Shorter Tablet: Jews Are The Establishment And Therefore Have The Most To Lose From Anti-Establishment Politics

Posted on October 31, 2017 by Luke Ford

David Mikics writes for Tablet:

Along with the Soviet Union’s accusation that Zionism is racism, the left has inherited the Communist Party’s “politics of position,” as David Hirsh calls it in his new book Contemporary Left Antisemitism. What you are determines whether or not what you say will count. (How many campus arguments have been clinched with the accusation of “white privilege”?) If you are a Zionist, your words are worthless; you can’t possibly have an argument worth listening to.

In left-wing circles these days, Hirsh comments, “the notion of ‘progressiveness’ attache[s] itself to peoples and nations rather than to political movements or to ideas,” and Jews have found themselves on the wrong side of this crude black-and-white binary. Jews are oppressors, not victims. A common tactic of the British anti-Zionist left is to treat any raising of the issue of anti-Semitism as a dirty trick, something that Jews have invented to claim special privileges for themselves.

But why should anyone care? Jews no longer face pogroms, and Israel has plenty of room for improvement. Jews in America and the United Kingdom are mostly well-educated and financially secure. The Jews of France might have more reason to feel endangered, but if they want to leave for Israel, most have the means to buy a plane ticket. And in Israel, at least for the moment, Jews are rarely subject to terrorist violence. Shouldn’t we focus on other kinds of racism that affect more genuinely downtrodden groups?

Well, there is the statistical fact that Jews are targeted by killers and casual bigots alike more often than more fashionable religious victim groups in Western societies. But even putting that reality aside, giving special-victim status only to certain groups while excluding others is bad politics and bad morality. Like Donald Trump’s sham populism, anti-Semitism destroys our political climate, by providing a portal through which widespread distortions of social reality and links to repulsive, anti-American and irrational political ideas may enter.

Surprisingly, contemporary anti-Semitism is mostly an echo of Soviet propaganda. Zionism=racism, the UN resolution passed in 1975 and repealed in 1991 after the Soviet Union collapsed, was a Communist idea that is now resurgent on college campuses and in left-wing political circles. Communism invented the use of anti-Zionism as a cover for anti-Semitism, as well as the notion that Israel is an agent of Western imperialism. The anti-Zionist left were pioneers of fake news, another Leninist innovation, even before Glenn Beck or Breitbart on the right. Often, the point of such fake news is that Israel, or the Jews, are uniquely malevolent, powerful, and cruel; they—we—delight in killing Palestinian children, or at least covering up for those who do. We push America into wars—an interesting thesis, Valerie Plame Wilson seems to think—and we destroy the careers of anyone who “criticizes” Israel.

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Foreign Affairs: The European Roots of the Alt-Right – How Far-Right Ideas Are Going International

Posted on October 31, 2017 by Luke Ford

George Hawley writes:

Some figures once associated with the ENR have attacked it for a similar reason, but from the right rather than the left. These critics, most prominent among them the journalist Guillaume Faye, believe that the ENR’s high-minded, universalistic rhetoric about difference is a sham. Faye rejects the idea that the movement should fight, as de Benoist put it, for “the cause of peoples,” urging it to instead be honest that it really cares only about the fate of Europe—especially as it relates to Muslim immigration, which Faye sees as a mortal threat. In Faye’s view, dancing around this uncomfortable truth with talk of an abstract right to difference serves only to water down the ENR’s message and weaken its impact.

Faye has also rejected de Benoist’s preference for abstract metapolitics designed to persuade elites and change the culture. He has argued that because of Europe’s demographic trajectory, which points toward a steadily declining white share of the population throughout the twenty-first century, Europeans do not have time to wait for the cultural landscape to change; instead, practical politics must begin today. Faye’s manifesto Why We Fight calls for a “fight with a sense of urgency, to stop the invasion and reverse Europe’s biocultural destruction.” The book is now a mainstay on the alt-right in the United States and is promoted by alt-right groups such as Identity Evropa.

From its birth until the recent past, the ENR received little attention from the American right, despite making waves in France and other European countries. The lack of interest on the mainstream right is easy to understand. The ENR rejects nearly every element of U.S. conservatism, including capitalism, Christianity, and support for the United States’ international hegemony. It is thus unsurprising that the movement long received only cursory attention from mainstream U.S. conservative outlets such as National Review…

These European ideas are finding a receptive audience in the United States for many reasons. One is the declining legitimacy of mainstream U.S. conservatism, which has prompted a search for right-wing alternatives to what is increasingly perceived as a calcified and anachronistic ideology. Ideas taken from the ENR are also useful for those who wish to provide an intellectual gloss to crude racist attitudes…

The European far right’s influence on its U.S. counterparts now extends beyond works of political theory. The use of the term “identitarian” to describe American white nationalists—a rhetorical device that is increasingly common among alt-right ideologues and serves to soften the movement’s image—is similarly adopted from Europe.

The alt-right is also borrowing activism tactics honed by the European far right. Having apparently learned a lesson from the Charlottesville rally—which was a major propaganda defeat for the alt-right—the movement is increasingly turning to so-called flash mobs. Rather than announcing their activities months in advance and giving their opponents time to organize, alt-right supporters rapidly assemble, declare their message, and disperse before counterprotesters can mobilize—a method that the European identitarian movement has used for years. The European far right has in turn adopted tactics pioneered in the United States, such as online trolling.

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Converting To Judaism aka Monotheism 1.0

Posted on October 31, 2017 by Luke Ford

I view the Alt Right as Judaism for gentiles (a cohesive group strategy).

An Alt Right goy says: I heard you saying your dad was an evangelical religious fanatic of sorts. Same here. My dad was the same. And I was always annoyed and dismayed by the Christian thing.

Then in my mid twenties I seriously considered converting to Orthodox Judaism. I was studying English literature at the university and I took a few courses in the Hebrew department, Hebrew language and biblical history. But then I realised that there was something wrong with the Jewish thing even though I couldn’t put my finger on it at the moment, and I called the whole thing off.

So in a way you could have been me. Or I could have been you. You get my point.

Luke: “In one circumstance, we’d be the concentration camp guards, in other circumstances, the inmates headed for the gas chamber.”

Goy: I was always embarrassed by the Jesus thing. Although I couldn’t articulate it clearly and coherently, my gut feeling was that those people (christians) were aping another people (Jews). In my mid twenties I left atheism and thought that the best thing would be to go straight to the real deal, Monotheism 1.0: Judaism. It made sense for a while. But then I met real Jews in real life and they freaked me off. It was only a few years later, in my early 30s, that I got totally red pilled on the Jewish question and I understood my gut feelings about both religions. But yeah, I understand where you’re coming from.

Would you have converted to Judaism if you knew back then what you know now?

Luke: Yes. I always answer these types of questions with: Given who I was and what I believed at the time, I could not have acted differently. I badly needed something transcendent then and Christianity did not cut it for me. Judaism was fascinating, exciting and it remains so for me, even when I differ with most diaspora Jews when it comes to politics and culture.

I avoid regretting the past, I take the 12 step attitude that I have been placed at a particular time and place for a reason to do good.

Goy: I’m an agnostic and I don’t think I’ll change. We simply do not have elements enough to categorically proof nor disproof if there is or there is not a transcendent reality beyond the visible reality. But the thing is, the monotheistic faiths have poisoned this discussion to the point of rendering it unintelligible. The question is: is there or there is not a transcendence? Period. The specific nature of whatever transcendence that might be real is a different topic. The monotheistic creeds dishonestly twist this subject, framing it in terms of debating the existence or not of their particular deities (Yaveh, Allah or the Christian God). This is insanity. I don’t deny the possibility of there being a transcendence to our reality. This is insoluble any way. But I am 100% sure of the historical, material spuriousness of the monotheistic faiths. Long story short: you don’t need to subscribe to some Semitic cult in order to be open to the transcendence.

Luke: Everyone needs a code, an ethos, and it helps to ascribe it to God.

Goy: True, specially if you’re not very smart or socially functional. But how much do smart people need to pretend to believe these tales? Do you realise that the yellow people, Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, perhaps the most high I Q group among the gentiles, are not particularly religious?

Take Confucianism in China and Xintoism in Japan. They are much closer to being civic cults than to being what we in monotheistic civilisations would describe as a traditional, transcendence-seeking religion.

Luke: They are traditional. They worship their ancestors.

Goy: Yes precisely, that’s my point. AND TRANSCENDENCE IS NOT THE MOST PRESSING ISSUE FOR THEM, BUT RATHER SOCIAL ORDER AND THE WELLBEING OF A PARTICULAR FOLK. In a way, Confucianism and xintoism are closer to Judaism than to Christianity and Islam. Seeking spiritual, metaphysical answers in Judaism or in the Asian cults I mentioned sounds insane to me. They’re traditional civic cults, they’re not Classical Greek philosophy. My point is that we Whites need a civic cult too, but not a “religion” in the transcendental sense of the world. Judaism, confutionism and Shintoism have worked very well for millennia without worrying much about metaphysical issues.

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AltRabbi: ‘FrameGame is the Stephen Miller of alt right twitter. A Jew who puts nationalist goyim to shame’

Posted on October 30, 2017 by Luke Ford

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Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption

Posted on October 29, 2017 by Luke Ford

Marcia Angel writes in 2009 for the New York Review Of Books:

Consider the clinical trials by which drugs are tested in human subjects.5 Before a new drug can enter the market, its manufacturer must sponsor clinical trials to show the Food and Drug Administration that the drug is safe and effective, usually as compared with a placebo or dummy pill. The results of all the trials (there may be many) are submitted to the FDA, and if one or two trials are positive—that is, they show effectiveness without serious risk—the drug is usually approved, even if all the other trials are negative. Drugs are approved only for a specified use—for example, to treat lung cancer—and it is illegal for companies to promote them for any other use.

But physicians may prescribe approved drugs “off label”—i.e., without regard to the specified use—and perhaps as many as half of all prescriptions are written for off-label purposes. After drugs are on the market, companies continue to sponsor clinical trials, sometimes to get FDA approval for additional uses, sometimes to demonstrate an advantage over competitors, and often just as an excuse to get physicians to prescribe such drugs for patients. (Such trials are aptly called “seeding” studies.)

Since drug companies don’t have direct access to human subjects, they need to outsource their clinical trials to medical schools, where researchers use patients from teaching hospitals and clinics, or to private research companies (CROs), which organize office-based physicians to enroll their patients. Although CROs are usually faster, sponsors often prefer using medical schools, in part because the research is taken more seriously, but mainly because it gives them access to highly influential faculty physicians—referred to by the industry as “thought-leaders” or “key opinion leaders” (KOLs). These are the people who write textbooks and medical journal papers, issue practice guidelines (treatment recommendations), sit on FDA and other governmental advisory panels, head professional societies, and speak at the innumerable meetings and dinners that take place every year to teach clinicians about prescription drugs. Having KOLs like Dr. Biederman on the payroll is worth every penny spent.

A few decades ago, medical schools did not have extensive financial dealings with industry, and faculty investigators who carried out industry-sponsored research generally did not have other ties to their sponsors. But schools now have their own manifold deals with industry and are hardly in a moral position to object to their faculty behaving in the same way. A recent survey found that about two thirds of academic medical centers hold equity interest in companies that sponsor research within the same institution.6 A study of medical school department chairs found that two thirds received departmental income from drug companies and three fifths received personal income.7 In the 1980s medical schools began to issue guidelines governing faculty conflicts of interest but they are highly variable, generally quite permissive, and loosely enforced.

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