I was looking at some of my 2015 Facebook posts and I enjoyed these:
* I’m asking a representative sample of different groups, “Do you have any pictures of your sister?” and I will be charting their reactions. Which group do you think would react most negatively to such a question and what does that mean?
* I put on my CPAP, got under the covers and then started snorting and spitting when I imagined myself saying to my latin friend, “Do you have any pictures of your sisters? I’m sure they’re very pretty like you.”
* Note to self: Never ask your boss if his mother was able to find sparks with his step-dad.
* I said to this latino guy at work, “How’s your sister?” And he got all ticked off like I was about to suggest something immoral.
* I’m compiling a list of my biggest wins in 2015 and would appreciate your suggestions.
* Friend: “Dude what are you on now, your sputtering out stuff like a broken fire hydrant. It’s like your mouth is ejaculating after ODing on Viagra!”
* Friend: “If you would just treat your mouth like your penis, maybe you could finally restrain your inappropriate words.”
* It just takes more willpower than I’ve got these days to suppress the phrase “queer with AIDS” as in, “Sure, if I were a queer with AIDS, I’d be glad to help you with that.”
* The only way I find to get through prosaic tasks is by wondering which groups I would vote off the island in which order.
* I drive people crazy by making jokes when they’re in no mood for humor. Please pray for me that I learn self-restraint.
* If you can’t be a good example when you’re posting on Facebook, be a very loud warning.
* When dudes tell me they’re on paternity leave, I want to buy them a dress.
* A man was wondering what to do with his kids today. I wanted to suggest a visit to Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch.
* It’s a never-ending battle to reduce unwanted notifications from Facebook. Why would I care if I somebody posted to some stupid group that somebody joined me to?
* Readers perplexed by scriptural difficulties or social problems are encouraged to submit their inquiries in the comments.
* I long for the chastity of the 1950s when the future Mrs. John LeCarre would write in her diary: “I have decided that in future I will let D touch my breasts, but nothing more.”
* When Talmud class becomes too difficult, I drift off to fantasies that some prestigious group will invite me to speak to them about my life. Then I deliver the whole speech in my head and an hour later, Talmud class is finished.
* Friend: “My mind may not be a less corrupt or vulgar than yours. But, my FFB upbringing gave me the filters and forethought not to share what’s not acceptable with the wrong people, whereas your deep honesty makes you share EVERYTHING that goes on in your rebellious head, and separates us as people.”
* I went to the physical therapist today for my tight hamstrings.
PT: “So what do you do?”
Luke: “I teach freedom of movement.”
Posted inPersonal|Comments Off on The Best Of 2015
Luke, I am pleased to share with you one of the most shocking discoveries of the 21st century. I won’t fuck around with you here for I believe I have, at long last, identified the origins of Big Foot.
I am a bit of an outdoorsman, Luke. For many years I was troubled by an encounter with the beast known as Sasquatch – the mighty “Swamp Ape” of southern climes, or the terrible predator of chickens and small Mexican boys, “Chupacabra.”
Some years ago, I was with some friends on a hunting expedition in the woods, maybe a mile off from the nearest trail marker. This was bear country, and we were prepared both with our firearms and by taking precautions to tie our food into the branches of a nearby oak. Yet what throws off the scent of the grizzly seems to only arouse the sensations of Sasquatch, which broke into our camp shortly before midnight on the third day of the expedition.
We had heard some mild rustling. “Perhaps a rabbit,” my friend said. “Or perhaps a crazy bitch running from her family obligations!” another chided. But broken sticks and the rustling of a large-hoofed beast in the brush made me think something larger was afoot. And approaching.
Suddenly, there I was: eye to eye with the great beast, the mighty Sasquatch! It seemed remarkably human, with a large beak with nostrils flaring until they were the size of silver dollars. It had curly brown hair, but was so covered in dirt and foul-smelling mick that I was unable to discern its shape.
But what I remember most was its call. The sound of its bellow haunts me to this day.
“ALO WAA ES JA EFF” it cried. It was a peculiar roar, as if it had swallowed its tongue or a toy which would present a hazard to a small and simple-minded person. “JA EFF!” it screamed. “ALOG JAY EFF!”
Luke, as you know I am something of a “man’s man.” I have pleased women on many continents and have kept oil painting representations of some of them. But I tell you, face-to-face with this creature, I evacuated my bowels and bladder simultaneously. I screamed like a little girl at the horror, the unscientific abomination that stood before me.
Perhaps it was the sensation of hot urine and steaming feces running down my legs that forced me back to my senses. I unholstered my sidearm kept close by at all times against the threat of bears. The beast took another step and I fired. I fired again. Five bullets I emptied into this monster. The bullets seemed to do nothing. In silent horror with my companions I watched as Sasquatch pawed through our camp, fleeing with a bottle of brandy kept for medicinal purposes and a bag of scones. Also a slinkie, a child’s toy one of my companions brought for his own amusement, but which seemed to fascinate this savage’s child-like mind.
The evening haunted me. For years I have dedicated a share of my family’s considerable fortune and exhausted our extensive network of connections to researching the truth of these creatures that have preyed upon lone backpackers and wounded travelers for centuries.
Only now, listening to the extensive video testimony of noted scholar JF Gariepy (PhD, Bitchute) did the final piece fall into place: the origins of the Beast-Man haunting North America, the story of Big Foot! Sasquatch is not a missing link, a lone survivor, a shed skin from our genetic history. No, the monsters of the woods are just one of the MANY women who abandon their families and go out to live in the wilds by themselves with no money, source of communication or supplies beyond a “small stool for sitting next to fires.” The woods are now filled with these wild creatures who departed from civilized society. Perhaps the incoherent, babbling dinosaur rawr of the Sasquatch from my own encounter was even “Mama JF” herself, during one of her “earlier survivalist adventures.” A caring mother, sensitive artist, “high IQ housewife” who has “gone to Croatan” indeed!
Thank you Luke for inadvertently making this final connection for me. I close here with the words of our distant cousin: “ALOG WAA ES JA EFF” to you, to the brave fighters for Palestine and venceremos to all lovers of knowledge and students of the devolutionary phenotype worldwide.
Posted inJF Gariepy|Comments Off on Mama JF Missing
Frame Game, the pseudonym of an alt-right internet personality, hid his face while pushing racist conspiracy theories. Inadvertent slips revealed details about his identity.
Michael Benz, a former Trump State Department official whose work has been cited in congressional hearings and promoted by Elon Musk, has become a go-to voice for Republican criticism of government and social media censorship in the past year.
But before his stints in government and as a pundit, Benz appears to have been a pseudonymous alt-right content creator who courted and interacted with white nationalists and posted videos espousing racist conspiracy theories, according to recordings, livestreams and blog posts reviewed by NBC News.
The pseudonym, Frame Game, posted videos and participated in podcasts and livestreams during the rise of the alt-right following Donald Trump’s election. Frame Game avoided showing his face in his videos or appearances, during which he pushed a variety of far-right narratives including the “Great Replacement Theory” that posits the white race is being eradicated in America for politics and profits. In others, Frame Game said he was a white identitarian, railed against the idea of diversity and made montages urging white viewers to unite under the banner of race.
In interviews with white nationalists, Frame Game blamed Jews for “controlling the media” and for the decline of the white race. “If you were to remove the Jewish influence on the West,” he said in one video, “white people would not face the threat of white genocide that they currently do.”
Frame Game stopped posting in 2018. A review of his content revealed various details that match Benz’s appearance and life story. Benz, in his public posts and appearances, has not espoused the same racist views as Frame Game…
Hours after publication on Friday, Benz posted a lengthy statement confirming his connection to the Frame Game account. He said the account was a covert effort intended to somehow combat the anti-semitism it espoused. “The account in question was a project by Jews to get people who hated Jews to stop hating Jews,” he wrote. “Let me be clear: I am extremely proud of this.”
Benz, 39, has positioned himself as a leading voice for many conservatives by tapping into a broader right-wing wave of disaffection with perceived social media and government censorship. He heads a group dedicated to the subject, has been featured as an expert in dozens of news stories and spearheaded efforts to bring attention and pressure upon people and organizations involved in social media moderation.
Benz and his organization were also cited in reports and witness testimony from the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, led by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, as well as the Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs. Benz also amplified the “Twitter Files,” documents released by Musk that revealed internal debates about content moderation and communications with outside organizations, governments, journalists and researchers. For months, in videos and threads posted to Twitter, Benz has framed those internal debates as grand conspiracies and maligned the academic researchers and institutions involved as government spies and plants.
Beyond the censorship debate, Benz has posted videos alleging a variety of shadowy doings in line with broader far-right paranoia around many hot-button issues. One video connecting criticism of Musk to a conspiracy theory around Ukraine and global energy markets was reposted by Musk, who added: “Interesting perspective.”
Brandy doesn’t give any credit to Benz for the brave, true and beautiful things he said under his Frame Game Radio persona. People are complicated. If any media report focused on the worst things we’ve all said and done, we’d all look terrible.
When speaking publicly, it is a good idea to think about what your enemy will do with what you are saying. We all speak within a certain context, but your enemy will rip away that context to present your quotes in their worst light.
Benz would have you believe his statements, stuff like this—suggesting Holocaust education is a grand Jewish conspiracy to solidify a victim identity narrative to stay in control of the world—was somehow deradicalizing MAGA people. It’s nonsense. https://t.co/GJYn6AmbN6
ICYMI we revealed the secret alt-right past of the “anti-censorship” brigade’s favorite new expert: https://t.co/t46pA9ZizZ
And in the wildest admission I’ve ever gotten on a story, here’s his explanation for years of anti-Semitic posting & allying w/ white nationalists. https://t.co/Io1O1eoZaV
Frame Game was my favorite guest in 2018 because he had a phenomenal mind and he regularly challenged me more than anyone else in my life.
Benz and I enjoyed the expansion of the Overton Window pushed forward by the Alt Right. We were intoxicated by this new intellectual playing field. We enjoyed the frisson of danger from engaging with the right. In the pursuit of this engagement, we bent over backwards in showing empathy for their point of view, and we said things in pursuit of this engagement that we now regret. This is common among scholars and activists and journalists who want to penetrate forbidden worlds. When we get a new beat, we want to sweeten things with the major players and so we deliver “beat sweeteners” (flattery of important sources). In the pursuit of engagement, activists, journalist and scholars often say things that they later regret in the cold light of day when their entreaties are made public just as job interviewees and men on the make often say things that later embarrass them. In the pursuit of a forbidden connection, it’s easy to sell out. I think I did this at times in early 2018 and I think Frame Game did this too. We were so eager to talk to people in the Alt Right that we short-changed our analytical side. It was such a thrill to get the dangerous people on our shows that we failed to ask the tough questions (to ourselves most of all).
When you create, you leave your analytical side behind. You can’t write and edit at the same time. To put down your best first draft, you must ignore your inner editor. Frame and I created for a few months without normal self-interested inhibition. It was intoxicating to have these forbidden conversations. It was intoxicating to leave the modern buffered reflexive autonomous strategic self behind to experience the joys of the medieval king of the castle persona.
The modern world rewards a courtier morality wherein one constantly weighs every gesture, deed and word for its possible implications. This kills spontaneity and traditional forms of identity. By playing in the Alt Right pen, people indulge traditional ties at the expense of the civic virtue of not harming group’s feelings. For a few glorious months in 2017 and early 2018, we got to feel alive by freeing ourselves from modern concerns about racism, sexism, homophobia, and bigotry. We had primal engagement at the price of modern decency.
Frame Game was great at framing things. I’ll never forget one time on my show in 2018, he said to me, “Luke, I love you, but you don’t change anything.” Frame was dedicated to changing the world. I was dedicated to understanding the world.
Because Mike was operating with anonymity in 2018, he said more outlandish things than he would have if he were speaking under his real name.
It’s easier to tap into a primal engagement with the world when you operate out of anonymity just as people tend to become more primal when drunk. Going online and sharing your opinion is intoxicating, and intoxicated people are more right-wing than sober people.
First, let me state something for the record. I’m a Jew. I’m a Proud Jew. I’m the descendant of Holocaust Survivors who fled Poland. I was Bar Mitzvah’d, and not just Bar Mitzvah’d, I did the additional 4 years of Hebrew School to get confirmed, meaning I went to Hebrew School until I was 17 years old. My Hebrew name is Moshe, and my rabbi would reiterate to me that that name means “messenger.”
I’m telling you this because one of the most notoriously unethical hit piece journalists in the entire country, Brandy Zadrozny, who is famous for constantly getting her stories wrong, just tried to write a hit piece on me that is the literal 180 degree opposite of what she wrote, and what she thinks she found.
Also, in case it’s not obvious, Brandy’s entire industry beat – “disinformation” – is getting totally crushed right now by work I’ve contributed to on multiple fronts (legal, regulatory, policy, media) and she clumsily must have thought she found something that can shoot one of the leading messengers on Internet freedom with an unrelated attack related to anti-Semitism.
Let me start with the bottom line and then I’ll tell you the backstory.
The account in question was a project by Jews to get people who hated Jews to stop hating Jews. It was a deradicalization project, and it produced deradicalization material. It made contact with groups in the early primordial soup of the MAGA movement in 2016 and sought to move people from a place of hate and division closer to a place of love and unity.
And it was successful. The biggest fans of this account, which was deleted around six years ago and to which I only contributed in a very limited manner, were fellow Jews who saw how effective it was at building a bridge and winning over hearts of people who held anti-Semitic beliefs, and non-Jews who would write in to say, “I’m so glad I found this account, I used to have a lot of hate and heaviness in my heart towards Jewish people, but since I discovered you, I don’t feel that anymore.”
The biggest antagonists of the account were people complaining their followers were becoming less radical and less willing to blame their problems on Jews.
Let me be clear: I am extremely proud of this. In another life, this thing I was briefly a part of in 2016 and 2017 would be getting National Science Foundation funds for combatting anti-Semitism.
And this was achieved through dialogue and engagement, instead of shunning and censorship.
You can disagree with the methods, but you can’t argue with the results. And I absolutely will not be lectured by Brandy Zadrozny on what techniques are or aren’t effective at moving people from a place of hate and division towards a place closer to love and unity on the issue of anti-Semitism.
Let me also say: I would not participate today and do not endorse participating in something like this in a general sense. It was a creature of a very bizarre and volatile time in early 2016 in which fellow conservative Jews were facing rising sentiments of anti-Semitism on our right – from people voting the same way for President – and political persecution and censorship from the ADL on our left. Having to move extreme elements from a fixation on identity to a focus on reforming institutions was a Bizarro World situation that called for a kind of Bizarro World logic of which I am proud, but would not repeat today.
To be clear: without this essential context completely omitted by Brandy, there are obviously going to be elements of the account’s contents she quotes that, without context, are going to look like extremist material, in the same way that the Redirect Method her own censorship industry bedfellows champion redirects people to generally unsuitable content only aimed at certain audiences. This was an anonymous account for a limited purpose that was never supposed to be producing content for a mass audience, and had been shut down for 6 years until long-deleted posts were dug up using digital forensics by snooping investigators with basically intelligence agency powers who want to take me out because I’m an effective voice fighting censorship.
I’m grateful for your continued support, and remain wholly undeterred in my mission to restore a free and open Internet.
I remember Benz having a meager background in Judaism. For example, “Moshe” does not mean “messenger.” Instead, it means “savior.” The Hebrew word for prophet, “Navi”, means “messenger.”
Many people argued in 2018 about whether or not Benz is Jewish. He struck me as a highly assimilated Jew.
Richard Spencer responds to the news:
The notion that “frame game” was engaged in “de-radicalization” is absurd. Though he obviously was trying to channel the AltRight in a certain direction for an outside player. He’s just confessed to as much. It’s clear that “Mike Benz” (or whatever name he’ll go by in a few months) is motived to advocate for a “free” Internet so that bad actors like himself can infiltrate online movements and point them in certain directions. He’s a walking, talking argument for greater government regulation of the Web. For what it’s worth, I find the notion that he’s Jewish dubious. He constantly lies. Why should anyone believe he’s now telling the truth?
I agree with Richard that Mike Benz’s response to the news was absurd just as much of Richard’s response to Benz is absurd. Richard is so blinded by his hatred for any competing thought leader that he claims “Mike Benz” will just keep changing his name to pursue his dark agenda. That Mike Benz at a certain time and place used a pseudonym is understandable. I don’t expect he’ll keep doing it. That Mike Benz is a “walking, talking argument for greater government regulation of the Web” is absurd. How so? How exactly does the Frame Game – Mike Benz story argue for greater government regulation of the web? I don’t see it. There’s nothing nefarious about wanting to change your environment. Everybody does it. Every living thing tries to change its environment to benefit its own interests.
My first question about pundits is do they optimize for truth. Very few do. Mike Benz does not. Richard Spencer does not. Mike optimizes for effectiveness. Richard optimizes for attention.
In his public work, Benz is dedicated to framing. When optimize for the frame game, I imagine it is easy to get an exaggerated sense of your own abilities to evade and transcend the truth.
By comparison with Mike Benz, Richard Hanania made an a convincing apology when he was outed as former white nationalist and his career has apparently not suffered.
Like Benz, Hanania tried to have the best of both worlds (saying what he wanted under a pseudonym as well as simultaneously seeking status) and he played the game as effectively as anyone for years.
I remember disagreeing with Frame Game about several points including:
* He had a higher opinion of David Irving than I did.
* He was outraged by social media deleting the accounts of Alex Jones. I wasn’t outraged. I thought it was an understandable reaction to the bad behavior of Jones. I was open to being convinced that deleting Jones meant the destruction of free speech online, but I never found any of these arguments credible.
* Frame Game frequently invoked “white genocide.” I was briefly ambivalent about that line of argument, and then I turned against it.
* Frame Game believed you should never apologize nor show any weakness before your enemy. I believed in apologies and admittance of weakness where appropriate, even if it is to your enemy.
* Frame Game was down with what was effective, while I was constrained by the morality of my 12-step programs and Orthodox Judaism.
* Frame Game was more hostile to the establishment and its elites than I was, while at the same time he was more credulous with regard to establishment statistics that served his narrative, such as bogus U.S. Census Bureau data about demographics.
* He wasn’t persuaded by the Cofnas critique of Kevin MacDonald, while I was.
* Overall, Benz’s point of view was apocalyptic. I had enough of that thinking from my father.
I’ve watched some of Mike Benz’s recent videos. They are compelling, but they don’t optimize for truth.
In his Twitter bio, Mike states: “Executive Director, @FFO_Freedom.” In response to Brandy’s article, Mike said about Frame Game Radio: “The account in question was a project by Jews to get people who hated Jews to stop hating Jews.”
I suspect that Mike is exaggerating. I suspect that Mike’s “Foundation For Freedom Online” is primarily just Mike. I suspect that Frame Game Radio was primarily just Mike.
The Frame Game Radio persona never betrayed any group dynamic. It was clearly one guy doing his thing. The idea that Frame Game Radio was primarily about neutralizing hatred of Jews is absurd. A side benefit of his work may have been a reduction in hatred of Jews by some people while for other people he may have increased such hatred.
Mike tweets: “The dirty & despicable tactics of the ethically bankrupt Brandy Zadrozny, whose failed hit on me was Opposite Day from her reporting…”
There was nothing “dirty & despicable” about Brandy’s reporting on Mike Benz. It was basic journalism.
Mike writes: “one of the most notoriously unethical hit piece journalists in the entire country, Brandy Zadrozny, who is famous for constantly getting her stories wrong, just tried to write a hit piece on me that is the literal 180 degree opposite of what she wrote, and what she thinks she found.”
This hyperbolic response does not speak well of Mike. Brandy is not famous for getting her stories wrong. If her stories were consistently wrong, she’d have been fired. NBC News has a protection to protect.
Mike defends himself as a “proud Jew” and “the descendent of Holocaust survivors.” This is painful pleading. He’s mounting a pitiful attempt at the frame game and it doesn’t work. He clearly didn’t run his response by anyone. If he had, he would have been spared embarrassment.
Mike writes: “Brandy’s entire industry beat – “disinformation” – is getting totally crushed right now by work I’ve contributed to on multiple fronts (legal, regulatory, policy, media) and she clumsily must have thought she found something that can shoot one of the leading messengers on Internet freedom with an unrelated attack related to anti-Semitism.”
Brandy accurately pointed out some things he said in the past that he would rather people did not know about. We’ve all said things in the past that we regret. Mike might acknowledge things he’s said that he regrets and point out how other things he’s said in a certain context sound horrible when ripped out of that context but otherwise stand up.
It’s a bad sign about Mike Benz’s judgment that he regularly retweets BretWeinstein.
This tweet by Weinstein that Benz retweets is particularly dumb: “Principle: When a person courageously confronts those with immense power, we owe them every benefit of every doubt.”
There’s no inherent reason that those who go up against immense power are any more right or righteous than those who don’t. Did the Taliban and the Viet Cong and the World War II Japanese deserve every benefit of the doubt because they opposed the mighty United States?
My response to the Washington Post.
This is a 40-minute lecture, Part 1 in what I'd like to be an ongoing series, Censorship Industry Decoded.
This first video cut through the tricks & traps in WaPo's verbage. These tricks are stock for the industry & essential to understand. pic.twitter.com/XWHdRatY3G
Baya Rae comments below this video: “Frame Game is best described as a paleoconservative libertarian that was allied with the Alt Right and wanted to be the rightwing Saul Alinsky. He’s utterly benign if not a valuable asset to the global rightwing. I was saddened by his departure because he was sincere and gave great advise on how to effectively shift the Overton Window rightward. Glad he’s back, hopefully he remains back.”
Ricardo: “He was a psyop bro.”
God Hand: “How was he a psyop? I remember his YT channel. FG was a Jay who explained how Jayish special interest groups operate to undermine Wyte interests. He was 100% honest about who he was and his goals.”
Inter-dimensionallizard1028: “In 2018 when Starbucks got into trouble for having two black loiterers arrested, Frame Game had a good analysis of the pressure groups involved and the whole diversity cartel that makes these companies bend the knee.”
Myst: “If you want the case of a strong opponent of FG, I suggest Norvin Hobbs. He’s very intelligent and he arguably caused his departure from the space back in the day.”
Ricardo: “He admitted that he and the Gevalt Right was an op. Now, we know where Halsey got all that superchat money.”
GodsOwnPrototype: “FGR was/is by all known content, a Righteous Jew, up there with Paul Gottfried as one being able to actually percieve & empathise with traditional Europeans & articulate balanced arguments. I’m not sure he stuck to his remit then because some of his content clued me into JQ lore I’d not encountered despite years of interest & was also formulated in such a way as to make it family shareable – which I did quite a lot. …[H]e was open that he was a fellow traveller on the train only so far; he wanted to reach out a hand of friendship & understanding as a Jew in a time of growing hostility partly as someone who concurred with the many complaints but also to grow a bridge, ironically, of broad racial solidarity as Western Caucasoids, across the ethnic hostile divides, in a time of demographic shift & rising hostility against the pale ones.
Granted this was a longshot at best & a laughable proposition given the hateful subversion of so many of his influential co-ethnics; however, the facts on the ground show there is a pragmatic case.
The Zionists both worked for the British in a world war on the one hand, also carried out a terrorist campaign against them elsewhere & even made overtures to the Nazis (the Stern gang) for assistance against them & the Haavara transfer agreement were real facts that helped found the modern state of Israel.”
Almost all of our major institutions today are controlled by the left who have a radically different conception of masculinity from the traditional one. The challenges men face now at work are similar to the ones faced by the feudal lord who had to move to court and code-switch from lord-speak to courtier-speak, as Rony Guldmann explains in his work-in-progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia:
* Beset on the one side by the ever-expanding political power of the centralized monarchies and on the other by the new economic prowess of an emerging bourgeoisie, the old feudal nobility found itself progressively emasculated, both militarily and economically, stripped of the glorious self-sufficiency that was the hallmark of an earlier, more anarchic period. Retaining any vestige of their former power and prestige now required, not physical prowess and military excellence, but cultivating the right relationships with the founts of power. And this, at its limit, came to mean taking up full-time residence in the absolutist monarchic court. One of the most decisive developments in the Western civilizing process, writes Elias, was the transformation of warriors into courtiers.92 For this political transition entailed a set of thoroughgoing psychological changes that would eventually spread beyond the monarchic courts and profoundly affect the identity of the modern West, shaping our basic concept of what it means to be “civilized.”
* “He is no longer the relatively free man, the master of his own castle, whose castle is his homeland. He now lives at court. He serves the prince. He waits on him at table. And at court he lives surrounded by people. He must behave toward each of them in exact accordance with their rank and his own. He must learn to adjust his gestures exactly to the different ranks and standing of the people at court, to measure his language exactly, and even to control his eyes exactly. It is a new self-discipline, an incomparably stronger reserve that is imposed on people by this new social space and the new ties of interdependence.”
This new social space generated a new personality/affective structure, a new “peculiarly courtly rationality”97 under whose aegis “the coarser habits, the wilder, more uninhibited customs of medieval society with its warrior upper classes, the corollaries of an uncertain, constantly threatened life” became “softened,” “polished,” and “civilized.”98 Medieval mayhem and wantonness could become suppressed because it is only at this point in Western history, with the radical heightening of the level of the day-to-day, and indeed minute-to-minute, coercion which one individual was capable of exerting on another, that “the demand for ‘good behavior’ is raised more emphatically,” and that “[a]ll problems concerned with behavior take on new importance.”
…More primitive social arrangements unmarked by complicated chains of human interdependency generally encouraged either “unambiguously negative relationships, of pure, unmoderated enmity” or else “unmixed friendships, alliances, relationships of love and service.”111 Hence, for example, what Elias describes as the “peculiar black-and-white colouring of many medieval books, which often know nothing but good friends or villains.”112 But the extended chains of functional dependencies in which one was enmeshed at court—and which were simultaneously arising within the wider society as a whole—encouraged heretofore unknown levels of ambiguity, contradiction, and compromise in the feelings and behavior of people. These now became marked by “a co-existence of positive and negative elements, a mixture of muted affection and muted dislike in varying proportions and nuances.”113 The courtiers had to become more calculating, less wholehearted in their sentiments—less “sincere” and “authentic,” we might say. Such was simply inevitable given the new intertwining layers of social interdependency. If people developed a new moral sophistication, this was the product, not of advancing knowledge, but of the gradual introjection of social exigencies, the muting of affect-structure required by the peculiarly courtly rationality.
This new social and psychological sophistication emerges hand-in-hand with the lowering of the threshold of shame, embarrassment, and repugnance in the social relations of the European upper classes, as “people, in the course of the civilizing process, seek to suppress in themselves every characteristic that they feel to be ‘animal.’”114 There was an intensification of disgust before the ejection of saliva, which becomes increasingly surrounded by taboos.115 Attitudes toward food, and meat in particular, also became transformed. Whereas the carving of a dead animal at table was previously a matter of indifference, or possibly pleasure, the new standard required eliminating any reminders that a meat dish has something to do with the killing of animals. The animal origin of meat dishes had to be “so concealed and changed by the art of its preparation and carving that while eating one is scarcely reminded of its origin.”116 In the same spirit, eating with one’s hands becomes increasingly taboo, as the fork and individual cutlery and crockery were introduced into the dining experience.
Enjoying the plausible deniability provided by a façade of democratic idealism, the liberal elites have quietly colonized a host of powerful social institutions—the judiciary, academia, public public schools, large foundations, the media, entertainment, and others—through which they now pursue unofficially what earlier clerisies had to pursue officially. They do not marginalize or excommunicate in the name of some codified orthodoxy like Catholic teaching or Talmudic law. But conservatives believe that the cumulative social prestige arrogated by this “rising class” is the functional equivalent of such an orthodoxy, imbuing the liberal elites’ pronouncements with a special power to cut off debate and silence dissent. Seeking above all to maintain this power, this new secular priesthood will badger, scold, and bully all who defy it. And this means conservatives. If they strike liberal professors like Connolly as angry and obstreperous, this is as a natural reaction to this new regime, to provocations whose very existence the elites refuse to acknowledge.
* Liberalism is not just a political orientation, but a totalistic worldview and way of being that has by now crept into the American psyche itself and can always be discovered at work in the seeming trifles of social life and pop culture—suffocating conservatives from all sides. Liberalism is not sustained by reason and argument, but by the mores and pieties that liberals have quietly entrenched as the unquestioned, taken-for-granted background of things—a parochial ethos into which the populace has become progressively indoctrinated by small, often imperceptible increments. In issuing their claims of cultural oppression, conservatives seek to awaken their fellow Americans to this hidden reality.
* Diagnosing the roots of liberal hostility toward home-schooling, Kevin Williamson observes: “The Left’s organizing principle is control, and the possibility that children might commonly be raised outside of its control matrix is an existential threat from the progressive point of view. Institutions such as free markets and free speech terrify progressives, because they are the result of arrangements in which nobody is in control… Home-schooling isn’t for everybody, but every home-school student, like every firearm in private hands, is a quiet little declaration of independence. It’s no accident that the people who want to seize your guns are also the ones who want to seize your children.”
* Like many on the Left, conservative claimants of cultural oppression believe that “the personal is the political.” Given liberals’ insatiable lust for control, what were once purely private preferences on how best to educate one’s children have now become political acts—“quiet little declarations of independence” through which to hold off left-liberal hegemony for yet another day. Conservative claims of cultural oppression seek, not primarily to highlight liberalism’s flaws as a political philosophy, but to expose its transgressions as a social practice that works to demoralize and delegitimize those who remain steadfastly loyal to “traditional American values”—gun owners, home schoolers, housewives, church goers, the police, ranchers, small business entrepreneurs, and others. The ordered liberty of the conservative is a basic threat to liberal control and so must be targeted at every turn as a danger to the civilized order, the idea of which has now become identified with liberalism itself. If liberals are hostile toward the home-schooling to which some conservative parents are drawn, this is because those parents cannot be counted upon to civilize their children in the manner prescribed—that is, to raise their children as liberals. That is why those children must be seized.
Conservative claimants of cultural oppression see themselves, not only as the losers in a “war of ideas” that was always rigged against them, but furthermore as a quasi-ethnic group being encroached upon by a foreign colonial power that is endlessly contemptuous of their native folkways and bent on replacing these with its own supposedly more advanced culture. The National Review laments: “The crusade against private gun ownership is, for the Left, a kulturkampf. The sort of people who are likely to own or enjoy firearms are the sort of people who are most intensely detested by the social tendency that produced Barack Obama et al. — atavistic throwbacks and “bitter clingers,” as somebody once put it. The Left’s jihad against hunters, rural people, shooting enthusiasts, and Second Amendment partisans will do effectively nothing to prevent lunatics from shooting up schools or shopping malls. That they would exploit the victims of these awful crimes in the service of what amounts to a very focused form of snobbery is remarkable.”
Notwithstanding their ostensible egalitarianism and pragmatism, the liberal elites are committed to their own particular brand of identity politics, complete with its own special kind of otherization. The “bitter clingers” who stand in the way of gun control are not merely criticized as misguided, but despised as occupants of a lower moral and cognitive order, atavisms of a barbaric past that liberals alone have superseded. Whereas now eclipsed traditionalist hierarchies revolved around perceived differences in things like sexual purity, work ethic, religious affiliation, family pedigree, and ethnic bona fides, the new status hierarchy of liberalism is rooted in “cognitive elitism” and centers around a morally charged division between those who are “aware” and those who are not, those who possess the psychic maturity to accede to liberalism and those who lack it and must be reformed. This kind of identity politics will always take refuge in some pragmatic-sounding pretext—e.g., the dangers of firearms or the inadequacies of home schooling. But conservatives dismiss this pragmatism as an elaborate façade for a status hierarchy that liberals refuse to acknowledge. If this hierarchy can go overlooked by “thinking people,” by the “educated,” this is because thoughtfulness and education are themselves now defined by the liberal dispensation. These have become mere badges of honor to be conferred on liberals and withheld from others. Liberals’ near-monopoly on the means of cultural reproduction lets their own kind of identity politics pass under the radar screen, camouflaged in an aura of hard-nosed utilitarianism.
Posted inAlt Right|Comments Off on NBC News: Michael Benz, a conservative crusader against online censorship, appears to have a secret history as an alt-right persona
* Is there anything good about the events of the weekend in Israel? Yes, they return us to reality. Different groups have different interests, and when the clash of interests is intense enough, you get war, which is the continuation of politics by other means.
* Everybody is vulnerable. You can devote every resource to making yourself safe, but there will always be ways that you are vulnerable. It makes sense to try to have the best possible relations with everybody and to make yourself as strong as possible, but everybody hurts sometimes. “Old age, sickness and death” await all of us.
* I fear empathy overload. I haven’t felt anything about these attacks. I keep myself in analytic mode so I can avoid feeling anything. That’s pretty much how I go through life, except for when I explode over trivia. What the heck? Come on, man. You’ve got to be kidding me!
* Contrary to the Wall Street Journal report, both America and Israel have stated that there is no evidence that Iran ordered these attacks. Iran has yet to attack Americans in America, but I’m sure Iran has hit squads in this country who will go to work if America directly attacks Iran. Obama reached the best deal possible with Iran, and it was a shame that Trump repudiated it. The argument that the Biden administration played a role in the Hamas attack by returning six billion dollars of frozen Iranian assets is absurd. Iran has been allowing in nuclear inspectors. They’ve reduced uranium enrichment. They released American hostages. They’ve indicated openness to direct engagement with America through Oman. I doubt Iran ordered these attacks.
* When you watch the news, do you feel like you are being stage managed to hate Iran, Russia, and China, and to get ready for America to wage war on all three countries? I do. Iran did not direct nor lead Hamas attacks on Israel. Iran is Shia. Hamas is Sunni. There’s some cooperation between these two, but Hamas is not a proxy for Iran. By and large, Sunni and Shia Muslims hate each other. If America goes to war with Iran, it will be a disaster for America and completely unnecessary.
* What Sunni civilization would you most like to live in? Gaza is a hell hole, but where have Sunnis produced a great civilization? The primary problem for Gazans is Gazans. The primary problem for Palestinians is Palestinians. The primary problem for Sunnis is Sunnis. They have shown no evidence of greatness for centuries. When will Sunnis produce a flourishing civilization? What are the foremost Sunni contributions to the world? How are Sunnis are light unto the nations? I can’t think of any Muslim country that I would want to imitate.
* If the NATO vs Russia war in Ukraine goes nuclear, the media line will be that this is a result of America not intervening more forcefully on behalf of Ukraine. John J. Mearsheimer notes that American subsidizing of Ukraine’s military against Russia is ten times as catastrophic for Americans interests as our pointless 2003 invasion of Iraq. Biden’s extreme support for Ukraine is an unforced error against Western interests. If Biden hadn’t armed Ukraine, Russia would not have felt the need to invade.
* America is on the hook to go to war for Taiwan against China when Taiwan can’t be bothered to defend itself. Taiwan only spends 1% of its GDP on its defense. I would be all in to support Taiwan if Taiwan was all in to defend itself, but it’s not. Taiwan wants to do as little as possible in its own defense and have us pick up the tab. War with China over Taiwan would likely cost America thousands of lives, several aircraft carriers, a thousand planes, dozens of ships, tens of billions of dollars, and that’s in the best case scenario.
* Biden’s National Security advisor Jake Sullivan told The New Yorker: “I believe in freedom fighters and I believe in righteous causes, and I believe the Ukrainians have one. There are very few conflicts that I have seen—maybe none—in the post-Cold War era . . . where there’s such a clear good guy and bad guy. And we’re on the side of the good guy, and we have to do a lot for that person.”
The only objective source of morality is the transcendent one, which depends upon a subjective leap of faith. Unless Sullivan wants to invoke God, there’s no rational basis for this analysis. He’s essentially arguing that we have to aid Ukraine because of God’s will. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a Russian version of the Monroe Doctrine. Russia has strategic interests in wrecking Ukraine because Ukraine has become a de factor member of NATO aka Russia’s enemy.
* American news, with its whipping up of war fever against Russia, Iran and China is certainly not managed in America’s interests. Foreign policy is a game played by elites where common opinion counts for little. The common opinion of Americans is that they don’t care much about non-Americans, just as the Japanese don’t care much about the non-Japanese, and so forth. So far 14 Americans have died in this Hamas attack and 20 are missing. Those deaths will shape how Americans relate to Hamas.
* Every sane nation must prioritize its own survival. Ukraine and Israel are irrelevant to American interests while Taiwan is important to America’s interests. Given that America has limited resources, if it sanely pursues its interests, it will have to short-change Ukraine and Israel, even if the survival of Ukraine and Israel are in doubt. This might be an ideal time for China to invade Taiwan. America is stretched thin.
…a large majority of Palestinians appear to support Hamas militants’ brutal weekend attack on Israel.
…the breaking news of the surprise Hamas eruption had prompted celebrations on the streets of Ramallah, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, where people distributed sweets to gathering crowds.
Many saw the attack, in which over 100 Israelis were abducted and taken as hostages into Gaza, as retribution for the deaths of Palestinian civilians in earlier rounds of conflict and in daily life. “The world keeps saying this attack is unprovoked, but in fact the world is ignoring how violent the daily occupation is,” says Diana Buttu, a former adviser to the Palestinian delegation to peace talks with Israel, now in abeyance.
…The bloody events of last weekend, including the massacre of over 250 revelers at a rave party, have been condemned by people around the world as a terrorist outrage. In Gaza, however, they are widely seen as a breach in the Israeli-built wall that has trapped residents for 16 years and condemned them to victimhood.
Fatah, and the Palestinian Authority, which it controls, are obliged by the Oslo Accords to cooperate with Israel. But they now find themselves caught in a political bind, faced with a public supporting Hamas’ action and increasingly calling for similar violent resistance.
The Palestinian Authority has been notably silent since Saturday, and officials turned down requests for comment on the political situation.
On the broader international front, Israel and the United States say they had no evidence that Iran was closely involved in planning Saturday’s rampage, as has been reported.
* There’s no evidence that the way democracies wage war is any more moral than the way autocracies wage war.
* About half of Los Angeles Orthodox Jews consider Baruch Goldstein a hero says a knowledgeable friend. You can buy a book praising Dr. Goldstein at every Torah book store in town to the best of my knowledge.
* Hezbollah is more competent and dangerous than Hamas. If Israel invades Gaza, might Hezbollah attack Israel? If they do so in force, thousands of Israelis will die within 24 hours.
* Israel has started slowly in its last five major wars. Its reserve troops are not particularly competent.
* Why do the Arabs get upset about a tiny Jewish state in their midst? For the same reason that people who hold to a traditional male-female definition of marriage get upset by the tiny number of gay marriages in their midst. Both the Jewish state and same-sex marriage are affronts to particular hero systems and these affronts hurt their adherents every bit as much as a punch to the stomach. Our beliefs are us. They take place in our body and they produce bio-chemical reactions when they are denigrated.
* If you believe that the Palestinians should pursue their goals peacefully, then you believe in the legitimacy of BDS. If you oppose the legitimacy of BDS, you oppose Palestinians pursuing their goals without violence.
* Simchat Torah is a Jewish holiday that is often observed outside with singing and dancing. American Jews, by and large, kept their celebrations inside this year. Pico Blvd in 90035 was going to be closed Saturday night for an open air celebration but that was canceled due to the news.
Streets in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood would normally be shut down this weekend for parties in honor of Simchat Torah, the Jewish holiday marking the completion of the annual cycle of the reading of the Torah. But this year, the mood was somber as police stepped up security in Jewish and Muslim communities alike.
“It will forever be a day of memorial and sadness,” said Rebecca Wizman, standing outside a Pico Boulevard synagogue…
She and three others were discussing who they knew preparing to fly to Israel to fight. Batsheva Pinto said many people from her congregation were headed there. So was her brother-in-law.
For two days, Wizman said, everyone she knew had been operating in an information vacuum. Because of the holidays, they hadn’t been able to check their phones since Friday night.
Wizman said she was dreading Sunday evening, when she would once again be able to go online and read the latest headlines. She assumed the death toll had mounted; she was scared to learn by how much.
* Within five minutes of the onset of these attacks, around 11:30 pm Friday, Orthodox Jews in Los Angeles were talking about them and asking non-Jews to pull up the news for them on their phones.
* I don’t think there will be any lasting repercussions from the shocking videos and pictures of the slaughter in Israel. These images compel only momentary attention for most people, and most people don’t matter anyway when it comes to foreign policy. Foreign affairs are decided and conducted by elites. For example, I don’t think most Americans would support the defense of Taiwan at the cost of thousands of American lives, but that decision has already been made by elites on both sides of the aisle. The one area where the massacre pictures might be decisive is that many non-Muslims might look at them and decide they no longer want Muslims in their country. They might not want to import Middle East war into their country.
* For one people to be safe, they sometimes have to destroy their enemies. By permitting Hamas to live, Israel got slaughtered. Israel should not have allowed Hamas to live, even if that meant occupying Gaza.
* The news keeps saying this was an intelligence failure by Israel. I doubt it. I bet there were many intelligence reports of the Hamas attack and the politicians and the IDF ignored them. NYT:
American and Israeli officials said none of Israel’s intelligence services had specific warning that Hamas was preparing a sophisticated assault…
Why was Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, now a dozen years old, apparently overwhelmed by the barrage of inexpensive but deadly missiles at the opening of the attack? How did Hamas manage to build such a big arsenal of rockets and missiles without Israeli intelligence detecting the growing stockpile?
Was Israel too focused on threats from Hezbollah and the West Bank, rather than focusing military and intelligence resources on Gaza? And why were so many Israeli forces on leave or distant from the southern border, allowing Hamas to overrun Israeli military bases near Gaza?
Claiming intelligence failure protects those in power, but when we learn more, we will likely see there were intelligence reports warning of a Hamas attack and people in power in Israel chose to ignore these reports. I suspect this disaster was primarily a political and military failure, not an intelligence failure. The advantage of blaming an intelligence failure is that you don’t have to hold specific people accountable. You can just blame a bureaucracy. When you say this was a political and military failure in Israel, there are specific persons (the leaders of Israel’s government and military) you must hold accountable.
It is not clear yet that this is primarily an Israel security complex failure or a political failure. Neither politicians nor generals are consistently right. According to reports from Israel, Netanyahu is not happy with the options the IDF has given him. “If you invite a rattlesnake into your bed, you are going to get bitten. Israel invited two rattlesnakes into its bed, the PLO and Hamas.”
* If America hadn’t subsidized Ukraine to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, Moscow would not have guided this Hamas attack on Israel. Richard Kemp writes for YNET:
Hands that pushed Hamas attack forward are in Moscow
The instability created by attack on Israel is intended to pull US attention, as well as resources, away from the war in Ukraine and prevent Israel-Saudi normalization.
President Joe Biden and European leaders have long feared an escalation of the Ukraine war and that is what they’ve now got. Unwilling to take the fight directly to NATO, instead, Putin has been fomenting conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Serbia and Kosovo, in West Africa and now in Israel.
The instability created in these places is intended to pull US attention, as well as resources, away from the war in Ukraine. Let us not forget that the US recently withdrew large stocks of munitions stored in Israel and transferred them to Ukraine. If this war escalates further, which it may well do, they will have to be replaced by stocks that might otherwise be earmarked for Ukraine to use against Russia.
Just as Russia used Iran to supply large numbers of drones to attack Ukrainian civilians, it is now using Iran to encourage and enable these attacks in Israel. Iran is of course a more than willing partner whose leaders have repeatedly sworn death to Israel and America; as are its proxies in Gaza and also in Lebanon. Iran has long been directing, training, funding and supplying weapons to Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza as well as in Judea and Samaria, or the West Bank. Moscow too has maintained and developed connections with Palestinian terrorist groups and individual extremists, going back to Soviet days, when Putin himself as a KGB officer was dealing with Middle East terrorists including during his time in Dresden.
Hamas leaders, including terrorist boss Ismail Haniyah, have made a number of visits to Moscow since the Ukraine war began, meeting with senior government officials including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. A delegation from their Gaza terrorist bedfellows, Islamic Jihad, led by its chief, Ziyad al-Nakhalah, also visited Moscow in March. Likewise, leaders of another Iranian proxy, Lebanese Hezbollah, have been welcome guests in Moscow. Hezbollah terrorists fought side by side with Russian troops in Syria and have since been involved in helping Moscow evade sanctions and, according to the US Treasury Department, may have received weapons in return….
Today, Gaza terrorists are not fighting alone, but with the backing of two powerful states, both motivated by renewed aggression against the US arising from the war in Ukraine, and that should change the strategic calculus.
Every major country has condemned these Hamas attacks but Russia and China.
* Israel’s most right-wing government ever is incompetent. Even if Bibi Netanyahu’s judicial reforms are a good idea, they divided the country and left it wide open to attack. Sometimes it is worth dividing a country to get something done, and sometimes it is not worth it.
* Bibi’s biggest claim to power was that he would keep Israelis safe. He hasn’t. He won’t last long as Israel’s prime minister.
The security barrier in Gaza cost three and a half billion shekels. Above ground, underground, sensors, cameras, everything is the last word in technology. On Saturday, with the outbreak of the war, it collapsed, it was a wall of paper.
October 7, 2023 was a mega-blunder, a disgrace that the IDF has never known in all its years.
I will explain: The first disgrace was the intelligence. Again, as in 1973, the system saw all the telltale signs but arrogantly concluded that these were just exercises, idle training. The second disgrace was the ease with which the Hamas terrorists jumped over the barrier; the third disgrace was the ease with which they returned to Gaza with dozens of hostages; the fourth disgrace was the slow reaction of the IDF to the infiltration. Dozens of terrorists were walking around the Armored Corps base as if it was theirs, and there was no helicopter to shoot at them.
The Yom Kippur blunder had a bigger number of people killed, without comparison. This is true, of course. But in the ’73 Yom Kippur war we confronted the largest of the Arab armies, not a second-rate terrorist organization. Out of that painful war came a peace that endures today, 50 years after the cease-fire. It is hard to see right now what good will come out of this current war….
In the Shalit deal, Netanyahu released 1,027 terrorists in exchange for one captured soldier. The price of repeated terrorism was hard, some say unbearably hard. How many terrorists will Hamas demand to be released in exchange for dozens of prisoners? A deal would give Hamas one more victory. And most importantly, it will deal a heavy blow, another blow, to deterrence against Iran and Hezbollah, and further weaken the Palestinian Authority…
The Iron Dome is a wonderful invention that saved the lives of hundreds of Israelis. It is clear what would have happened if we did not have an Iron Dome; we would have had no choice but to go into a decisive battle against Hamas, including the occupation of Gaza. Is it possible that everything we achieved in the Iron Dome was a delay of a few years until the inevitable ground operation?
* There’s no difference in the way democracies and non-democracies pursue war. Democratic countries, for example, are not more considerate of civilian lives than non-democracies. John J. Mearsheimer wrote in his 2018 book The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities:
* A final, albeit indirect, reason to doubt that liberal norms carry much weight in international politics is that there is little evidence that liberal democracies fight wars in especially virtuous ways. Given the emphasis liberalism places on inalienable rights, one would expect liberal democracies to go to some lengths to avoid killing civilians, or at least do better than authoritarian states. This is one of the central tenets of just war theory, a quintessentially liberal theory that has individual rights at its core. 35 Michael Doyle, for instance, urges that all sides in a conflict maintain “a scrupulous respect for the laws of war.” 36
But when Alexander Downes did his groundbreaking study of civilian victimization in war, he found that “democracies are somewhat more likely than nondemocracies to target civilians.” 37 John Tirman shows in his detailed analysis of how the United States fights its wars that it has killed millions of civilians, many on purpose. 38 And although Geoffrey Wallace shows autocracies are more likely than democracies to abuse prisoners of war, he provides plenty of evidence that democracies mistreat their prisoners. 39 The widespread use of torture by the United States in the wake of 9/11 is just one example. Both Downes and Wallace show that when states get desperate in wartime, they quickly forget the enemy’s humanity and begin to value rights far less
* When foreigners murder Americans, it is of much more concern to the average American than when those same foreigners murder each other or people from other countries. 40 The outcry in the United States when the Islamic State (ISIS) beheaded two American journalists in 2014 is one of the events that persuaded President Obama to go to war against ISIS. 41 Americans had been appalled by the widespread carnage and destruction wrought by ISIS, but they cared more about the deaths of their fellow Americans. Meanwhile, Americans who murder foreigners, especially nonwhite foreigners, are rarely treated as harshly as Americans who murder their fellow citizens. For example, Lieutenant William Calley, who commanded the U.S. soldiers involved in the infamous My Lai massacre in Vietnam in March 1968, served only three and a half years under house arrest before he was freed, and he enjoyed overwhelming support from the public after his role was revealed in the media. Nobody else in his unit was convicted of a criminal offense, even though somewhere between 350 and 500 civilians, mostly women and children, were murdered. 42 Calley and those under his command surely would not have received such benevolent treatment if they had butchered that number of unarmed American civilians. As John Mueller notes: “Although Americans are extremely sensitive to American casualties, they seem to be remarkably in sensitive to casualties suffered by foreigners including essentially uninvolved — that is, innocent — civilians.” 43 John Tirman, who has done a major study on this subject, concurs: “One of the most remarkable aspects of American wars is how little we discuss the victims who are not Americans.” 44 Of course, this kind of thinking is not peculiar to the United States. All nations think this way, and it cuts directly against liberalism’s universalist dimension.
* The United States, for instance, has fought seven wars since the Cold War ended, and it initiated all seven. During that period it has been at war for two out of every three years. It is no exaggeration to say that the United States is addicted to war. Moreover, Britain, another liberal democracy, has been at America’s side throughout those wars. This helps explain why democratic peace theorists do not argue that democracies are generally more peaceful than non – democracies.
Several factors explain why democratic peoples sometimes favor starting wars. For one, there are sometimes good strategic reasons for war and most citizens will recognize them. Furthermore, democratic leaders are often adept at convincing reticent publics that war is necessary, even when it is not. 19 Sometimes not much convincing is necessary, because the people’s nationalist fervor is so great that, if anything, they are pushing their leaders to go to war, whether necessary or not. 20 Finally, it is wrong to assume that the public axiomatically pays a big price when its country goes to war. Wealthy countries often have a highly capitalized military, which means that only a small slice of the population actually serves. Moreover, liberal democracies are often adept at finding ways to minimize their casualties — for example, by using drones against an adversary. As for the financial costs, a state has many ways to pay for a war without seriously burdening its public. 21
The second institutional explanation is that it is more difficult for government leaders to mobilize a democracy to start a war. This cumbersome decision making is partly a function of the need to get public permission, which is time – consuming given the public’s natural reluctance to fight wars and risk death. The institutional obstacles built into democracies, like checks and balances, slow down the process. These problems make it difficult not only to start a war but also to formulate and execute a smart foreign policy.
If these claims were true, again, democracies would not initiate wars against non – democracies. But they do. There may be instances where democratic inefficiencies prevent governing elites from taking their country to war, although as I noted above, that will happen infrequently. Moreover, the institutional impediments that might thwart leaders bent on starting a war usually count for little, because the decision to start a war is often made during a serious crisis, in which the executive takes charge and checks and balances, as well as individual rights, are subordinated to national security concerns. In an extreme emergency, liberal democracies are fully capable of reacting swiftly and decisively, and initiating a war if necessary.
Virtual Pilgrim comments on my YT: “I am more interested in the United States’ response to the Ukrainian war and the Israeli war then the war itself. I had three older brothers in the Vietnam War. One got 50% of his body scarred with 2nd degree burns. The other was shot down in a helicopter but survived. He told me a few years ago he still has PTSD. We were told how important that war was for ourselves and the world. In 2009, the manufacturing company I worked for (Datalogic) closed down our operation here and moved it to Vietnam to cut costs. Americans got doubly screwed coming and going – my brothers and myself included. Christian Zionist, John Hagee, is a warmonger who wants to send more white people to go die for foreigners while our borders are being overrun. So, don’t ask me to weep for them, because I’m too busy weeping for America.”
Reasonable comments on my Youtube video:
Word of the alarming news first reached many Orthodox communities via security guards, caretakers, home health aides, or other non-Jews routinely employed over the Sabbath and festivals. After nightfall Saturday, there was an additional, major (and completely /kosher/) source of news and rumors from the Holy Land: Visiting residents of there, where only /one day/ of Yom Tov is observed. While such guests may not /publicly/ desecrate the additional day of observance that is mandatory in the diapsora [יום טוב שני של גלויות] , in so far as /private/ conduct is concerned, they are not bound by its restrictions.
In short, it is not only entirely plausible but also quite /probable/ for a fully-observant Jew to learn of news of this nature on a Sabbath or holiday without transgressing any halachic restrictions.
Posted inHamas, Israel|Comments Off on Israel vs Hamas
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
