Category: Political Psychology

Sohrab Ahmari on ‘Lawfare’

An exercise in naïveté:

Reacting to Donald Trump’s hush-money conviction in Manhattan on 30 May, the French writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry asked on X: “Has there been a single left-of-centre person… who has said: ‘Hey, nakedly partisan prosecutions of your political opponents goes against the values of liberal democracy, rule of law, justice, and everything my side claims to support?’”

A number of progressive figures have, in fact, decried lawfare against Trump and the Trumpians.

[. . .]

But the honour roll of the principled anti-lawfare left is all too short. That’s a shame, because right-wing populists won’t be the only victims.

[. . .]

Such partiality in the application of law and institutional norms should alarm progressives. 

Sohrabi comes across as naïve. Since when is the Left in any classical sense liberal? Since when are these 'progressives' in any sense progressive.    They are more aptly described as regressive, anti-civilizational nihilists.

Leftists are so far gone that they are willing to protract their nihilism unto the destruction of the very secular values that they supposedly champion. Pascal Bruckner:

Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they [have] transferred their hopes to the Islamists.

The Muslim as the new proletarian.

The worst of the great religions, "the saddest and poorest form of theism," (Schopenhauer) is defended when a defining project of the Left was the cleansing of the earth of the "opium of the people." (Karl Marx, full quotation here.)

Add to that the absurdity that the Left, whose own secular values are secularizations of Christian notions, attacks Christianity viciously while cozying up to Islamists.

It's insane, but then the Left is insane in any case.

Know the enemy and show him no quarter.

I know. You don't want to believe it is a war. It's a war. Which side are you on?

Reading Now: Alex Marlow, Breaking Biden

Subtitle: "Exposing the hidden forces and secret money machine behind Joe Biden, his family, and his administration." (Threshold, 2023).  Excerpt:

Intellectually, Republicans understand that to have a nation, you need a border.  [. . .] But the establishment isn't going to solve a problem if the solution is going to cost them a lot of (any?) money, even if the fate of our nation depends on it.

Unless, of course, we are talking about Ukraine's border with Russia. Then it's essential, heroic even, to have a border and defend it. After all, that border isn't keeping out cheap workers and future voters.  (p. 249)

The RINOs and the Democrats are one in that they both want open U. S. borders, albeit for different reasons. The RINOs want cheap labor while the Dems want future votes. Thus talk of a 'uniparty' is apt. The RINOs are in cahoots with the woke globalist plutocrats and have no concern for American workers or American culture. They think they will always be able to find sanctuary somewhere with their wealth and connections, and in the meantime they are content to be lapdogs of the Left and continue to receive invitations to the toniest Beltway soirees. The 'cuckservative' label fits them nicely.  Civility and 'character' are so important to Mitt Romney, for example, that he refuses to support Trump because of his 'bad character' while ignoring that of Biden which is far worse. Liz Cheney is another disgusting specimen of this Never-Trumper species.

Marlow sums up his book here.

Is Leftism a Form of Mental Illness?

Wokery is the most extreme form of leftism. Some if not all elements of wokery are indicative of mental illness on the part of those who actually believe them. I will mention just four.

  • Thinking that one can effect a sex-change by merely mental gymnastics, by 'identifying' as a woman or as a man. Cognate with this species of insanity is the notion that sex of a neonate is 'assigned' at birth as opposed to being biologically inherent in the organism that exits the birth canal. A name can be assigned but not sex. Not even an inappropriate nominal assignment has the power to alter the sex of the nominatum. The boy named 'Sue' remained a boy.
  • The bizarre notion that permitting or minimizing the consequences of criminal behavior will lead to less crime. 
  • The astonishing conceit that mathematics is racist. Why exactly?  Because blacks as a group are not good at it?
  • The knuckleheaded notion that wholly legitimate criticisms of a 'person of color' such as Alejandro Mayorkas may be deflected   by hurling the slur 'racist,' a word which wokesters never define the better to use as an all-purpose semantic bludgeon.
  • Et cetera ad nauseam.

Why Did DeSantis Get ‘Smoked’?

Plausible explanation:

Like it or not, many Republicans have a unique bond with Trump, not just because they had to endure a lot of grief for supporting him in the past but also because they see how Democrats and the media have weaponized entire institutions against him in the most outrageous and dangerous ways. Even if these GOP voters are open to supporting other candidates this time around, the last thing they want is to be told that Trump is awful, which comes off as an indictment of them and their judgment. 

It’s odd that DeSantis was never able to figure that out, or that no one in his orbit was able to persuade him to take a different approach. Instead, as my colleague Emily Jashinsky put it Monday, DeSantis “allowed Beltway vest aficionados and their friends in the donor class to steer his career off course” with endless attacks on Trump.

Jashinsky's article is astute.

The Psychology of the Pollyanna and the Political Ponerology of Leftism

We all know pollyannas. They are more often women than men and the charm of these lovable ladies is in no small measure due to their openness to the positive in people and things and their seeming incapacity to discern the negative and evil. A most extreme example has come to my attention, one

. . . Natali Yohanan, “a 38-year-old mother of two, who never locked the doors of her house in Nir Oz, a kibbutz near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. There wasn’t even a key.” And then: “On Oct. 7, a Gazan woman walked through Yohanan’s unlocked front door and made herself at home for hours, eating, singing, and watching Netflix. Sometimes, the woman served drinks to armed terrorists who stopped by for a break from the massacre they were conducting outside.” Ms. Yohanan speaks of the impact of 10/7 on her in the 10-minute video below.

Watch the video and then ask yourself the question that I ask myself: how could an adult Israeli be so naïve, so trusting, so lacking in insight into human nature? The woman is not stupid; how then explain this blind spot? At one point Yohanan, a teacher, says that all children are good. Plainly false! Has this teacher never been on a schoolyard? Children can be vicious in a way that no animal can be vicious.  That is why they need to be socialized and, yes, indoctrinated, but in correct and ameliorative doctrines. (That 'indoctrination' is a dirty word is another piece of stupidity that you are well-advised in dropping.)

Yohanan is an Israeli. Surely she knows something about how her state came to be and why it came to be. Her kibbutz is right next to the Gaza Strip. Did she know nothing of Hamas and their genocidal intentions? They make plain their antisemitism and their anti-Zionism in their charter.  Does she know nothing about Islam? (See this excellent article by Raymond Ibrahim.) 

As I say elsewhere, homo homini lupus does not capture the depth of human depravity, and is an insult to the wolves to boot. Man is not a wolf to man; man is a demon to man. 

I am touching upon one of the roots, perhaps the deepest, of the delusional Left, namely the insane notion that everyone, deep down inside, is basically good. Not only is this conceit a characteristically leftist bit of delusionality, it also serves to distinguish conservative from leftist. No conservative accepts that crazy conceit.

And let's not forget that those who accept the crazy conceit that people are basically good refute their own false theory by being the most murderous of all. In the 20th century alone communist governments have murdered some 85-100 million people according to The Black Book of Communism.

Liz Cheney: Profile in Political Projection

Projection is a psychological defense mechanism whereby one attributes one's own unacknowledged feelings, desires, intentions, attitudes, etc. to others.  Extending the notion into the political sphere, the political projector accuses the other side of doing what he and his ilk are doing but will not own up to doing. I happened across a very clear example on CBS this morning.  It severely tested my ataraxia.

Projection is standardly understood as the offloading of the negative onto the other, but it is also often a mistake to project positive feelings, values, and attitudes into the other. Such projection may get your irenic self killed, as I argue in a Substack article, aptly entitled Beware of Projecting . . . your values and attitudes into others.

Radical Islam’s Threat to the Left

Substack latest.

Why don't leftists — who obviously do not share the characteristic values and beliefs of Islamists — grant what is spectacularly obvious to everyone else, namely, that radical Islam poses a grave threat to what we in the West cherish as civilization, which includes commitments to free speech, open inquiry, separation of church and state, freedom of religion, freedom to reject religion, universal suffrage, the emancipation of women, opposition to cruel and unusual penal practices, and so on?   In particular, why don't leftists recognize the grave threat radical Islam poses to them?  Why do leftists either deny the threat or downplay its gravity? Given their atheism and pronounced libertine ‘wobble,’ they would be among the first to lose their heads under Islamic law (Sharia).

Here is a quickly-composed  list of twelve related reasons based on my own thinking and reading and on discussions with friends. 

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.