Month: June 2024

Jews and Christians Together

A reader of this blog recently opined, "And there isn't any "Judeo-Christian" anything: there is just Christian and Jew, and ne'er the twain shall meet." This provocative comment ignited some animated push-back from other commenters. And so it was serendipitous that I should stumble this morning upon Jews and Christians Together by Ian Speir. If my reader seeks to decouple the Christian from the Hebraic, Speir and those he quotes aim to bring them together, but in a way that seems to favor the Hebraic over the Christian. Here is a taste (bolding added):

Those ideas and values—mediated through the Bible, accelerated by the rise of the Christian West, and strained through the filter of the Reformation and the Enlightenment—found good soil in America. They are at the root of some of our country’s most fundamental convictions, like [such as]  human dignity and ordered liberty, the necessity of freedom of conscience, and the insistence that the common good is best secured when men and women are free to pursue lives of virtue. 

These civilization-shaping ideas do not depend upon the Constitution; they predate it. The Declaration calls them rights—though they are equally responsibilities—that are “endowed by [our] Creator.” They are more than a frame of government or a social contract. They form a civilizational covenant, transcending the ebb and flow of history and the politics of a particular moment. 

At times these values have been called “Judeo-Christian.” The better descriptor is “Hebraic,” a term that simultaneously captures their worldview significance and their biblical source. 

In his lecture, Cohen insists that the “Hebraic spirit” of America and of the West is now at stake.

I will leave it for you to decide whether the thought in the bolded passage goes too far in  the direction opposite to that of my reader. 

How should we characterize the spirit of America and the West? Off the top of my head, here are four options that may serve as a menu for further rumination:

a) The spirit of America and the West is not Hebraic but Christian with Christianity decoupled from Judaism. (The extreme  view of my reader which is nonetheless useful as a foil against which to contrast more plausible views.)

b) The spirit of America and the West is Hebraic-Christian with primary emphasis on Judaism. (This seems to be the view of Speir and those he cites.)

c) The spirit of America and the West is Hebraic-Christian with primary emphasis on Christianity which, while in continuity with Judaism,  supersedes and perfects it.

d) The spirit of America and the West is the spirit expressed in (c), and thus the spirit of Jerusalem but a Jerusalem supplemented and where necessary corrected and held back from fanaticism and 'enthusiasm' (Schwärmerei) by the enlightenment values of Athens (philosophy) both ancient and modern.  (This, I want to suggest, comes fairly close to the classically liberal spirit of the Founders who were men of the 18th century Enlightenment.)

This schema does not cover all the options, but may be of some use.  Of the four, I prefer (d). 

How Left-Wing Conspiracies Work

VDH:

Since 2016, there has been a clear pattern to left-wing conspiracies—beyond the obvious fact that they traffic in lies, stereotypes, and paranoia to serve precise political agendas.

We now know that the conspiracy to cook up the Russian-collusion hoax—Donald Trump allegedly conniving with Vladimir Putin to rig the 2016 vote—was perpetrated by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Its funding was hidden by the Democratic National Committee, the law firm Perkins Coie, and Fusion GPS.

The Russian “disinformation” laptop hoax—the notion that the same Russians four years later created a fake Hunter Biden laptop to smear the Biden family on the eve of the first 2020 debate—was jumpstarted by the Biden campaign’s then-chief foreign policy advisor, current Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

There was never much evidence that a wayward bat or pangolin in a meat market birthed the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the efforts of China, Western and international health officials, and Dr. Fauci’s health bureaucrats to spread that lie.

The January 6th riot was certainly wrong and buffoonish. But the idea that it was an insurrection aiming to violently overthrow the U.S. government was also a left-wing myth fueled by the Democratic House leadership and the media.

All these schemes have their commonalities:

Related:

Niall Ferguson, We're All Soviets Now

The Trump Conviction: It Depends How the Question is Framed

Donald J. Trump is a convicted felon.  Indisputably true. And so the question is asked: "Would you vote for a convicted felon for U. S. president?"

Time was when almost everyone, regardless of political affiliation, would have answered in the negative. For until recently lawfare was rare if not nonexistent in the USA.  When procedural norms were respected, a conviction meant something: to be found guilty in a properly conducted proceeding by a jury of one's peers was taken to be good evidence of actual guilt.

But no more. We conservatives are unmoved by Trump's being a convicted felon. We return an affirmative answer to a different question: "Would you vote for a victim of lawfare railroaded in a Soviet-style show trial for U. S. president?" Yes. For  to be 'convicted' of a 'felony' in a show trial  in which the procedural rules have been flouted has no tendency to show that the defendant is guilty of any crime.

A defendant found guilty of a crime in a court of law may or may not be guilty of the crime with which he is charged — even if the  courtroom proceedings were procedurally correct in every respect. And similarly if he were found not guilty. One may be found not guilty and yet be guilty. O. J. Simpson was found not guilty of the double homicide of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.  You will all remember that so-called 'trial of the century.'  But no one believes that Simpson did not do the dastardly deeds. Though found not guilty, his guilt stank and stinks to high heaven.  No one is looking for the 'real killer,' to adapt a verbal riff from the late F. Lee Bailey. So while the courtroom proceedings were procedurally correct,  the objectively wrong verdict was arrived at: found not guilty, Simpson was in fact guilty.

A fortiori in the case of Trump in which the procedural rules were set aside. Alan Dershowitz:

The infamous conversation between Stalin and the head of his KGB Lavrenty Beria is often quoted: 'Show me the man, and I will find you the crime.'

This prosecution was even worse because, though DA Bragg tried desperately to find a crime with which to charge Trump, he failed to find one, as did his predecessor Cyrus Vance.

So Bragg went a dangerous step further than Stalin ever did: he made up a crime.

He found a misdemeanor that was past the statute of limitations — making a false bookkeeping entry on a corporate form — and magically converted it to a felony that was within the limitation period by alleging that the false entry was intended to cover up another crime.

Throughout the trial, many people inferred that crime to be an alleged attempt at election interference. But Bragg never actually explicitly stated that.

In fact, the prosecution didn't tell the court what Trump's other 'crimes' were until their closing arguments on Wednesday – by which point the defense had no opportunity to respond.

And even then, the supposed crimes outlined were vague.

In his closing instructions, Judge Juan Merchan exposed his already apparent bias once more – telling the jurors that they didn't actually have to agree on the specifics of Trump's unlawful behavior.

How could someone defend themselves against such vague allegations?

It was at this moment that I became convinced that the jury would find him guilty.

And that conviction may well mark the beginning of a new era of partisan weaponization of our justice system.

DA Bragg has demonstrated how easy it now is to get a conviction against a political opponent. Other ambitious DA's are likely to follow suit. And the ultimate losers will be the American public.

John Yoo is right : this is a direct assault on the rule of law and the separation of powers.  

Reading Now: Demonic Foes

By Richard Gallagher, M. D. Available via Amazon.

It arrived yesterday and I'm already 60 pages into its 247 pages.  A page-turner for sure.  I did, however, refrain from reading any of it in bed last night before drifting off — for obvious reasons.  Experiences of my own incline me to take very seriously "Unseen Warfare."
 
Dr. Gallagher comes across as a very credible witness.  Rooted as he is in Western canons of rationality and scientific method, he nonetheless appreciates that there are points at which methodological naturalism must give way in the teeth of massive evidence of super- and preter-natural phenomena.
 
This article features an interview with Dr. Gallagher.
 
UPDATE (6/14).  I am now up to p. 82.  It gets better and better. Packed with distinctions essential for clear thinking about this topic. 

Anti-Semitism in John Chrysostom

Eight Homilies against the Jews, Homily I. Some historical background to this:

It’s November 2023, and, following the October 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists that killed some 1,400 Israelis and at least 31 Americans, thousands of demonstrators march through New York City, calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” echo through the streets, along with “there is only one solution: intifada revolution.” Among the crowd is the infamous Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, who warns through a megaphone that a cabal of wily Jews has conspired to place “their little posters” (of kidnapped Israeli civilians) across the city, seeking to entice people to rip them down. While many onlookers might look like “ordinary people,” she says, the Jews have “their little people all around the city,” surveilling others. Sarsour is there to deliver such rhetoric in part because she’s been paid to be there: her nonprofit, MPower Change, has received $300,000 in grant funding from the Ford Foundation “to build grassroots Muslim power.”

 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Forgotten and Unforgotten Folkies

Paul Clayton, Wild Mountain Thyme.  Baez version from the "Farewell, Angelina" album.  A snippet of the same song by Dylan and Baez with a beaming Albert Grossmann looking on.  And while we're at it, here is Joan with Farewell, Angelina.  Beautiful as it is, it doesn't touch the magical quality of Dylan's own version which is in a dimension by itself.

Paul Clayton, Who's Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I'm Gone).  Dylan borrowed a bit of the melody and some of the lyrics for his Don't Think Twice, It's All Right.  

Dylan talks about Clayton in the former's Chronicles, Volume One, Simon and Shuster, 2004, pp. 260-261.

Mark Spoelstra is also discussed by Dylan somewhere in Chronicles.  While I flip through the pages, you enjoy Sugar Babe, It's All Over Now.  The title puts me in mind of Dylan's wonderful It's All Over Now, Baby Blue.

Bonnie Raitt does a good job with it. Or perhaps you prefer the angel-throated Joan Baez. Comparing these two songs one sees why Spoelstra, competent as he is, is a forgotten folkie while Dylan is the "bard of our generation" to quote the ultra conservative Lawrence Auster.

Ah yes, Spoelstra is mentioned on pp. 74-75.

About Karen Dalton, Dylan has this to say (Chronicles, p. 12):

My favorite singer in the place [Cafe Wha?, Greenwich Village] was Karen Dalton. She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky and sultry.  I'd actually met her before, run across her the previous summer outside of Denver in a mountain pass town in a folk club.  Karen had a voice like Billie Holliday's and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it.  I sang with her a couple of times.

Karen_dalton_newspaper

It Hurts Me Too

In My Own Dream

Same Old Man

 

Of DEI and the Devil

Top o' the Stack. Excerpt:

The hard Left, which now controls the Democrat Party, is evil at its core. I don't say that every  leftist, 'progressive,' and wokester is evil. Most of these folks are useful idiots. A large subset of them are superannuated, low-information, life-long Democrats who are pissing away their 'golden years' in empty socializing, hitting little white balls into holes, and other forms of Pascalian divertissement.