Category: Political Ponerology

Wolff on Israel

Robert Paul Wolff, 30 October 2023:

I have found the series of comments on the Israeli situation interesting and helpful. I have not responded to them because I am so upset by what is happening that I can barely watch the news reports of it anymore. Let me make one small observation. There has been talk by Israeli officials and others about how this is an existential threat to the state of Israel. Let us just keep in mind that Israel is the only nation in the region with nuclear weapons and more generally is far and away the most powerful militarily. The attack on October 7, horrific and ugly and sadistic as it was, was no more a threat to Israel's existence then [than] was the attack on the twin towers on September 11 a threat to the existence of the United States.

Two points by way of rebuttal.

First, while it is true that Israel is the only nation in the region with nuclear weapons at the moment, that is very likely soon to change thanks to the concessions and fecklessness of the Obama-era appeasement policies vis-à-vis Iran promoted by puppet Biden and his (mal)administration. 

Second, the October 7th massacre was not an isolated event, but part of the larger project of clearing the space "from the river to the sea" of Jews and their state once and for all. This larger project is part of a still larger one that without exaggeration can be  called genocidal: to exterminate the Jewish people.*  And beyond this there is the anti-civilizational project of destroying our superior Western culture, one pillar of which is Judeo-Christian, and whose last bastion, bloodied, decadent, and tottering though she be, is the Great Satan, the USA.

I will leave it to others to comment on the psychology of Jews like Wolff who embrace leftism.  Some will say that he is a self-hating Jew who has internalized Jew hatred and turned it upon himself. I take no position on that speculation, but I do think a distinction is called for, namely, the distinction between a self-hating Jew and a Jew-hating Jew.  Obviously, a Jew could hate himself  for reasons other than his being Jewish. But every Jew who hates himself because of his Jewishness is a self-hating Jew.

__________

*To characterize the October 7th attack as "genocidal," as I heard one commentator do this morning, is a semantic stretch of the sort that is frowned upon here. Precision in the use of language is essential to intellectual hygiene.

And You Call for a Cease-Fire?

Take a look at the massacre map. Then read this:

The world is yet again staring at the near inevitability of another global conflagration.   The flashpoint is in the Middle East and the Hitler of our time: the Mullahs of Iran.   The West, led by Barack Obama and Joe Biden, have chosen to follow in the footsteps of the self-absorbed European leaders of the 1930’s in dealing with Iran and their terrorist legions of Hamas, Hezb’allah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Ansar Allah (Houthis) among others.

The Obama/Biden policy in dealing with Iran has been to facilitate Iran in becoming a dominant player in the region in the naïve belief that if the West, and in particular the United States, treats the Mullahs of Iran as equals, they will evolve into non-belligerent leaders who can be trusted.  Even if that means the acquisition of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles and sacrificing America’s only resolute ally in the region, Israel.

But is the disastrous Obama-Biden policy naïve, or is it something worse: a deliberate attempt to "fundamentally transform" (in Obama's words), and thus destroy the USA?  For example, why are no steps being taken by the Biden administration to control the southern (and northern) borders when it is a known fact that jihadis are entering the homeland?

Before 7 October it was clear enough that the purpose of the open border policy was to change the demographics of the USA in such a way as to make possible the permanent ascendancy of the Democrat Party. But now it can be seen that more nefarious motives were and are at work: to increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks within the homeland.  And what would they accomplish? They would give the current regime the excuse it needs for an even more draconian assault on the middle class and traditional American liberties.

UPDATE 1 (11/1)

Senator Hawley in a Congressional hearing hammers Alejandro Mayorkas who bears the Orwellian appellation "Director of Homeland Security." Is there anyone in the Biden administration more emblematic of the abysmal mendacity of said administration? 

These are very dangerous times. You'd best prepare for the immediate here and the possibly soon-to-arrive hereafter.

UPDATE 2 (11/1)

Pope Francis has called for a cease-fire:

"Ceasefire," he said, mentioning a recent television appeal by Father Ibrahim Faltas, one of the Vatican's representatives in the Holy Land.

He then added in his own words: "We say 'ceasefire, ceasefire'. Brothers and sisters, stop! War is always a defeat, always".
What he means, presumably, is that war is always a defeat for humanity. Is Bergoglio ignorant of recent European history and in particular the Second World War? If the Allies had not defeated the Axis powers, humanity (in the normative sense) and the high civilization of the Judeo-Christian type that the good pope supposedly represents, would have ceased to exist.
 
John Lennon famously if foolishly sang, "Give peace a chance." What he and Bergoglio the Benighted fail to understand is that sometimes we have to give war a chance.
 
Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war. The price of peace is a credible deterrent. Weakness and appeasement invite attack. Joe Biden is weak on multiple fronts; no surprise then that the upshot is war on multiple fronts.  
 
Conciliation is obviously a very high value. But how conciliate those who are religiously committed to your extermination? How conciliate those who would rather die than permit you to live?
 
 
 
 

The State of Things When the ‘Leader’ of the ‘Free World’ is a Puppet

I asked Dr. Vito Caiati, historian, whether Donald Trump's being in office would have made any difference to the present geopolitical mess, and this is what he wrote:

As for the present miserable state of the world, I think that had Trump remained in office neither the war in the Ukraine nor the war in the Middle East would have occurred, or if the former occurred, it would have been resolved on the basis of a territorial compromise concerning the Crimea and robust autonomy for the eastern, Russian majority oblasts.  Leaving aside the origins of the conflict (US interference in the internal politics of the Ukraine and the expansion of NATO eastward), Trump would have put Zelensky and company on tight rein. As for Israel, can we doubt that the appeasement of the Obama-Biden regime towards Iran encouraged the reemergence of terrorism? Now, the plan is to provide public support to Israel, while privately restraining her once again to conduct the war in a way that would deny the complete victory that she requires. With Trump, the war would have not occurred, and if it did, he would not have tied Israel’s hands.

As for the danger of WWIII, it appears to me that the Ukraine mess is a potential trigger for it.  There is no way that the Ukraine can defeat Russia, and I fear that a protracted conflict could lead to further American involvement and the real chance of a great power clash.

With regard to demons and such, I call your attention to what appeared on the Vatican Synod website this week (page 29): “What is a merciful heart? It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons, for all that exists.” Thus, the diabolical evil that first showed its face with the Pachamama desecration of St. Peter’s advances further in the Bergoglian Church.    

I agree in the main, but Caiati's final sentence prompts me to ask: Is Bergoglio proposing mercy for demons in which he believes? Or is the truly Bergoglian termiticism and diabolism due to his tacit denial of the reality of demons?

No doubt demons are creatures, but does Bergoglio and his fellow clerical termites believe in their existence? I don't know but I suspect he doesn't and they don't. How many Catholic priests today believe in the  preternatural? I suspect it is a minority.  The preternatural is the sphere within which demonic agents operate. It lies between the natural  and the supernatural.  See Ralph Weimann, Sacramentals: Their Meaning and Use, p. 196: "In the period after the Second Vatican Council, and under the influence of rationalism, it was increasingly considered 'unscientific' to speak about angels and even more unscientific to speak about demons."

At a time when the RCC should be standing as a bulwark against the anti-civilizational forces of Chinese Communism, Islamism, and  Leftism, it is transforming itself under the termitic influence of Bergoglio & Co. into just another pile of secular leftist junk. 

But how could anyone in this enlightened age believe in such medieval superstitions as the existence of demons?  Hasn't humanity finally put paid to this old nonsense?  Maybe not. Maybe there is no naturalistic explanation of the depth and depravity of human behavior. Perhaps an adequate explanation must posit the preternatural. See my Substack article, The Holocaust Argument for God's Existence wherein I write:

As a sort of inference to the best explanation we can say that moral evil in its extreme manifestations has a supernatural source. It cannot be explained adequately in naturalistic terms.  There is an Evil Principle (and Principal) the positing of which is reasonable. The undeniable reality of evil has  a metaphysical ground.  Call it Satan or whatever you like.

In that passage I am using 'supernatural' to cover both the supernatural proper and the preternatural. 'Preternatural' would have been the better, because more specific, word choice. But then I would have had to explain 'preternatural' which would have lengthened the piece. Brevity is the soul of Stack and not just of blog.

Now I would like you to take a gander at this Daily Mail article and rub your noses in recent Hamas-Islamist barbarity. Could the source of this evil be merely natural?

Left and Right: Morally Equivalent?

Leftist evil-doers are becoming ever more brazen in 'outing' themselves. I hand off to Hinderaker:

My opinion of leftists is so low that I am hard to disappoint. But I admit to being shocked by the reaction of many leftists and liberals to the Gazan invasion of Israel. In many instances, they feel no obligation even to disavow the Gazans’ mass murder, gang rapes, kidnappings and beheadings of infants. They go straight to denouncing Israel for imagined crimes and, in some instances, attacking anticipated actions that Israel hasn’t even taken yet. People who are so twisted that they witness the Gazan atrocities and can only fault Israel are moral monsters. Many liberals have self-identified as such.

The case of Dr. Mika Tosca can stand for many others.

 

Dinesh D’Souza on our Incipient Police State

Here, with a link to a trailer of his new movie.

……………………….

'Terrorist' is experiencing semantic spread. 

It emerged in the Congressional FBI whistleblower hearings that the abbreviation '2A' is a "terrorist marker." That came as news to me. (But see here.) I have been using '2A' from time to time as an innocuous abbreviation of 'Second Amendment.'  The context, of course, is the Bill of Rights which are the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution.

I have written sentences like this:

2A does not confer, but protects, the citizen's right to keep and bear arms.

My use of the harmless abbreviation makes me a terrorist, a white supremacist, and what all else in the eyes of the regime.  What does it make the regime? A police state.

So I suppose it is a good thing that it has been a very long time since I attended a Latin mass. These masses, as is now well-known, are notorious gathering points for insurrectionists, militiamen, and other violent extremists out to overthrow 'democracy.'  Much less known, however, is that these masses are conducted, not in old Church Latin, but in coded Latin.  Thus hoc est corpus meum is code for create mayhem. De mortuis resurrexit means: he rose up and committed insurrection.  There really are very few threats to the powers that be stronger and more insidious than the Latin mass, which is why Pope Francis, that faithful custodian of the depositum fidei, is such a staunch defender of the old mass against the forces of reform.

Sarcasm aside, part of understanding  the destructive Left is understanding their commitment to the hermeneutics of suspicion.  You can learn about said hermeneutics, and cognate topics, from my essay From Democrat to Dissident section 16.4. It is published in Hillman and Borland, eds., Dissident Philosophers: Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy, Rowman and Littlefield, 2021.  Available via Amazon where you can read some editorial reviews.

UPDATE (10/19). Serious punch-back against demento-totalitarian police-state scumbaggery may be coming Spartacus style:

Something intriguing is happening with bitcoin.  What started as a series of perplexing data “inscriptions” containing classified files from the U.S. government has now been confirmed by Bitcoin Magazine as an ongoing effort to cement information in the public record beyond the reach of government censorship.

An anonymous guardian of free speech has begun using bitcoin to republish all of the information originally published by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks back in 2010.  Codenamed “Project Spartacus,” the operation seeks to take advantage of several inherent bitcoin attributes:

[. . .]

Project Spartacus is just the beginning.  Imagine new social media networks built from decentralized blockchains of information.  Imagine an entirely new internet operating beyond the reach of corporate search engines, regulated addresses, and government permissions.  With no corporation in control of the networks or in singular possession of communicated data on privately held servers, the problem of State-directed censorship disappears.  No longer could corporate oligarchs operate in concert with government dictators to silence public dissent and magnify government propaganda.  No longer would it matter what the Marxist Globalists at Facebook or Google think is true — or what they think should be falsely presented as truth — once ordinary people have a dependable workaround technology that allows them to share information free from Big Brother’s menacing intervention.

Discreetly shared samizdat has returned.  It will soon run on decentralized blockchain.

The Politicization of Medicine

Nothing is safe from politicization by leftists.  And you are still a Democrat? WTF is wrong with you? You geezers in particular need to wake up. This is not the party of Jack Kennedy. 

Over at Instapundit:

NYC – Dr. Dana Diab is an ER physician at Lenox Hill (@lenoxhill). Dina Diab took to Instagram rejoicing Zionist settlers [aka jews] were murdered, raped, beheaded, and kidnapped by the Hamas terror group on Saturday October 7th. Jewish patients beware.

See also: Why Was My Talk at a Medical Conference Canceled?

The End of Liberty is Nigh: The Digital Pound and Cancel Culture

And to add insult to injury, irony to outrage, the end of liberty is being ushered in by the mother country.  Here:

The digital pound would be a new type of money issued by the Bank of England for everyone to use for day-to-day spending. You would be able to use it in-store or online to make payments. 

This type of money is known as a central bank digital currency (CBDC). You may also hear it being called ‘digital sterling’ or even ‘Britcoin’. We call the UK version of CBDC the digital pound.

The digital pound would be denominated in sterling and its value would be stable, just like banknotes. £10 in digital pounds would always have the same value as a £10 banknote.

If we introduced it, it would not replace cash. We know being able to use cash is important for many people. That’s why we will continue to issue it for as long as people want to keep using it.

And you can take that italicized paragraph to the bank! (Italics added.)

In a parallel assault on liberty, the Brits are going cancel-crazy. Dreher:

It’s a country that gave the world George Orwell, but now, it’s a ‘Brand’ new world for free speech in once-great Britain, which these days specializes in doling out the unwelcome gift of Orwellianism.

Dame Caroline Dinenage, the chair of a British Parliamentary committee, has been writing to social media platforms Facebook, TikTok and Rumble, asking them if they plan to follow YouTube’s lead and demonetize the accused sex pest Russell Brand. On committee letterhead, Dame Caroline wrote to express the committee’s concern that Brand will not be able to make money on the platform and thereby “undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behavior.”

Potentially illegal. This Conservative MP is using her powerful position to attempt to crush Brand’s ability to make a living, even though he denies the allegations, and they have not been subject to any sort of trial. This member of the British government is attempting to demonetize Russell Brand himself, based solely on allegations.

If this outrageous intimidation is allowed to stand, no one is safe in Britain. All it takes is for the right people to level fashionable accusations against you—ones having to do with racism, sexism, LGBT-phobia, ‘toxic masculinity,’ and whatnot—and you could see your livelihood evaporate overnight. You could even see your own government persecute you, as the committee headed by Dame Caroline, Baroness Lancaster of Kimbolton, is doing to Brand.

The Anglosphere is lost, and America is no exception. The push-back is too little, too late. But it ain't over 'til it's over.

We fight on in the gathering gloom. No defeatism! On the other hand, don't be a fool who sacrifices his life on the altar of activism. We have but one night to spend in this bad inn.  But a night is not nothing. I'll leave it to you to figure out the right mix of commitment to the fight and Gelassenheit. And it is up to you to balance praeparatio vitae and praeparatio mortis.

"So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

"War, children, it's just a shot away."

New Yorkers are Getting What They Deserve

They are paying the just tax for willful self-enstupidation. Vote Democrat, get more crime. The morally decent should leave NYC, and indeed every Democrat-controlled craphole. Of course, some cannot leave for various reasons. I feel sorry for them. But they should have done more to prevent their city from being taken over by leftist scum, especially since they knew from experience the Giuliani years.

Here is the graphic video.

New Yorkers are Getting What They Deserve

They are paying the just tax for willful self-enstupidation. Vote Democrat, get more crime. The morally decent should leave NYC, and indeed every Democrat-controlled craphole. Of course, some cannot leave for various reasons. I feel sorry for them. But they should have done more to prevent their city from being taken over by leftist scum, especially since they knew from experience the Giuliani years.

Here is the graphic video.

Why Won’t Leftists Enforce Existing Laws?

A reason, perhaps the main reason, may be gleaned from the following graphic:

The above stats are clearly in the ball park according to every study I have read. Heather Mac Donald has done outstanding work on this topic. I refer you to her.

One reason why leftists won't enforce existing laws is because (1) doing so would have a "disproportional impact on blacks," and (2) such disproportionality violates the value of 'equity' to which leftists subscribe.

Leftists (mis)use 'equity' to mean equality of outcome or result. 'Equity' is at or near the top of the Left's axiological hierarchy:  a high or the highest value to be striven for in our social and political arrangements. 

Someone who accepts both (1) and (2) will be loathe to enforce existing laws against homicide and other crimes. 

Now (1) is undoubtedly true. The reason is simple: blacks as a group commit more crimes than the other groups mentioned.  And so it follows that their incarceration rates are higher.  This is so even after we subtract off unjust convictions due to racial bias among jurors, and the malfeasance of corrupt judges, overzealous careerist prosecutors, and bad cops. 

(2), however, is undoubtedly false.  The reason is that 'equity' is a disvalue, not a value. The word as used by leftists is a neologism that conflates the distinction between equality in legitimate and attainable senses (equality of opportunity, equality before the law, treating like cases in a like manner, and such related ideas as due process which are the glory of the Anglo-American legal system) and, on the other hand, equality of outcome, which is unattainable except by police-state means, and even then not sustainable for long: life's  natural hierarchies will inevitably reassert themselves.

It might go like this: the USA under the yoke of 'woke' continues to weaken itself until it collapses under the  effect of its own decadence in synergy with  external attack and invasion by its geopolitical enemies. It is a good bet that this is in our near future, within ten years.  It is not inevitable, but there is no reason to be sanguine about the prospects of push-back. The oligarchic deep state will do everything and anything to crush Donald J. Trump and will of course if necessary attempt an 'Ecuadorean solution.' 

If the USA collapses, then the natural hierarchy of aptitude, ability, resoluteness, etc, will have reasserted itself.  We will then both collectively and individually face the Islamist-Sino-Russki trilemma: either embrace and affirm the new order, or accept political-cum-religious dhimmitude, or 'be put to the sword,' if not literally then by cancellation of livelihood and incarceration.

There will never be, and their cannot be, equality of outcome or result over the long haul because of the different aptitudes and abilities and interests of different peoples and groups of people.  

Diplomad 2.0 on the Biden ‘Special’ Counsel

We all know it's a joke, a joke worthy of that all-time jokester and comedian, Lavrenti Beria.

Beria would have appreciated AG Garland's "sudden" naming of a Special Counsel to look into Hunter Biden, this after years of saying no SC was needed. He also would have appreciated that the Special Counsel (SC) named is none other than US Attorney David Weiss (another miserable Trump appointment), who "investigated" Hunter for the past three three years: remember the laptop? On top of it, Beria would have appreciated how Garland has violated the law by picking Weiss; the law requires that the SC come from outside of the government, certainly not be a DOJ Attorney and the one, on top of it all, who has protected the Biden Crime Family (BCF) for these past three years. Let us not forget that Weiss masterminded that other joke: the "plea deal" for Hunter which would have allowed that crackhead to skate on serious tax fraud and gun charges that would have put any of us in the slammer for years.

Well, of course, it turned out some honest judge threw out the plea deal as it contained promises of, in essence, permanent immunity for Hunter from any other prosecutions. 

Read it all.  Garland & Co. see themselves and their 'president' as above the law while piously intoning, "No man is above the law, not even the president of the United States."  

A Short History of Slavery

Candace Owens, about five and a half minutes.  A crisp refutation of widespread leftist lies and omissions. Do your bit and propagate this video.

"Truth is not a leftist value." (Dennis Prager) Some of you think that I came up with the line. Not so. I got it from Prager. Always give credit where credit is due. Or are you a plagiarist like Joe Biden?

His plagiarism is a comparatively minor element given the depth of his moral corruption, as is becoming increasingly evident. The case against Biden 2024 is massive even if you don't agree with me that the hard-Left/'woke' policies this puppet promotes are destructive unto national suicide.

Political views aside, anyone can see that Biden is physically unfit for office and non compos mentis, not of sound mind. These two absolutely undeniable points disqualify him, especially as commander-in-chief. (Our geopolitical adversaries are licking their chops and testing the old fool with blatant provocations in preparation for events that few want to talk about.) Biden's supporters will deny his moral corruption; their denial, however, only serves to make evident their moral corruption and disregard for facts.