Why Do They Hate the South and Its Symbols?

Posted on August 16, 2017 by Luke Ford

Paul Gottfried on Confederate Flag Day, State Capitol, Raleigh, N.C. — March 3, 2007:

Those Southern secessionists whose national flag we are now celebrating have become identified not only with a lost cause but with a now publicly condemned one. Confederate flags have been removed from government and educational buildings throughout the South, while Confederate dignitaries whose names and statues once adorned monuments and boulevards are no longer deemed as fit for public mention.

The ostensible reason for this obliteration or dishonoring of Southern history, save for those civil rights victories that came in the second half of the twentieth century, has been the announced rejection of a racist society, a development we are persistently urged to welcome. During the past two generations or so, the South, we have been taught, was a viciously insensitive region, and the Southern cause in 1861 was nothing so much as the attempt to perpetuate the degradation of blacks through a system based on racial slavery. We are being told that we should therefore rejoice at the reconstructing of Southern society and culture in a way that excludes, and indeed extirpates from our minds, except as an incentive to further white atonement, the pre-civil rights past, also known as “the burden of Southern history.” This last, frequently encountered phrase is from the title of a famous study of the South by C. Vann Woodward, who in his time was a liberal-minded Southern historian.

Arguments can be raised to refute or modify the received account of Southern history now taught in our public schools and spread by leftist and neoconservative journalists. One can point to the fact that a crushing federal tariff falling disproportionately on Southern states contributed to the sectional hostilities that led to the Southern bid for independence. One can also bring up the willingness of Southern leaders to free blacks and even to put them in grey uniforms, as the price of the freedom that Southerners were seeking from Northern control. And even if one deplores slavery, this commendable attitude, which was also shared by some Confederate leaders, does not justify the federal invasion of the South, with all of its attendant killing and depredation. That invasion took place, moreover, in violation of a right to secede, with which several states, including Virginia, had entered the Union.

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Sacrificing Smart Asians to Keep the Racial Peace

Posted on August 16, 2017 by Luke Ford

Robert Weissberg writes:

Stated in cost-benefit terms, denying a few hundred (even a few thousand) high-SAT scoring Asians an Ivy League diploma and instead forcing them attend Penn State is a cheap price to pay for social peace.

This argument rests on an indisputable reality that nearly all societies contain distinct ethnic or religious groups who must be managed for the sake of collective peace. They typically lack the ability to economically compete, may embrace values that contravene the dominant ethos, or otherwise just refuse to assimilate. What makes management imperative is the possibility of violence either at an individual level, for example, randomly stabbing total strangers, or on a larger scale, riots and insurrections. Thus, in the grand scheme of modern America’s potentially explosive race relations, academically accomplished Asians, most of whom are politically quiescent, are expendable, collateral damage in the battle to sustain a shaky status quo.

Examples of such to-be-managed groups abound. Recall our own tribulations with violent Indian tribes well into the 19th century or what several European nations currently face with Muslims or today’s civil war in Burma with the Karen People. Then there’s Turkey’s enduring conflict with the Kurds and long before the threat of Islamic terrorism, there were Basque separatists (the ETA), and the Irish Republican Army. In the past 45 years, there have been more than 16,000 terror attacks in Western Europe according to the Global Terrorism Database. At a lower levels add the persistently criminal Gypsies who for 500 years have resisted all efforts to assimilate them. This listing is, of course, only a tiny sampling of distinct indigestible violence-prone groups.

The repertoire of remedies, successful and failed, is also extensive. Our native-American problem has, sad to say, been largely solved by the use of apartheid-like reservations and incapacitating a once war-like people with drugs and alcohol. Elsewhere generous self-rule has done the trick, for example, the Basques in Spain. A particularly effective traditional solution is to promote passivity by encouraging religious acceptance of one’s lowly state.

Now to the question at hand: what is to be done regarding American blacks, a group notable for its penchant for violence whose economic advancement over the last half-century has largely stalled despite tens of billions and countless government uplift programs.

To appreciate the value of affirmative action recall the urban riots of the 1960s. They have almost been forgotten but their sheer number during that decade would shock those grown accustomed to today’s relative tranquility. A sampling of cities with major riots includes Rochester, NY, New York City, Philadelphia, PA, Los Angeles, CA, Cleveland, OH, Newark, NJ, Detroit, MI, Chicago, IL, Washington, DC and several smaller cities.

The damage from these riots— “uprisings” or “rebellions” according to some—was immense. For example, the Detroit riot of 1967 lasted five days and quelling it required the intervention of the Michigan Army National Guard and both the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions. When it finally ended, the death toll was 43, some 7200 were arrested and more than 2000 buildings destroyed. Alas, much of this devastation remains visible today and should be a reminder of what could happen absent a policy of cooling out black anger.

To correctly understand how racial preferences at elite colleges serves as a cost-effective solution to potential domestic violence, recall the quip by comedian Henny Youngman when asked “How’s your wife?” He responded with, “Compared to what?” This logic reflects a hard truth: when confronting a sizable, potentially disruptive population unable or unwilling to assimilate, a perfect solution is beyond reach. Choices are only among the lesser of evils and, to repeat, under current conditions, race-driven affirmative action is conceivably the best of the worst. A hard-headed realist would draw a parallel with how big city merchants survive by paying off the police, building and food inspectors, and the Mafia. Racial preferences are just one more item on the cost-of-doing business list–the Danegeld.

In effect, racial preferences in elite higher education (and beneficiaries includes students, professors and the diversity-managing administrators) separates the top 10% measured in cognitive ability from their more violent down market racial compatriots. While this manufactured caste-like arrangement hardly guarantees racial peace (as the black-on-white crime rate, demonstrates) but it pretty much dampens the possibility of more collective, well-organized related upheavals, the types of disturbances that truly terrify the white establishment. Better to have the handsomely paid Cornel West pontificating about white racism at Princeton where he is a full professor than fulminating at some Ghetto street corner. This status driven divide just reflects human nature. Why would a black Yalie on Wall Street socialize with the bro’s left behind in the Hood? This is the strategy of preventing a large-scale, organized rebellion by decapitating its potential leadership. Violence is now just Chicago or Baltimore-style gang-banger intra-racial mayhem or various lone-wolf criminal attacks on whites.

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Saturday In Charlottsville

Posted on August 16, 2017 by Luke Ford

Paul Gottfried writes:

First of all, I find no heroes emerging from these events. The police showed no ability or perhaps no willingness to keep the two sides separated; and when they met it was inevitable that these armed partisans who hated each other’s guts would clash. Although the dismantling of Lee’s statue (in May a judge placed a six-month stay on this outrage) may have been only the pretext for obnoxious youth to raise holy Hell, the removal of Confederate statues and the renaming of parks and streets commemorating Confederate commanders is sheer lunacy. It should be opposed by all possible legal means. The NAACP and leftist cranks like Max Boot who push this agenda are the American equivalent of the Taliban. Are we supposed to do the PC cringe again when the usual pests demand that we remove the names of Jefferson, Madison and Washington from every city in this country because our country’s Founders owned slaves?

As for the bloody clash in Charlottesville, it’s impossible for me to read the account provided by neocon princeling John Podhoretz in the New York Post this morning without losing my breakfast. The villain for Podhoretz (as it always is these days when’s he’s not attacking critics of the Likud Party) is Donald Trump who refused “to denounce Nazis and white supremacists unqualifiedly and by name.” It seems that Trump had the “shamelessness” to suggest that there were two sides involved in the clash in Charlottesville. (Donald Trump has since unloaded all his fire on Pod’s target.) The anti-fascist and BLM protestors, according to Podhoretz’s doctored narrative, were merely “responding” to hate; and the president whom Podhoretz wouldn’t back against Hillary and whom he continues to denounce “refused to name the evil in our midst,” thereby showing “the behavior of a man whose moral sense is stunted.” On Saturday evening, Fox-news offered an interview by Julie Banderas of a Weekly Standard senior editor who scolded Trump for not treating the Altright in the same denunciatory manner as ISIS. Both, according to Ms. Torrance, were equally dangerous terrorist organizations…

Finally I would observe as a representative of the independent Right that Richard Spencer and his friends did us a horrible disservice by contributing to the confrontation that took place on Saturday. Much of what Richard and other members of the Altright say about the growing indistinguishability of our authorized Right and authorized Left is entirely on the mark. But the way to combat this deplorable situation is not to team up with Nazis and encourage demonstrators to come armed to Charlottesville to protest the leftist Taliban. One has to create a counter-media to what our shared enemies have done and be willing to accept decent people, whatever their race, to combat left-wing totalitarians and fake conservative enablers.

The war for civilization is almost entirely between groups of whites, in fact mostly white Christians. The white Left has drawn in other groups, but mostly as auxiliary forces. The same battle would be going on, as it has been in much of Europe, if we were only dealing with white opponents. None of the multiculturalists I have known has been black; and calling white multicultural fanatics “race traitors” is a gross oversimplification because the object of leftist hate goes well beyond their own racial group. It now includes all normal people who have not been reconstructed by the managerial therapeutic state or are fighting the scourge of Political Correctness. At the very least, Richard and his comrades have diverted us from this fight and compounded this injury by playing a role in the violence that should not have occurred.

I can’t help asking this rhetorical question, at least parenthetically at the end. According to white nationalist protocol, am I supposed to ally with white cultural leftists against the very black African Cardinal Robert Sarah, who spoke yesterday in Brittany? The good cardinal affirmed his reverence for the Vendean martyrs who fought for their king and church against the evil French Revolution. Needless to say the ideology that Cardinal Sarah decried was far less radically leftist than what our fake conservatives proclaim as their global democratic agenda. The struggle to restore a decent society that we’re in cannot and should not be reduced to racial differences.

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The Greatest Sins Of The West

Posted on August 16, 2017 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* In reality, the greatest sins of those who built America, and frankly the greatest sins of the West, have been kindness and generosity. These are great virtues, and among our greatest strengths when extended to ourselves. They create high trust, low crime, low corruption societies, where people watch out for one another, help each other through hardships and the cream can rise to the top. But it is ruthless exploited by people from everywhere else, who view it not as virtue, but view it the same way a thief views a home where the people don’t lock their doors.

People in other parts of the world aren’t dealing with this BS because they never had their others to deal with. When they conquered others, the others either were subsumed inside the dominant people completely, or they were annihilated. Needless to say, these people wouldn’t think of letting in the ‘wretched refuse’ of other lands come and suckle off their generosity, spit on their ancestors, and talk about and act in ways to wipe out the majority.

* Nassim Taleb recounts the old Levantine saying, in Antifragile: the man who has no past has no future. I mentioned this to an Israeli friend, and he told me the Israeli version: “a tree without roots cannot grow.”

* I think the best explanation for the present America-hate is the one given by Nietzsche — it’s the politics of ressentiment, or resentment.

Nietzsche drew a distinction between “master-morality” and “slave-morality.” “A living thing,” wrote Nietzsche, “seeks to exert its strength.” People of superior intellect, strength, creativity and willpower create nations and make history. They define morality in their own image, for they are the masters.

The weak, the stupid, and the losers embrace slave morality — that is, they resent and object to anything that the masters create. It is based upon envy and the knowledge that they are inferior.

Nietzsche argued that Jews and feminists were the primary transmitters of slave morality. The only way they could exert power was to gin up resentment, envy and hate to bring down the intelligent, the creative, and the powerful.

And that’s EXACTLY what we see happening today. Who are the “antifa,” tearing down statues of great men, but a collection of self-loathing freaks? Fat, tattooed women with purple hair, “transgenders,” 80-IQ blacks, scrawny beta-cucks and gays, and neckbeards with dark-rimmed “smart” glasses on college campuses. They’re incited by the ideas of Jewish Frankfurt School academics and Jewish feminists like Susan Sontag and Shulamith Firestone, which are now 100% mainstream in intellectual circles. They hate America and hate its Founders because they every time they look in the mirror know damn well they are incapable of matching up to a Jefferson, a Washington, a Lee, an Edison, a Ford, a Carnegie, a Wright or a Yeager.

The hatred is based on envy and the knowledge of one’s inferiority when standing in the shadows of giants.

* The bastards now attacking my ancestors are going to be removed from the United States. There is no other way. God bless all who will defend their ancestors when Civil War II fully breaks out.

Some Jews are great. Stephen Miller and Mickey Kaus and Ron Unz come to mind. Some Jews are ungrateful to the Angles, Saxons, Normans, Celts and others who created and maintained the British Empire, the American Empire and the Anglosphere. The corporate media is to a large extent controlled by Jews. The corporate media is the power in the United States that constantly attacks the Founding Fathers and other founding stock Americans. The Jews who control the corporate media bit off more than they can chew when they picked a fight with the Anglo-Celts in the South.

Who controls the corporate media in the United States is a question of national security and civilizational survival. Americans of European Christian ancestry can no longer allow non-Europeans or non-Christians to own and control the corporate media in the United States. We did not ask for this civil war, but it is upon us.

* Hitler and most of the Nazi high command were really passionate about Native American rights. Even going so far to draw up tentative plans to return large chunks of North America to the indigenous people.

* At some point, you need to decide whether your are for Western Civilization or against it. I can’t speak for everyone obviously, but I’m happy to join with anyone who genuinely wants to help save our history and culture regardless of their religious background or ethnicity.

But if you can only think “Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, what about the Jews? ” then what help are you? There is something much larger here than feeling insulted when someone points out the truth about Jewish culture.

* For more than a week we had a growing anti-SJW momentum in popular culture with Damore’s memo. The facts were perfect and on our side, and we had a likable face the normies could identify with, and a dislikable enemy in Apu Pikachu and the blue haired “that’s not funny!” harpies.

Then our friends Richard Spencer and DailyStormer did them a solid and changed the topic to “Violent Nazi Mobs: Yea or Nay?”

* In many ways, the current moral panic over Trump declaring that both sides were violent in Charlottesville is identical to that over saying “All Lives Matter” instead of “Black Lives Matter”.

Under current religious rules, it’s blasphemous to suggest that there’s any parity between the concerns of one side and those of the other. There is only one evil, “Othering”, and only one good, the extermination of “Othering”.

* Let me use a parable, since you are from San Fran and I was once a native too. After many bitter harvests since moving to California, the Giants had the best run of fortune of any MLB team this century, winning 3 World Series in 4 years. Yet whenever I hung out on a Giants fan message board, all the weak-kneed, no-heart fans there could go on about was how stressful winning it all was, and how their delicate little systems could not stomach anything less a 4-consecutive blowout Giants sweep. And if I am truly honest with myself, I was not much better than those fans.

The point being, that if Trump has not improved you as a man, you really have not been paying attention. Trump pulled off the greatest upset in Presidential history, yet to road to the White House was anything but smooth, orderly, and dignified. And if we have any hope of saving this country and its traditions we have to learn the have the self-confidence, thick skin, and will of Trump, and not be afraid to look boorish, loud-mouthed, and uncouth sometimes, or succumb to the urge to run to the nearest corner to curl up and die the next time we are ‘embarrassed’. A regular gentleman, polished, nice paleocon would have died the death of a thousand comedy-news snarks by now. Trump is out there fighting the good fight and he is doing it completely alone. Truly the most Olympian figure of our age.

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Random Thoughts On Charlottsville

Posted on August 16, 2017 by Luke Ford

* The news coverage of the Charlottsville rally showed zero criticism of violent communists.

* The news coverage of Charlottsville this weekend showed zero empathy for whites who want to preserve their heritage. Zero.

* If the cops had done that to Jewish protesters – funneled to violent protesters for a beating – Jewish orgs would have all called it a pogrom.

* “The mere fact that not even a shot was fired by one of the myriad of gun carrying rightists is a miracle in itself. Astounding self control.”

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President Trump Argues Over Charlottesville, Race Relations in Heated Press Conference | NBC News

Posted on August 15, 2017 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Trump was spot on. That was a beautiful press conference. I love that he gave those media thugs a piece of his mind. Our mainstream journalists have not one shred of credibility left, they are blinded by hate and their ideology and see no wrong in reporting half truths or outright lies.

It’s come down to this: only the left has the right to protest, no one else does. Any other group who tries to protest will get shouted down, clubbed, pushed, beaten. Is this still a free country?

What kind of people wear masks to a protest? Why do they need them? Those Antifa thugs wear masks and bring clubs to every “peaceful” protest. Add to them the BLM racist thugs, and you always know how things will end.

I don’t know why the right go out to march or protest, it just gives these leftist thugs more opportunities to incite violence. Let them go own the streets and protest all they want, all they’ll do is turn more people off. Let these Antifa/BLM thugs protest, they’ll get bored eventually, meanwhile, we vote!

* I thought that Trump’s press conference was utterly masterful — and entirely truthful. Violence (except self-defense) was explicitly disavowed by the alt-right groups who actually got a permit for the rally. And unlike Obama, who time and again sprinted to the podium to make politically-charged and racially-charged statements “without knowing all the facts,” Trump carefully examined the evidence and found that the Left was indeed inciting and committing violence.

It’s almost unreal how the mainstream press has scripted a completely false narrative and is using it to hold the President of the United States hostage. I’ve never seen anything like it… perhaps with the exception of Soviet Union, where the Official Party Narrative disseminated by Party organs like Izvestia and Pravda was frequently at odds with reality. But in the USSR, it was the government and the party were controlling the media narrative, not being assailed with it. The 6:30 national news on all major networks was so slanted against Trump’s truthful statements I was absolutely flabbergasted.

* That speech was pure Bannon. The Left is now going insane trying to deal with the term alt-left.

I admit I was opposed to that term, but I was wrong. It was a rhetorical kill shot. That said, alt-right is probably dead a brand, but that may not be a bad thing either.

* He took the media to task on the violent left, on the slippery slope of taking down statues and re-writing history, on the painting of all proud southerners with a racist brush. And it was funny as heck. I don’t know how his advisors standing next to him kept from smiling or laughing – more discipline than I have.

Posted in Alt Right, America | Comments Off on President Trump Argues Over Charlottesville, Race Relations in Heated Press Conference | NBC News

Where Does The Washington Post Stand On Donald Trump?

Posted on August 15, 2017 by Luke Ford

I glanced at the WashingtonPost.com just now and saw 16 anti-Trump stories and four neutral stories about Trump.

My impression of the news media over the past two years is that their stories are about 70% negative about Trump, about 25% neutral, and about 5% positive. By contrast, it seemed like the media’s focus was about 50% positive on Obama, and then evenly divided between negative and neutral.

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Ivy League law prof says Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior — and gets hammered for it

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Luke Ford

Amy Wax, a brilliant and courageous woman, has long been a race realist. Jared Taylor has praised her.

The Blaze:

University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Amy Wax may come across as somewhat of an aberration at one of the high-ranking bastions of liberal academia.

That’s because Wax — the Ivy League school’s Robert Mundheim Professor of Law who boasts degrees from Yale, Harvard and Columbia — often stands against the left-wing tide.

Wax penned an op-ed for Philly.com Wednesday, co-written with Larry Alexander of the University of San Diego School of Law, in which she declares that our society’s multifaceted breakdown can be linked to the abandonment of a long-lost cultural “script.”

You know what it is: “Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime,” she writes.

Her piece also blasts as culturally unsuitable the “single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants” and warns that we need to get back to old values — and fast.

In a follow-up interview with the Daily Pennsylvanian Thursday, Wax told the school paper that Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior.

“I don’t shrink from the word, ‘superior,’” she told the paper, adding that “everyone wants to come to the countries that exemplify” these values and that “everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.”

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Parasha Re’eh (Det. 11-16)

Posted on August 13, 2017 by Luke Ford

Wikipedia: “The parashah is the longest weekly Torah portion in the Book of Deuteronomy.” Listen here.

* Shouldn’t the WN leaders themselves have been asked these two questions instead of leaders from the Cathedral?

* Deut: 10:19: “Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Ethan Linden:

In our parashah this week we find an odd statement masquerading as banal—a revolutionary idea that at first glance seems familiar, but is something else entirely. In Deuteronomy 10:19 the Torah commands: “Ve-ahavtem et hager ki gerim hayitem be-eretz mitzrayim” (“Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”).

We find very similar statements elsewhere in the Torah, of course, but with a crucial difference. Consider Exodus 22:20, for example: “Veger lo toneh velo tilhatzenu” (“Do not wrong a stranger, do not oppress him”). The end of this verse—which provides the reason for the law, or perhaps the reason why the people should take care to follow it—is the same as that in Deuteronomy: for you were strangers in the Land of Egypt. But in Exodus, and in most of the other biblical verses that address this issue, the command is: Do not harm, do not oppress. In Deuteronomy 10:19, we are told: Love. One is a negative injunction—do not act in such a way toward a stranger—while in this week’s parashah we have an affirmative requirement: Seek a ger out and show favor to him or her.

It is perhaps the oddity of this that leads Rashi to his interesting comment on this verse. He quotes from the Talmud (BT Bava Metzia 59b): “Do not taunt your fellow with the blemish you yourself have.” This is an unexpected take on the verse—and one that affects the level of difficulty of this mitzvah. After all, not oppressing someone is easier, and takes far less effort, than acting affirmatively to befriend them, to try to understand and love them. While the Exodus version of the command can be followed simply by staying out of the way of a ger, this Deuteronomic version in our parashah seems to require the exact opposite: to get in their way such that we can see the ger, and the ger can see us. Rashi, perhaps sensing this difference, reads the verse as being less about public policy and more about public comity. We all have blemishes, Rashi seems to be saying, and perhaps we should remember that when we are interacting with our neighbors.

* Moshe: “See, I present before you today a blessing and a curse.” Every choice we make contains a blessing and a curse.

* Det. 11:32: “You shall be careful to perform all the decrees and the ordinances that I present before you today.”

Every people has an operating procedure for maximum success. When they drift from it, they decline.

* Regarding the events in Charlottesville, we should remember that not all white nationalists are murderers. As 4Chan Pol put it: “White nationalism is a movement of peace, anyone who does violence in the name of white nationalism is no true white nationalist. To conflate violence with white nationalism is bigotry of the highest order, I’m offended at your bigotry.”

* I believe in right and wrong. I believe there is objective morality (which requires belief in a transcendent God who is the source of morality aka the Torah). Right now, however, regarding the events in Charlotte, I prefer clarity and objectivity. There are different forms of life here struggling for survival. When conflicts of interest become sufficiently intense, there is inevitably violence. That’s how intense conflicts of interest are solved.

There are iron laws of life that apply to everybody, such as gravity and social identity theory. Many conflicts, personal and group, are win-lose. One party wins and another party loses. Sometimes, you have to kill or be killed. The more you identify with your group, the more likely you are to have negative feelings about out-groups. The more pressure a group or an individual feels, the less likely he is to be tolerant. The more intelligent the person, the more able he is to empathy and to find win-win solutions.

* The parasha offers some insights into Saturday’s events. Deut. 12:2-3: “Destroy completely all the places on the high mountains, on the hills and under every spreading tree, where the nations you are dispossessing worship their gods. 3 Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and burn their Asherah poles in the fire; cut down the idols of their gods and wipe out their names from those places.”

One side is trying to destroy all the symbols of the Confederacy and white supremacy. The other side is trying to maintain their civilization and not be replaced.

It is similar to the situation 3200 years ago laid out in the Torah in the fight for the Holy Land. The natives wanted to keep their civilization. The Jews want to destroy it and take over with their own civilization. If we want to discuss this conflict in terms of right and wrong, we have to share the same faith in the transcendent God who’s the source of objective morality. If you don’t share the same faith, it is hard to have a fruitful discussion of right and wrong. But all people can discuss group conflicts of interest. No faith required.

Non-monotheist approaches to life don’t have the same need as monotheists to wipe out other religions and to install allegiance to the one universal morality.

* Det: 12: “8 You are not to do as we do here today, everyone doing as they see fit, 9 since you have not yet reached the resting place and the inheritance the Lord your God is giving you.”

Even with objective morality and God-given morality, there are different moralities for different places and situations. Ethics can be both divine, universal and situational. Judaism is situational morality. The situation determines the moral.

* In Hebrew, the word for “slave” and for “servant” is the same — “eved.”

* The Protestant approach to the Bible is that every man can open it up and on his own divine what it is saying. The Catholic and Jewish approach is to approach the text through the eyes of tradition (you follow the guidance of your wisest ancestors).

* Det. 12:18: “You shall rejoice before HaShem, your God, in every undertaking.” The Torah places tremendous importance on happiness though this happiness is secondary to observance. The U.S. Declaration of Independence, on the other hand, declares: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Do other religions place equal value on happiness? Islam does not radiate happiness. Hasidic Judaism places more importance on happiness than any other Jewish movement.

* LINK:

What makes something “chukat goyim?”

* One of the most famous examples I have heard is that one should not even tie one’s shoes like the non-Jews do in times of persecution. That seems rather excessive. What if the Jews started doing some custom, and it gets co-opted by the non-Jews. Can we still do it? If not, that could wipe out a lot of Passover seder traditions, since a large fraction of Christian (in particular Catholic) ritual is based on the last supper, which of course was a seder.

* Rabbi Feinstein says we follow the opinion of the Ran, that chukat goyim is only something that the Jews haven’t done until now, AND it has something to do with paganism or sexual immodesty. (Halloween is generally understood as an example of the former; for the latter, R’ Moshe suggests that theoretically, if the Jewish women in a society clearly had the practice not to wear red clothing, then choosing to do so in imitation of the non-Jews — red is flashier and more attractive — would be a problem.)

Another possibility of chukat goyim is where the action makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, so the only reason to do it would be to try to blend in with non-Jews. A doctor’s white coat (or the specialized clothing of craft guilds in Renaissance Italy) is okay because it’s not pagan nor immodest, and you’re wearing it for professional reasons. R’ Moshe also writes that all the funny things about American clothing — well, American men’s clothing in the 1950s — are considered decorations, and not a problem.

Fascinatingly, R’ Moshe concludes that “American clothing” today is in fact “American Jewish clothing”, no different than “Polish Jewish clothing” and thus not “goyish” at all. (Provided it’s appropriate!)

The shoelace case is one where clearly the Jews had one shoelace style, and the non-Jews another. One choosing to change shoelace style would be making a statement “I want to look like a non-Jew.” In this case, the non-Jewish style was also flashier, so the switch is both a statement, and a drift away from modesty. It’s also important to realize that in times of persecution, we need to hold strong.

Wikipedia: Chukot Akum or Chukat Ha’Akum is a prohibition in Judaism of imitating Gentile manners in their dressings and practices. The prohibition comes from the old testament commandment “You shall not follow gentile customs”(Leviticus 20:23). Modern life has created many dilemmas on what constitutes a violation of this prohibition and there is ongoing debate about this topic. For example can a Jew attend thanksgiving or Mother’s day observance without violating this prohibition.

* If white nationalists are not allowed to rally, then what are their alternatives?

Washington Post: Richard Spencer, the white nationalist and one of the leaders of the rally, said police failed to protect groups with which he is affiliated. “We came here as a demonstration of our movement,” Spencer said. “And we were effectively thrown to the wolves.” The police, he said, “did not protect us.”

* Marshawn Lynch sits during national anthem…

* David Brooks writes in the NYT: “Damore was tapping into the long and contentious debate about genes and behavior. On one side are those who believe that humans come out as blank slates and are formed by social structures. On the other are the evolutionary psychologists who argue that genes interact with environment and play a large role in shaping who we are. In general the evolutionary psychologists have been winning this debate.”

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My Keen Attention To Detail Got Me To Where I Am In Life

Posted on August 11, 2017 by Luke Ford

I parked my car at a meter yesterday and got outside into the sun and happily and blissfully walked away without putting any money in the meter. I do this quite a lot but yesterday I didn’t catch myself and got my first parking ticket ($63) in about eight years. In my first year in Los Angeles (1994), I racked up about $1000 in traffic tickets, but in all the years subsequent, my parking tickets wouldn’t add up to that. The number of women I got to know well in my first year in LA also exceed all women since. I’m a bloke who can make a great first impression.

I have a friend who’s lived in LA most of his life and he’s never gotten a parking ticket nor a moving violation. He inspires me. When I told him about my credit card debt (it was about $42,000 at the time), he said I should know to the day that I’ll have it all paid off.

I’ve never been a detail person. I don’t usually mention this in job interviews. Once I get a job, I find myself saying, “This will still work” about my typically shoddy output. And I’ll usually get a reply to the effect, “We don’t do things this way. That crap might be how things are in the Seventh-Day Adventist world, but in Jewish Hollywood, we spell names correctly.”

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