on the other side of the river. The flashing emergency vehicle lights were uninterrupted on the FDR drive
Then I saw it. An airliner was making an odd maneuver over New Jersey. It flew into Tower Two. The sound was terrifying
Tears flowed, but there was complete silence
About an hour later, Tower One came down. No one could believe it. Then Tower Two
Grey soot started to blow toward us
All of the firemen in my neighborhood firehouse had been killed, their trucks destroyed
I discovered after almost an hour of fruitless phone calls that all my family members were OK
I have never been the same. I will never be the same
@Huxley:
Here’s Taiwan’s story with Delta. Everyone loves Taiwan. It’s a veritable Oriental Open Society, after all. Have a look at the graph.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan/
Delta got into Taiwan. They clubbed it down like a baby fur seal without creating a police state.
This despite PRC with malice aforethought pulling a bunch of stunts which meant that very few vaccines had arrived in TW before Delta.
Can be done without gulags and police state. Just requires magic sauce admixture of intelligent, non reflexively obstreperous, non-riddled with obesity, T2D, Metabolic Syndrome first world educated population and a competent government which doesn’t actively *hate* its population (this last bit true even of PRC).
Happy to add in some ArtDeco Race is Real Genetic Sauce. Is certainly possible this virus is easier on East Asians. Corona Viruses are nothing new here. So they may well have evolved as well as acquired during lifetimes more immunity. Pretty much every expat who moved to East Asia has tales of getting as sick as a dog during first one or two winters as they encountered new and unknown viruses. Happened to me way back too.
Beyond that could also be engineered to go easier on the Han. But like I said, Coronaviruses are less of a deal, naturally, here. Most of the time anyway. SARS1.0 was rather an outlier in that regard.
Only add the obvious, 20 years ago we went to war, half way maybe against some Islamic terrorists, today the American government armed them better than most small countries are.
Sad to add this to a beautiful picture I think could be South Carolina coast.
T, huxley, et al.: Jill Biden evidently told some media person that she went after her Ed.D. in the first place because she resented having mail delivered to “Senator and Mrs. Biden,” and decided on a doctorate as a way of confirming her independent identity. And she insists on being addressed as “Doctor” for the same reason.
As for JoJo’s superior IQ, it’s generally known that he finished in the bottom third of his class at an undistinguished law school, and he had had to admit plagiarism during his first year in law school–which sank his first run for the presidency in 1987.
Meanwhile, anyone having trouble with insomnia can read Jill’s dissertation.
As I recall, Jill Biden made a stink about her “Dr.” title not being used and the media fell into line. [huxley @ 2:25 pm]
Right. Therefore my comment: “When you have to constantly flaunt the issue you probably lack its substance.” This, unfortunately is especially common in social sciences and education.
“I think people with a serious research degree are properly so addressed.” [Art Deco @ 2:44 pm]
It’s not how they are properly addressed, it ‘s how they demand to be addressed. The underlying problem with many social science and education doctorates is that they are not necessarily awarded on the basis of critical thinking or critical thinking skills; i.e., in your own terminology, they are not serious degrees. That is NOT to say that all education or social science graduate degrees are unserious. Rather many of them are process degrees; put in your residential study time (i.e., coursework) and write a dissertation based upon some kind of survey which you design and carry out with minimal sampling because one person can only do so much.
Many of these terminal degrees (I’m tempted to say the majority of them) do not foster or demand the quality critical thinking skills that serious degrees require. IMO and experience, the more serious a person’s research and degree is, the less likely they are to flaunt it and demand its recognition — and vice versa..
JD Keene:
Thanks for telling your story. There were many casualties of that day that don’t appear in the statistics.
Art Deco:
I know a great many PhDs, and none of them use the title “Doctor”. They are allowed to, of course, but they don’t. This even includes the university professors I know personally, although it is more common among professors and is certainly sometimes used.
And the people I know have far more rigorous degrees than Jill Biden.
I don’t know what kind of government differences (like some kind of Down Under form of Federalism might be in play) or lockdown differences there are by territory. — Fractal Rabbit
I don’t have the reference, but I did read that in the area of health and health safety, the Australian states do have great autonomy to do as they wish. It probably isn’t generally equivalent to our U.S. federalism, but for the purposes of covid management it is roughly equivalent.
Which makes me wonder; is there possibly some interstate hatred developing? That is, the tightly locked down people hating on the AU states that are more open?
Like the photo and the gentle transition of green plant life that indicates it is low tide. So that some salt-water tolerant plants are high and dry at the moment.
Looks like 20 years is where they start to tell us that we should “move on” and “stop hating”. That it is pretty much all our own fault. We had it coming.
It’s noteworthy that Trump (prominent NYC citizen who made a huge contribution to the recovery effort) and Giuliani (who was the actual NYC mayor on 9/11) are not invited to the Deep State festivities.
I discovered after almost an hour of fruitless phone calls that all my family members were OK. — JD Keene
That reminds me that apparently the cell phone system was swamped and largely useless for making phone calls on that day. But someone said then and in possible future crises, text messages are the way to go. They reduce the load on the cell system by a 100-fold or more.
Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, the eruption of Mt. St Helens, the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, and 9/11. All memories that I can recall exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news. Only Pearl Harbor and 9/11 resulted in big changes to my life.
One of the things that has been so different about 9/11 is how fleeting the time of unity and national resolve was. The years of WWII were a time when people really sacrificed, stood together, and stayed the course. Yes, there were people who grumbled, a few with little faith in the government (A friend’s father refused to buy war bonds because he was sure the government would default)., and some who profiteered of the war effort. But we never saw the kind of antiwar protests and open antiwar activity as has been customary almost from the beginning of the War on Terror.
Like many Americans I knew little about Islam. The first book I read was “The Haj” by Leo Uris. It gave me a sense of the animosity between the Muslims and the Jews in the Middle East. Then I began reading about the Muslim Brotherhood and al Banna and Qutb. That gave me an insight to the thinking of radical Muslims who are basically Wahhabis. Although the Saudis are Wahhabis, they have carefully concealed their support for the Muslim Brotherhood and other anti-Israel, anti- American terrorist groups. Also, their oil reserves have been a shield for them. The world needs their oil.
Then I learned of the schism between the Sunnis and the Shias. That led to understanding that the fundamentalist Shias, represented by the theocrats that control Iran, are also deeply anti-modernity mirroring the Wahhabis.
I supported the idea of trying to turn Iraq into a Muslim democracy. Iraq had institutions – courts, lawyers, judges, property laws, an educational system, a functioning oil extraction industry, etc. – that seemed to offer an opportunity for democracy to take root. Although a minority of Iraqis are fundamentalists, they are the ones wiling to wage jihad and control the rest of the population. Any efforts to create democracy will fail because of their ideology and willingness to die for it.
So, here we are 20 years later. We have spent much blood and treasure and we are not that much safer from terror attacks than we were on 9/11/2001. What is the way forward? I believe it is in rethinking our strategy and tactics to deal with the realities. We can defeat the jihadis on the field of battle, but that does not change the way they view modernity. Their war on us will continue. Time for us to come up with ways to deter them that will work long term. Isolate them from the West? No more Muslim immigration? Refuse to do business with them? Start a Muslim reform organization that has worldwide scope? Ruthlessly retaliate whenever attacked? Always project an image of strength and resolve? Always live up to promises made to allies and enemies? I’m sure there ae people who know much more than me who have ideas that are worth pursuing. We have to learn from our mistakes.
JimNorCal,
Regarding Trump and Giuliani not being invited to the festivities, did you see GWB’s speech?
He denounced ‘domestic extremists’. But given his record on Trump and Trump supporters and, Liz Cheney’s words of support for his speech, it’ a pretty good guess that he wasn’t referring to BLM/Antifa but to the Jan. 6th “Insurrectionists”.
GWB just has his nose out of joint because Trump made Jeb! look like an idiot.
Alf Tupper > “The needs of the student population are often undeserved”
Considering how much the bulk of the student population needs certain things that are lacking in their lives – stable two-parent families, gainful employment, decent (non-union) pre-college education – their deficits really are undeserved, and cannot be redressed by the college.
Legitimate pedagogical needs will remain both undeserved and under-served because of the mediocrity and mendacity of our educational institutions.
Some of their “needs” are not part of any reasonable educational curriculum, and are peripheral things that they want to have (just like the Big Name Universities), and should remain under-served, because they don’t need them.
Whether or not they deserve them is debatable.
Dictionary trivia: a “want” did not formerly mean a “desire,” but a “lack” of something necessary. As in the hymn line, “Make all my wants and wishes known,” they were distinctly different things. Which makes a lot of old literature and nonfiction more understandable.
It is a pity we have conflated want with desire rather than lack, because now people’s “wants” are viewed as entitlements rather than privileges.
We were in Lyon, France on 9/11/01. It took us about 24 hours to be able to call our college-age children in NC.
J.J., one thing we can do, and must do, is stop avoiding honest criticism of radical Islam for fear of being labeled “Islamophobic.” The violent passages in the Koran and traditions are there. It’s up to American Muslims to teach their children that they must not follow the violent path. And Islam, like any other religion in our country, must deal peaceably with criticism.
@ Fractal > “Well, check out Australia:”
I might be open to the idea of quarantine facilities specifically for incoming migrants (aka illegal aliens) and the Afghanistan evacuees.
Period.
Proper respect –
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/rebeccadowns/2021/09/11/army-football-team-remembers-911-with-sea-of-american-flags-n2595730
(but you have to open a Tweet to see them)
When are conservatives and right-wing media going to quit feeding the beast that eats them?
J.J. —
I started studying Islam in college in the mid-80s, probably the last time it was acceptable for a professor to assign both Edward Said and Bernard Lewis. (I came down on the Lewis side, to be sure.) I’ve read and learned a lot more since, and nothing has changed my mind that of all the world’s great-as-in-large religions, Islam is the least conducive to human flourishing.
Yes, there was the Islamic “Renaissance” in the 800s. But it was mostly by and for and limited to Persians, and in any case was squashed when the Islamic scholarly authorities decided there would be no more speculation about natural law or religion allowed, in around 900.
I don’t know what we can do about Islam. It doesn’t seem like it can ever peacefully co-exist with nonbelievers over the long term, and if it were to “reform” it would cease to be Islam, so no believer will ever allow that.
For that matter, Islam doesn’t seem like it can co-exist with itself. Most of its internal problems historically stem from the conflict between the commandment that all Muslims should be brothers in the Umma under a single Caliph, and the reality that different ethnicities and nations want to have their own rulers.
I know a great many PhDs, and none of them use the title “Doctor”. They are allowed to, of course, but they don’t. This even includes the university professors I know personally, although it is more common among professors and is certainly sometimes used.
Worked for colleges and universities for 21 years. Absolutely standard for formal address. Never heard one object. In class, they generally refer to other faculty that way when they’re behind the lectern. Of course, their friends do not use courtesy titles, and neither do work-friends. And, no, they don’t answer the phone ‘Dr. Burnett’ as a physician might. But they get called ‘doctor’ or ‘professor’ a score of times every day by students and staff.
(I think my brother is introduced as ‘Doctor’ at professional conferences. Must check).
Yes, of course people with advanced degrees use them routinely in their professional settings. My daughter is referred to as “Dr.” at her university by students and colleagues. The question with Jill Biden is why she insists on “Dr.” when she’s not teaching or at professional conferences.
The underlying problem with many social science and education doctorates is that they are not necessarily awarded on the basis of critical thinking or critical thinking skills; i.e., in your own terminology, they are not serious degrees. That is NOT to say that all education or social science graduate degrees are unserious. Rather many of them are process degrees; put in your residential study time (i.e., coursework) and write a dissertation based upon some kind of survey which you design and carry out with minimal sampling because one person can only do so much.
Again, ‘education’ is a practice, not an academic discipline. Ideally, teacher-training programs are concerned with classroom instruction and hands-on learning in technique. The study of educational practice is properly distributed across several departments of the arts-and-sciences faculty – primarily psychology but also history, sociology, and political science depending on what aspect of the practice of education you are studying. You can also conceive of degrees in public policy which study educational practice and institutions. There should be no research degree in ‘education’. There is insufficient content in technical training to justify a clinical practice degree you’d call a doctorate, either. Have a gander at EdD programs. It’s wheel-spinning hooey.
You should not conflate doctorates in ‘education’ with those in ‘social sciences’. There are scads of bad scholars and bad programs as we live in a decadent age. There is nothing about the subject matter of social research disciplines which makes a research degree a pantomime.
Art Deco:
I already indicated it’s done in university settings by professors with some regularity: “This even includes the university professors I know personally, although it is more common among professors and is certainly sometimes used.” I am exceedingly familiar with university settings and PhDs.
But that’s not what I’m talking about when I say that the people I know don’t use it. One was a professor and was regularly called “Doctor” at the university, but never wanted to be called that outside of that setting (and didn’t even want it within that setting, although it was okay with him if people just naturally used it, which they sometimes did).
So what happens at the university is mostly irrelevant to this discussion. Jill Biden is not at a university nor is she presenting professional papers. We are talking about her non-university demand to be called “Doctor.”
and he had had to admit plagiarism during his first year in law school–which sank his first run for the presidency in 1987.
Stealing that woman’s law review article word-for-word didn’t help. The hammer blow was John Sasso’s video showing he’d appropriated Neil Kinnock’s family history lock-stock-and-barrel. That should have gotten him laughed out of office in Delaware three years later. Not sure Delaware Republicans ever made a vigorous effort to get rid of him.
but never wanted to be called that outside of that setting
Yes, the one faculty member I called a personal friend preferred ‘Sarah’. She was funny that way. My mother counted several medical doctors among her personal friends. They preferred ‘Edward’, ‘Don’, ‘David’, and ‘Porter’.
Art Deco:
I am not talking about what my friends wanted me or other friends to call them outside of professional settings. I am talking about what they wanted anyone to call them, even people they didn’t know well and with whom they were not on a first name basis. They just used their full names or “Mr.” or “Ms” outside of university settings (and for most of them, even within university settings).
Are you trying to be cute? I think you well understand I don’t mean what personal friends wanted me or other personal friends to call them.
One interpretation of the picture at the top of this post is that it shows what’s left of the ship of state, up Shit Creek, with no paddle.
Kate and Bryan, thanks for the input. In thinking about trying to live peacefully with Muslims, I have often wondered if eventually, when they realize that infidels don’t want to live with or near them because of their intolerance they might decide to reform. It took years of carnage before the Catholics and Protestants came to that conclusion. (With a few exceptions along the way.) Refusing entry to Muslims from certain Muslim countries (As Trump did) is one way of isolating them. Refusing to do business with bad actors (As Trump did with Iran) is another way to isolate them. There are some efforts by American Muslims to reform the religion towards tolerance for other beliefs. Zhudi Jasser is one Muslim in the U.S. that has been working toward reform. See this:
http://www.mzuhdijasser.com/
If he and his organization received more support from government he might make more progress. I’m convinced that we need such an organization with a global reach to make a difference. More Muslim leaders such as General al Sisi of Egypt need to speak out about the issue of intolerance.
I happen to live next door to a Muslim family. They are devout in dress and habit . I observe the old grandfather out praying frequently. They have been nice neighbors. We haven’t talked religion, but we converse regularly about other topics of the day. Three years living as neighbors and all is quiet and peaceful. I believe, until they prove differently, that they are reformed Muslims. 🙂
Are you trying to be cute?
I’m cute naturally. No trying necessary.
In commemoration, and for your celebrations of liberty, here’s Chet Atkins playing Stars and Stripes Forever:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8BDYETDM5c
and Karina Gauvin singing Handel’s “Felicissima quest’alma”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arsHg1KS_WU
A nice History of Jihad read from Robert Spencer will open eyes on why the jihad is a ongoing forevermore event humanity will never get rid of.
“You should not conflate doctorates in ‘education’ with those in ‘social sciences’.” [Art Deco @ 5:290pm]
I am not. My experience has led me to believe that these two disciplines are where the most numerous abuses take place. Rigorous dissertations demand that your work make an original contribution to the scholarship of the discipline. Social science and education dissertations are oftentimes more interested in the process (i.e., the pedagogy) of the discipline rather than in the findings. With the caveat that there is only so much one student can do, any study or survey with only 150 data points (say survey responses) presents no usable findings to further the profession; it is, at best, a starting point for future research. The cure for that is to take longer and do a more comprehensive study to expand the data, but then the department doesn’t crank out Ph.D.s at the rate that catches administrative eyes.
The faculty and departments, themselves, dilute the degree to the detriment of the discipline.
J.J. —
I have a friend who is a lapsed Muslim, although I hardly ever see him since most of my friends dumped me after my divorce. I also work with several Muslims (or did when I was still going in to the office). As far as I can tell, they’re all Westernized, but I still keep an eye out for symptoms of Sudden Jihadi Syndrome, like badmouthing their wife and daughter, or growing a chin beard, or switching to “traditional” dress.
When I lived in Indonesia (world’s most populous Muslim country), we couldn’t drive, being ‘infidels’ and thus subject to revenge killings if we were in an accident. I had a driver: Abdul was peacefully devout. His Saturdays were spent, with his family, in mosque. Most of his Sundays were spent in service to the mosque community, ensuring widows/orphans/impoverished were having their needs met. I found quite a bit to admire in this sincere devotion, and we had many conversations. He was representative of the country’s religious character I think, although there are other areas where the beliefs run more to the extremes (Aceh).
One can be peacefully Muslim, but it’s not the norm, in my experience living for some time in a few of these places (Egypt, Tunisia, Kazakhstan, Indonesia). Simple ignorance and fear of outsiders is the source of a lot of abuse toward ‘infidels’, and a good bit of it is the state-sponsored education in the Madrassas that are sponsored by Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Arab nations, that furthers this particular antipathy. The preponderance of violence-prone fundamentalists is above the critical mass required to bully the remaining larger fractions into submission, and keep them there. You won’t often find Muslim moderates that will muster the courage to take a stand. They are irrelevant, therefore.
One can win in places like Afghanistan if one approaches it with the type of iron will of, say, a Curtis LeMay, adopting a position of temporary murderous resolve without margins, that doesn’t stop until the enemy admits unconditional defeat or is dead. Do this with the rebels; put the women finally in charge of running society with a small remaining foreign peace force and let them raise their boys. That would have a chance of working. Highly Illiberal, unsparing of religious freedoms, and more than likely effective, which of course means the vocally squeamish could never let it happen. Better for the world to have our 9-11’s and Charlie Hebdo’s than confront the poison and appear un-progressive.
@Aggie:
“put the women finally in charge of running society …. and let them raise their boys. That would have a chance of working. Highly Illiberal, unsparing of religious freedoms, and more than likely effective, which of course means the vocally squeamish could never let it happen.”
But it happened to your society. And the one I grew to adulthood in.
🙂
Look around you. The problem is that the Gelded (once gelded) cannot Geld. All they can do is think that Others should suffer their own fate. But thinking is not doing.
The Eunuch’s Lament.
FWIW I lived in Indonesia, too… and was pleasantly surprised by the gentleness and devotion of especially the Central and Eastern Javanese more Abangan Muslim types. But remember those ones killed more ‘Communists’ per capita in 1965/6. This is one of the ‘Amok’ SE Asian Cultures. Which pre-dates Islam and Islam does not ameliorate. They’re very nice and gentle until they’re not. And then you’re beastly dead.
Aceh is really something. I’ve been to the Mesjid Aceh (Acehnese Mosque) in Georgetown Malaysia.. Some Acehnese moved there back in the day and immediately built a *fortress* for their mosque. Very warlike people.
@Zaphod, you almost seem to be objecting to Muslims killing off Commies. I’m well aware of the tendency of those people to run amok. It hasn’t been that long since some of them stopped hunting heads, in the eastern provinces. But they’re mostly not Muslim.
I contend that the Eunuch’s lament is preferable to the implacable jihadis rampaging their way across various failed states while destroying antiquities, and preferable to hijacked airliners used as attack weapons to slaughter and cause mayhem – the primary reason being they would be lamenting there.
In any case it’s all armchair Field Marshalling so…..
@Aggie:
Do you seriously believe there were 1M+ ‘Commies’ needed killing in Central and East Java in the 1960s? There’s a Mister McNamara has a great financing deal for you on a Ford Edsel.
The point is not to let Jihadis win. The point is to become as Men again.
Zaphod:
Those are impressive graphs on Taiwan and Covid. Readers interested in the issue should take a peek. It’s a powerful glimpse into a country which seems to handling Covid right.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan/
You explained, if that’s the word:
___________________________
Delta got into Taiwan. They clubbed it down like a baby fur seal without creating a police state.
This despite PRC with malice aforethought pulling a bunch of stunts which meant that very few vaccines had arrived in TW before Delta.
Can be done without gulags and police state. Just requires magic sauce admixture of intelligent, non reflexively obstreperous, non-riddled with obesity, T2D, Metabolic Syndrome first world educated population and a competent government which doesn’t actively *hate* its population (this last bit true even of PRC).
___________________________
I’d like to know more specifically what that means beyond a mostly non-obese population and Asian, which may or may not be as vulnerable as other races.
Is there any relationship between Taiwan’s strategy and Australia’s?
@Zaphod: “..not to let Jihadis win” Got it. You mean, like finding ..say, a Curtis LeMay, adopting a position of temporary murderous resolve without margins, that doesn’t stop until the enemy admits unconditional defeat or is dead. “?
@Huxley:
Covid policy is pretty much apolitical in Hong Kong, Taiwan, PRC. (Edge cases of PRC trying to mess with TW’s vaccine choices and some bleating from Hong Kong Indians and Pakistanis about their relatives caught overseas not being allowed in to start a Delta outbreak excepted). ~65-70% of the Hong Kong population utterly loathe the local government as being PRC stooges and Quislings.. but still grudgingly admit that they have handled Covid quite competently. The people at the top might be scum, but the rank and file are competent and not your Post Office and DMV types.
My contention is that Covid containment strategies in PRC / Hong Kong / Taiwan are roughly similar. PRC certainly has more rigor than the latter two and one could argue about whether Hong Kong or TW is tougher on control measures. Both have effectively zero local transmission and Hong Kong hasn’t had a single patient die since early July. PRC not famous for its honest statistics, but we’re all pretty good at China Watching and figuring out if things add up and cohere, and seems that they’ve had a handle on Covid since ca. July 2020. We’ve discussed that before.
Everyone just gets on with it. Might be some grumbling about slowness of adoption or illogicality of this or that policy and how long it sometimes takes to recalibrate as new data becomes available, but people realise that these are not hills to die on. There are elements of Them and Us in Hong Kong/Taiwan but politics doesn’t permeate *everything* — this is a disease of ‘advanced’ ‘democracies’. Separate quotes deliberate.
So if the government says ‘Wear Masks’ there isn’t a national panty-wetting about mask-wearing. People just wear masks. Surgical masks. Not great, but certainly better than getting on a crowded subway train and not wearing a mask or some useless unhygienic unwashed cloth face diaper. People get that masks offer marginal benefit, but marginal gains are good. They’re not going to LARP about Muh Liberty over them. Same goes for quarantine rules and testing.
Contrary to Western misunderstandings, Chinese are not Oriental Hive-Mind Automatons. They’re often extremely selfish and individualistic (i.e. Muh Kentucky Long Rifle + Lexington Green) but also *PRAGMATIC*. They tend to rapidly iterate toward whatever works, discarding what does not work — they disdain intellectuals who talk about what *ought* to work. So they quickly figured out that strict quarantine rules for incoming travelers work, targeted building and district lockdowns work, and keeping the population relatively calm by not hyping fear also works. And it has worked. I’m sitting in my regular Sunday coffee shop. Nobody in here is wearing a mask. Obviously you can’t eat and drink and wear one. Outside the monthly craft market is going on in the Plaza. Everyone out there is wearing a mask because that is the Rule. There are no police around, but the private security will politely ask you to put one on if you don’t wear one. Outside the Plaza where it’s beaches and lanes and houses and condos in parkland nobody cares whether or not you’re wearing a mask. In other words, rules are strict when need to be strict and relaxed where they don’t need to be. This seems to be beyond Western Governments.
Look, I can’t give simple answers. A lot of my long posts about this Covid thing are trying to give a flavor for how things work out here. Statistics and recital of rules just doesn’t get anywhere near explaining the whole Gestalt of it.
I don’t see Australia as being anything like Taiwan. Similar size populations sure. But utterly different peoples. In Australia a lot of the serious cases are amongst recent ‘Immigrants’ from places shouldn’t be allowed into the West… But it’s literally illegal to criticize other races in Australia so if a bunch of fat Arabs are dying in Sydney’s West, well too bad… have to lock down the entire city. If the Chinese Diaspora on Sydney’s North Shore are doing much better than everyone else… well can’t look at what they’re doing differently either. Lock everyone down.
And again you’re in a Western country where the Managerialist Elite have contempt for the ordinary people and get passive aggressive thrills out of locking them down and stopping them from earning income which the Managerial Class doesn’t have to worry about because can ‘work’ online manipulating words and BS.
This kind of divide doesn’t quite exist in the Chinese World. Rulers might think mighty highly of themselves cf. Joe Chinaman in his sampan, or his factory job… but they don’t actively *despise* him. They’re all in the same boat lifted on the same hopefully rising tide. This has not applied in the West for at least a generation now.
Frankly I’m sick and tired unto disgust and death with the West. Which makes me rant. As you know.
@Aggie:
Pashtuns might be even harder to eradicate than Jews. Both are very persistent peoples.
I think Whitey would do well to emulate their stiff-necked hardiness rather than go all in on Eunuchry.
Regular culling of Pashtun herd from orbit is OK by me. Wouldn’t expect even the most vigorous social engineering to work on them… Besides it’s cleaner to kill your enemy even if it be indiscriminately than to debase and pussify him.
Doing the latter dishonors oneself as much as it does the victim. Please consider this point.
Zaphod:
Thanks for the reply. Sorry to soak up that much of your time. Unfortunately, I still don’t get it.
In any event it seems weird that Taiwan et al. are doing *something* right, something different and beyond masks from the rest of the world, yet it’s not discussed at all.
Instead we compare Texas and California, or Sweden and Norway, which has been of marginal use at best IMO.
@Huxley:
I don’t think it’s very difficult to get the broad outline:
1) Have strict border controls and test and quarantine everyone who enters.
2) If there’s an outbreak in Building X then lock down Building X for 24 hours and make everyone in it get a compulsory nucleic acid test for the virus. Anyone who has it gets carted off to spartan but OK quarantine for 2-3 weeks until clear.
3) Contact Tracing. In order of decreasing rigor I would guess PRC > Hong Kong > TW.
4) Compulsory masking in public places. Enforced very strictly in crowded public spaces. Less so elsewhere.
5) Compliance with above is not a badge of political affiliation.
6) Possibly that wonderful social construct, Race / Genetics has something to do with it too re relative immunity to Covid-19. Too early to say.
7) Thing work better when your population is more intelligent. The USA and most Western countries have more just plain stupid uneducable NPCs wandering around generally effing things up.
Plus a bunch of intangible stuff, the flavor of which I may be unable to adequately transmit. but I think 1-7 explains most of the variance.
Zaphod:
That’s more clear. Thanks. Though I’d like to see official discussion.
How does nucleic acid test compare with PCR?
@Huxley:
Nucleic Acid test doesn’t have that x30+ Amplification Factor. False positives don’t make for good policy decisions if your policy is to actually contain the disease and not grow your bureaucracy.
I should add (8) a pragmatic willingness to iterate solutions to above list.
It’s actually not hard.
Watch Vietnam and Singapore over next few weeks too.
Vietnam is dealing with similar situation to TW off low vaccination threshold.
Singapore is mostly vaccinated and is attempting to open up and let Delta be Delta… If it doesn’t work they’ll quickly adjust approach.
@Huxley:
“Though I’d like to see official discussion”
Has the last year or so not cured you of this malady?
NPC: Citations?
BAP: Both Barrels.
🙂
PS: If you don’t know who BAP (Bronze Age Pervert) is, you’re in for a real treat!
“Pashtuns might be even harder to eradicate than Jews….”
Well (as they say, though it’s just about the last brew I’d recommend to ANYONE)…”This Bud’s for you!”
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/are-the-taliban-descendants-of-israel-678995
..And BTW (of course), “[f]alse positives [DO] make for [fabulous] policy decisions if your policy is to [totally screw over your political opponents and destroy the body politic you were elected to serve]…”
…which is, to be sure, exactly what you intimated…
(Goes without saying that it must be a Democratic Party sorta thang….Hobby? Pastime? Game?)
Or maybe this is their “Hobby? Pastime? Game?”…:
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/major-us-cities-are-becoming-fentanyl-infested-cesspools-millions-plunge-hopelessness
…or this?…:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/merit-system-unjust-because-it-rewards-productive-individuals-professors-argue
…or quite possibly, this (the political equivalent of Twister??):
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/gavin-newsom-opposed-vaccine-mandates-just-two-years-ago-biden-and-fauci-also-said-no
File under: “That’s Entertainment!” (at the Democratic Party Funhouse)!!
“…official discussion…”
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/fauci-no-firm-answer-why-americans-who-recovered-covid-19-should-get-vaccinated
…though of official liars….
@BarryMeislin:
Re: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/are-the-taliban-descendants-of-israel-678995
Never rains but it pours. Then again you should see some of my relatives.
Um, er, no thanks….
But coming right up:
The Taliban apply for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return!!
(Of course, this is precisely what the Palestinians oughtta do…after mass converting to Judaism!… I really can’t imagine a more genuine reason to convert…though the love of such delicacies as roasted lamb in yoghurt sauce might prove a bit of an impediment, but then isn’t that why they invented soy- or cashew-based yoghurt, etc?…)
Re: Official discussion…
Zaphod:
Yes, I would like there to be official discussion of Taiwan’s Covid measures. If what they are doing is working — I have reasonable trust in their statistics — we should be learning from them.
It would be a measure of our society working, trying to solve a serious problem, rather than turning everything into a crisis which must not be wasted and used to forward a political agenda.
I take no pleasure in seeing things this screwed up.
Alas not all is peaches and cream (dates and rose water?) in the new Afghani Tribal Paradise:
(Though it is not all that dissimilar from Israeli politics and they could likely adapt with perhaps not too much effort.)
Anyway, everything one wanted to know about Taliban2.0 but were afraid to ask:
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/313329
(In fact, their good friend “Biden” may well be called in to “mediate” out the wrinkles between them….)
“…solve a serious problem…”
All very well and good.
Except that the CDC and its Democratic Party/Deep State masters are NOT (and never have been) trying to “solve the “serious problem” of COVID-19.
Perhaps this should be put differently:
The Democratic Party/Deep State are going all out to solve the “serious problem” of Donald Trump and his supporters, IOW solve the “serious” problem that is more than half of the USA…
…leading to the absolute need for across-the-board “mail-in voting” in 2022 and, if necessary, 2024.
…IOW, leading to the cementing in place of the Union of Soviet Socialist States.
…which the prolongation of the COVID crisis will, as they see it, enable them to accomplish.
…so that the definition of “solve” here is not what it appears to (or ought to) be.
Except that the CDC and its Democratic Party/Deep State masters are NOT (and never have been) trying to “solve the “serious problem” of COVID-19.
Barry Meislin:
Which was my point.
@Huxley:
“Yes, I would like there to be official discussion of Taiwan’s Covid measures. If what they are doing is working — I have reasonable trust in their statistics — we should be learning from them.
It would be a measure of our society working, trying to solve a serious problem, rather than turning everything into a crisis which must not be wasted and used to forward a political agenda.”
Ah.. Gotcha.
What you’re describing is some Civics Class version of how enlightened liberal democracies / open societies supposedly work. Seems like FT and The Economist and WaPo and just about everybody went to the same elementary school. Except that’s not how Liberal Democracies *are* working in Base Reality at present. The model is obviously wrong. So it makes sense to look for a model which describes more accurately how things are being done and looks for explanations as to how and why it evolved to be this way.
Well Curtis Yarvin’s theory here in a nutshell is that the problem is that the technocratic experts have been corrupted by power. Ideally they shouldn’t have any power at all. Once you give scientists and technocratic types real power, they cannot help but be Gollumed by it.
He talked about this in an interview with Tucker Carlson a few days ago:
https://youtu.be/zsGbRNmu4NQ
Political Correctness, Baizuos, all that other stuff doesn’t help… but even if they didn’t exist, there would still be problems with corruption of ¡Science! — less of a problem when Emperor Xi or Buonaparte or some King has all the Power and Scientists serve at his pleasure. This goes against our most sacred current Western religion though.
IOW, EVERYTHING has been politicized.
EVERYTHING is now being exploited and manipulated as an excuse to achieve absolute power, while destroying one’s PERCEIVED political opponents (IOW, all those one believes are obstacles, or potential obstacles, to one’s achievement of SACRED ABSOLUTE POWER).
Pretty simple. Pretty basic. (And you can’t get more anti-Founding Fathers than that.)
Me? I blame Foucault. (And all those “sophisticates” who bought into his twisted analysis all the while making the supreme effort to ignore his hypocritical love affair with the Mullahs…but then hypocrisy IS the name of the game.)
Oh BTW:
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/members-congress-staff-exempt-biden-vaccine-mandate
Well Curtis Yarvin’s theory here in a nutshell is that the problem is that the technocratic experts have been corrupted by power.
Zaphod:
Which means that in the past they were less corrupted.
I don’t expect perfection. But in less than the antediluvian past — say, WWII and the Cold War — America was more functional.
I don’t consider it naive or foolish to consider a return to such a good thing. Nor do I consider improvement impossible.
American Pravda hard at it:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/09/l-a-times-uses-photo-making-it-look-like-larry-elder-slapped-a-woman/
And it looks like they’re going to have to find a new variant.
AND FAST.
(What’s that? “Lambda” is coming down the pike? Joined by “Mu”? Phew, just in a nick of time….)
https://www.city-journal.org/good-news-from-cdc-on-delta-variant-covid-pandemic
Time for “Biden” to defund college football programs.
(AKA “Superspreader” events….)
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/473356/
Fantastic article on the debt the Founding Fathers paid to Ancient Rome (and in particular Aneneas, its founder), on the personal, civic and national virtues, on America’s current predicament and, tangentially, on why the barbaric Progressive wave must destroy the Classics at all costs.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/a-new-order-for-the-ages/
H/T Powerline blog.
Interim numbers showing the downside of Dem Party rule. It’s still early, too
Chicago weekend shooting Sunday morning update: 47 shot, 5 fatally
https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-shooting-shootings-today-violence/11015200/
California surprise!
“Republicans told they already voted on the recall. Denied regular ballots.”
https://twitter.com/GwilymMcGrew/status/1437049295950082052
this is precisely what the Palestinians oughtta do…after mass converting to Judaism!…
They’d have to travel to Britain or North America and locate an Orthodox rabbi willing to instruct them. Pretty sure Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist conversions do not cut it under Israeli law. If I’m not mistaken, the number of f/t Orthodox rabbis in the US and Britain is under 500.
If you’re married to someone born of a Jewish mother, or are a 1st or 2d degree relative of someone born of a Jewish mother, you can settle in Israel in conjunction with your Jewish relation, but you’ll be recorded in official data as a gentile resident.
All very true; but perhaps this fellow and his org. will help them out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavei_Israel
After all, many of those villages were Jewish before the Arab/Mohammedan conquest.
(OK, that’s about 1350-1400 years ago but who’s counting?…)
Note: “Shavei Israel” means “Those who return to Israel”.
Art Deco:
There’s no reason a gentile married to a Jew should be considered Jewish, unless that person has converted to Judaism.
But by the way, Reform and Conservative conversions are now accepted in Israel. All conversions including Reform were already acceptable if they are done outside of Israel, but this new ruling apparently allows Israeli ones as well.
As far as who is entitled to be a Jew according to the Law of Return, it goes like this:
If I am reading that statute correctly, all those people have VESTED rights to come to Israel as Jews, which means they would not need to be coming with the Jewish grandparent, etc.. At least, that’s the way it reads; I haven’t looked at the case law and don’t have time to do so right now, but in a quick search I didn’t find anything that says otherwise. Nor did I find anything that indicates such people would be considered gentiles, but I did find some articles on Russian immigrants that indicates that some percentage of them have until recently been considered “no religion.”
With the more recent change in conversion laws I think some of the things you describe have changed or are changing.
God bless Ed Driscoll.
During the recent Left/Education topic I was trying to remember an old quote distilling the literary contempt for the middle class. This afternoon Ed dug it up, synchronicity-style, for me:
______________________________
In his 2014 history of the American left, The Revolt Against the Masses, Fred Siegel wrote, “The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s.‘Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class.’”
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/473434/
______________________________
The one time I met neo in person was when she was visiting Ed Driscoll in the Bay Area.
“If you’re married to someone born of a Jewish mother, or are a 1st or 2d degree relative of someone born of a Jewish mother, you can settle in Israel in conjunction with your Jewish relation, but you’ll be recorded in official data as a gentile resident.”
I just *Looooooove* Ethno-States. My Archaic Farmyard Dutch and Bog Flemish are a bit fuzzy and I can’t quite remember the technical term for Apartness / Separateness(*).. Never mind.. I’ll look it up later. So can I start one too for Whites? Pretty please! Which forms do I need to fill out at which window?
*Ironic, really, that the South African Jews supported, the ANC en-masse and then having helped collapse the ***Apartheid*** regime for Plain Old Unchosen Whypeepo promptly decamped en-masse for their own Levantine Ethno-state or Greater Hampstead (practically the same thing :P).
Zaphod:
How is South Africa doing these days in your view?
Are they close to going full Zimbabwe? (Never go full Zimbabwe.)
@Huxley:
And what do you live under but the Dictatorship of the Upper Middle Class?
Obviously there are a bunch of Oligarchs pulling strings to navigate the barque of state in certain directions which suit them, but the daily tyranny you may experience is more than likely to be conceived, directed, and enforced by members of the Middle Class.
The Good Bourgeois Rules Best is just another Civics Class Myth. It’s a fable we tell ourselves of how things ought to be. Is/Ought. I’m not the resident philosopher, but I dimly recall someone had something to say about the distinction once. Or twice.
In reality, the Middle Class *is* tyrannical. I’m not saying that’s good or bad or proposing alternatives here. I’m merely gnawing away at the leg of the chair you’re sitting on. As always, welcome! 😛
@Huxley:
Re Seffrica:
Not well.
Ed Dutton interviewed an Afrikaner several days ago about daily life there.
https://odysee.com/@JollyHeretic:d/Afrikaans-Activist-Willem-Petzer-Discusses-South-Africa's-Collapse-into-Anarchy:c
Zaphod:
Not sure of your point about the middle class, which I guess is a response to my Parrington quote.
Maybe the Dutton interview is good, but it’s an hour-and-a-half.
–Daryl Hall & John Oates – I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccenFp_3kq8
(God, that’s worse than I remember! But catchy.)
@Huxley:
Look at your local university or city government and all the associated little tyrants and busybodies. Are they working class? Are they oligarchs? Nope… They’re Middle Class. Every time someone makes you sort your trash in some ridiculous way or forces you to sit through some Diversity Training or rubs some sexual degeneracy in your face while you’re just trying to catch up on the news — the people who did that to you mostly were Middle Class from long line of Middle Class ancestors.
You *do* live under the Dictatorship of the Vanguard of the Middle Class. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Maybe the Middle Class is not all that it’s cracked up to be?
Yes… I know you don’t like listening to YouTube videos and similar. Still… if you want to understand how things are in Albuquerque and you’ve only just arrived in town… Would you not go looking for a mix of taxi drivers and people in bars and coffee shops and supermarkets as well as reading the Albuquerque Journal? Because if you want something you can read, it’s probably going to be written by Progressives … or it wouldn’t be in print. And there’s something about the back and forth of conversation which conveys more than the written word can.
Now I am a voracious reader and have a low tolerance for the low information density of human back and forth conversation…. But I reluctantly concede that we miss out on much of the bigger picture when we ignore it.
Zaphod:
I confess I’ve lost track of your background. I know you’re not American and you’ve been around much more than I have, particularly in the East.
Glad to have you aboard.
However, there is a huge American difference between the Middle Class and the Upper Middle Class, at least in the terminology I would use. The Middle Class happily includes the Working Class, for now at least. The Upper Middle Class are the college grads who made good or their children who hope to make good and sup at the bottom of the Elite table.
The Upper Middle Class and its wannabes are the people like Parrington who spit upon the Middle Class folk — those who do their jobs, raise their children, used to watch football on the weekends and now cheer for Trump.
***
As to podcasts/Youtubes… Sure I’ll go to cafes, talk to people in the shops etc. to get a feel for the pulse of Abq. But there are googly-hours of audio/video out there and I just won’t sit through almost any of it, unless it looks good or someone really, really makes it sound worth it.
Tossing a link at me doesn’t cut it.
[Daryl Hall & John Oates] remain the most successful duo, ahead of the Carpenters, the Everly Brothers, and Simon & Garfunkel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall_%26_Oates
Whoa!
huxley & Zaphod:
The upper middle class used to be the small business owners which included the lawyers and the doctors who had their own offices. Middle class is as you stated and included so called working class with the distinction being white collar or blue. Middle class had some assets.
Lower class didn’t and lived pretty much paycheck to paycheck and owned little but could move up by saving what they could.
The change is that now the Democrats see the upper middle class as the college educated who work for government, NGOs, and large corporations. The rest and the old middle/working class are just said to be the always hated bourgeois now.
There was a few days ago questions on the rifles of the Boers.
Here’s a video about rifles for the Transvaal as opposed to the Orange Free State which I commented on then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjSShy_Yr3U
@ huxley > “The one time I met neo in person was when she was visiting Ed Driscoll in the Bay Area.’
I’m jealous.
I’m also peeved that I had to look up all three of those people in Wikipedia – clearly, I should already be familiar with their work! (I do occasionally see Ed’s posts at Insty.)
This old article helped me partially remedy that situation; it’s an excellent interview with Siegel reviewing his book again after Trump’s election, and presents much of the same information and arguments we cycle through here.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/02/02/the-revolt-against-the-masses/
This section, however, did not age well.
My biggest complaint about Siegel’s views (and I agree with him nearly 100%) is that the use of the word “liberals” to denote what we now recognize as socialist-progressives aka The Left does a great disservice to the original Liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment.
He is not unique in that regard.
@geoffb:
Thanks for that Forgotten Weapons YouTube link. Some of the comments are very interesting too.
Also… Yodeling:
https://youtu.be/hVjNxV7qM90
Still quite a few Jews left in The Republic of South Africa.
True that more than a few decamped (mostly to Oz, Canada, the US, the UK, and some to Israel).
Even more interesting/amazing is that in spite of the antagonism and hostility of the South African government (such as it is) and much of the “progressive” (so-called) academic, political and media—as well as some radical Jewish—cohorts toward the Jewish State, there is a considerable amount of philo-semitism and admiration for Israel (mostly) amongst the significant Black Christian population.
Some of that support is outspoken, emphatic and unwavering. Those people are truly heroic given what they’re up against….
@Barry Meislin:
(Discussing Philosemitic Black Christians)
“Some of that support is outspoken, emphatic and unwavering. Those people are truly heroic given what they’re up against…”
A bit more concern for Afrikaner White Christians might be in order. Even if their ancestors stopped your ancestors killing Spinoza 🙂
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Slovo
Still, Friend George Galloway has your back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEgdzyTgUqE
As did Nelson Mandela:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18GeelXaOaA
And fact remains that there is a bit of a stereotypical tendency to Tikkun things up a bit and then decamp to greener pastures when the tinkering effs things up (as it generally does). My fervent wish is for some ceasing and desisting with this behaviour pattern. And be it noted that I’m no fan of the USA or other Western countries or any country for that matter messing with other people’s ways of living. Recent events have taught us just how fraught this can be.
@ huxley – The post that follows Driscoll’s quotes from our own Gerard’s memories about 9-11.
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/473436/
GERARD VAN DER LEUN: The Wind in the Heights.
As Ed says, “Read the whole thing.”
And his contemporaneous witness of that day.
https://americandigest.org/saw-notes-made-september-11-2001-brooklyn-heights/
“[First published in real time on The Well, as it unfolded, September 11. And to be republished on this day as long as I shall live. Never forget. Never forgive.]”
Yes, you’re absolutely correct about that. The plight of South Africa’s impoverished Whites is dire—as is the plight of SA’s other impoverished populations, all of whom suffer when the government is an unrepentant kleptocracy—and yes, they do fall under the radar.
While I don’t know enough (or much at all, actually) about the subject, I would assume that Black Christians in SA, or most of them, are equal-opportunity worshipers and do-gooders; i.e., concerned about all who are in need (in keeping with their faith, at least in theory—though surely, it is not unnatural or blameworthy to focus on one’s own group).
And yes, the problem with “Tikkun Olam” is that it has too often been misunderstood and thus usurped by an overarching top-down socialist ethic, which all too often proves the adage that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
It should be noted, though, that this is not always the case and that good intentions, including philanthropy (though this last can be—and has been—maligned) are intended to help—and do help—the larger society, with a stress on the less privileged. This is, certainly, not only a Jewish issue: one has only to look at all the benefits and assistance provided by the 19th-20th “Robber Barons” to American society, for example.
(N.B. I’m not referring to such psychopaths as the Sackler family…but it can be a very fine line…)
BTW, AFAIK, Spinoza was excommunicated (place in a state of Herem or Cherem—similar to Haram, in Arabic) by the Jewish leadership in Amsterdam and therefore commanded to be shunned by the Jewish community; however, nowhere do I recall him placed under sentence of death; in fact, the Jewish leadership could NOT have done that…
A commenter on Driscoll’s post had a book recommendation.
Or, as another one remarked, “They are all sociopaths.”
Here are two reviews of the book, positive and negative (despite the URL), although neither includes the above excerpt.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/rutger-bregman-our-secret-superpower-is-our-ability-to-cooperate
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/10/humankind-by-rutger-bregman-review-a-hopeful-history-of-our-nature
Reading them jogged my memory, and I found the joggering article.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
Spoiler: they were from a totally different culture than Golding’s characters.
“…joggering…”
An absolutely incredible tale. Thanks very much for the link, AF…
Belmondo!
Les Tribulations d’un Chinois en Chine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BuTspv6AQE
Now *this* is a movie needs to be pirated and disseminated widely.
Antonioni’s Big Chinky Film it ain’t.
@ Zaphod –
You quote Curtis Yarvin quite often, so I thought you might be interested in this article. It’s not a fan letter, but it does clarify the viewpoint of at least one NR author.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/the-myth-of-the-red-pill/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-in&utm_term=second
@BarryMeislin:
“While I don’t know enough (or much at all, actually) about the subject, I would assume that Black Christians in SA, or most of them, are equal-opportunity worshipers and do-gooders; i.e., concerned about all who are in need (in keeping with their faith, at least in theory—though surely, it is not unnatural or blameworthy to focus on one’s own group).”
Christian Universalism seems to be a one-way street in that it’s usually or even mostly overly-altruistic Whites doing that thing. So far as I can tell — and doubtless there are exceptions — in non-Western parts of the world Christianity tends to work along ethnic and/or socioeconomic lines.
e.g.
In South Korea, basically being Christian and not Buddhist marks you out as belonging to the more educated scholar class.
In HK there is more social cachet to being Roman Catholic because it is associated with the most academically exclusive private schools.
In South America or the Philippines being a Mormon or a Seventh Day Adventist is kind of associated with having your #$%^ more together and having a metaphorical White Picket Fence cf. the more drinking, gambling, fornicating, lackadaisical Popish Syncretic Fellaheen.
In India there’s a definite Lower Caste whiff about Christianity (If you were a Brahmin or Bombay Stock-jobbing Millionaire Jain why give it all up?).
etc… etc.
But in all cases there’s almost something, you know, Tribal and In-Group about them. Very different to your average White Christian who thinks he’s doing everyone a favour by sponsoring Hmong, Sudanese, Afghans to come live in his community.
Africa… Well I’ll bet you Shekels to Bagels that the proponents on both sides in the late Rwandan Unpleasantness were belting out hymns on any given Sunday prior those unhappy events.
So, I don’t necessarily set much store by Christian affiliation of a minority in a sea of Zulu and Xhosa traditional juju worshippers (Witch Doctoring and the Medical Cannibalism of Albino Body Parts are making a big comeback). Doubtless there will be some martyrs. There always will. But I wouldn’t expect to go knocking on their doors for sanctuary when it kicks off either.
When the Mau Maus kicked off in Kenya, trustworthy old family retainers flipped overnight and murdered their White employers in their beds. Africa is kind of like that. Not all bad. They’re not all terrible. But you just never know.
Curiously I can remember small Bantu congregations doing full immersion baptisms along Durban Main Beach at dawn. Of course they sang. African harmonizing is incredible. Credit where due. My grandparents had a flat just off the Esplanade and I’d stay over sometimes and we would go out early for walks. In those days (early 70s) it was safe to walk unarmed in that area and in poor light. That was the beach early: Africans being baptised in the surf and Indian fishermen and their rowboats and sardine nets. I was too young to think in these terms, but it seemed in retrospect to be timeless.
I’m very much in favour of in-group preference and altruism. If everybody minded their own business the world would (mostly) be a better place. It’s not just a Jewish thing, of course. If anything the Puritan Strain is worse.
Zaphod:
Do you have a single clue why Israel was founded as a Jewish state?
And that quote about the law of return from another commenter (which is somewhat incorrect, by the way, as I pointed out in another comment of mine) is about who is automatically entitled to emigrate to Israel. There are plenty of non-Jewish citizens in Israel, and that includes Arabs, some of whom constitute a fifth column within the country.
But, funny thing, there are virtually no Jewish citizens anymore in most of the Arab countries where Jews had lived for millennia.
@AesopFan:
Thanks for the link.
Funny thing is that this morning I listened to a Z Man subscriber only podcast from last night and he was mocking Shullenberger for taking until 2021 to notice in print that there are these things such as the Red Pill (lucky he hasn’t met the Black Pill) and Yarvin. It’s like NR guys are living and grifting under a rock.
YMMV 🙂
But I will read him and see what he has to say. In advance of doing so, I’ll just state that NR & Cohorts have sat atop the commanding (hah) heights (hoh) of Conservatism (I die!) for like the last aeon or so… and yet look at where we are now today. So I’m somewhat prejudiced in favour of fresh approaches by fresh faces. Tomorrow certainly doesn’t belong to those doddering Neocons (I know, I know).
@Neo:
We’re all aware of why Israel exists. Some of us are a trifle rose-tinted when it comes to just how that nuclear-armed sausage was made. It was very far from all sweetness and light on one side and all darkness and savagery on the other. Personally I couldn’t care less about the dirty stuff. Everybody deserves their own ethno-state or at the very least the right to live separately and with rights of free association if it must be within a multi-racial state. Even if they don’t own nearly all the networks, studios and printing presses.
If White Americans could miraculously gain political power, would you object if they banned all immigration or only permitted (say) European Immigration? How about if they decided to build some lovely big walls… For example not just at the border. I mean black cities and ghettos are full of dangerous people… Kind of like Gaza, you might say.
I’m not criticizing these aspects of Israel. I totally love them. Even unto the get hold of your land by hook or by crook and then make up rules to suit your own people and nobody else. What I fail to understand (rhetorically speaking.. in reality it’s Humpty Dumpy and Who is to be Master) why it’s OK for Jews to pull these stunts but not White People in their own countries.
A lot of folks seem to have major cogdis about this. What’s good for the goose is not good for the gander… in fact the gander is being some kind of racist Nazi when he promotes doing as the goose does. But we’re never likely to agree on this.
Another Vesuvian belch from Fu Manchu’s flunky.
It appears that Xl’s concubine thinks that ancient offal and excrement can be sold as something new and shiney. As in, can you polish a turd? It appears that he is and does so.
No counting for taste, but remember, “eat sh”t, and die” is an unstated law of the copybook.
Zaphod:
Even your first sentence is silly and/or stupid: “We’re all aware of why Israel exists.” Who is this “we,” kemosabe? You don’t know what all of the people on this blog are aware of, much less most people in the US or elsewhere.
I have been astounded, actually, at how many intelligent (in the sense of high degrees from university) people I have spoken to who haven’t much knowledge if any of how Israel was created or why it exists. If you and I were to have an in-depth discussion on the subject – which I don’t have time to have here – I would bet that there are quite a few gaps in your knowledge as well. Of course, mine is not utterly comprehensive either. But I cannot speak for others, except for those with whom I’ve actually exchanged fairly lengthy words.
If you did know the how and why, then you would know why “White People in their own countries” are not analogous to Jews.
However, I defend the right of any country to limit immigration. I’ve never, for example, criticized Japan for its policies regarding immigration. It’s the right of a sovereign country to make such decisions.
The US has long been founded on immigration, and has decided to let a certain number of immigrants in every year. The method by which this occurs is (or is supposed to be) governed by law, and can be limited in any way. However, once people are here, the government does not and should not officially forbid ethnic or racial groups from living somewhere. We have a Constitution and amendments that forbid that, and you’ve given no indication of understanding the reasons behind that.
People are free to associate with whomever they wish, however. They are also free to live in cities or rural areas that are relatively homogeneous racially and ethnically – so far, anyway.
PS: Gaza is not Israel, so why you brought Gaza into the discussion is unclear. We are discussing internal/national regulations and barriers.
@ Neo et al.
You do realize that Zaphod is just pushing our buttons?
Or rattling our cages, or yanking our chains.
Whatever.
He reminds me of Milo Y – totally outrageous, until he starts talking seriously about something, and then quite lucid (for want of a better word just now).
However, there is definitely some value in presenting the alternative sides of the questions when he goes on a tear.
The chain yanking in question is a sublimated form of masturbation.
AesopFan:
Of course I realize Zaphod is trying to push our buttons. That’s why I said weeks ago that he is troll-like.
But not quite a troll. He has some interesting things to say at times, and sometimes is not pushing buttons, either. I actually think he’s not as well-informed as he thinks he is and that every now and then something actually penetrates and makes him think one iota differently. Perhaps I’m being too optimistic there, though.