Category Archives: Ideology

In which I pat myself on the back for keeping out of it..

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Over at Bob Wenzel’s entertaining blog, the libertarians are having it out with each other again – the thick libertarians and the thin.

(http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/which-political-party-is-best-for-america/question-2611731/?page=3&link=ibaf&q=&esrc=s)

First, Sheldon Richman took on Walter Block and Lew Rockwell.

He accused them of not supporting their arguments with evidence.

Bionic Mosquito zapped him.

The verdict from the gallery was a resounding win for the home-team.

Then it was Jeffrey Tucker’s turn to come out swinging against Thomas Aquinas,

who, being dead,  was ably defended by the learned David Gordon.

Next, N. Stephan Kinsella arm-wrestled with a minarchist and called him names like “loser,”

which is par for the course, when it comes to N. Stephan Kinsella.

I woman-fully restrained myself from throwing any sticks or stones, as part of my endless violated not-so-New Year’s resolution to “play nicer.”

[See, Mr. Tucker? I took your humanitarian advice to heart in spirit, even though I criticized it in letter.]

But I admit I missed drawing blood.

And I admit I enjoyed watching others draw blood:

http://johnkreng.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/review-of-bloodsport-1988/

But, honestly, I didn’t get much satisfaction from any of it.

A wee bit of Schadenfreude, maybe.

But, for a brutalist outcaste – a “hater” and a “bigot” –

….not bad at all.

Recommended reading: Jonathan Haidt: “Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics”

Tradition carries authority in itself

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Thomas Fleming at Chronicles  – the link no longer works – (h/t to The Thinking Housewife) suggests that men, reasoning on their own, are likely to promote their own ends, when subverting traditional moral teaching:

“Let us never forget that white males created and promoted feminism, that feminism is a male ideology. The women feminists were inconsequential eccentrics-compare the negligible influence of Mary Wollstonecraft with that of her lover Godwin, for example. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the other harridans they cite so often were regarded as freaks by both sexes.

Why did men create feminism? If we put the question to Godwin, Laclos, and Sade, they would say-if they were honest-that liberating women from control of fathers and husbands made them more vulnerable to seduction and exploitation, and that was certainly the foundation of the Playboy philosophy, and it has been said explicitly. Capitalists would have added that by liberating women, they could lower wages and make more money-remember it was the Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce that came up with the equal rights amendment and “Equal pay for equal work.”

But libertinism and capitalist exploitation are not the root of the problem. Feminism is an outgrowth of Renaissance anti-Christian individualism that makes of every son, daughter, sister, brother, wife,. parent nothing more than an interchangeable algebraic entity. Throughout the 18th century, the unreflecting encyclopedists and their disciples asked stupid questions like, “Why should one religion be preferred to another,” and “Why should aristocrats have social privileges not enjoyed by peasants,” and “Why should men have rights that women don’t have?” The most obvious answers are the ones we give to children when they ask why they can’t stay out till midnight or eat in the living room. BECAUSE YOU CAN’T. Why, daddy? BECAUSE I SAID SO.

In other words, challenges to the natural order of things must be met with exertions of authority, not with ingenious arguments. But, no, stupid white European males who could not see beyond the end of their nose – or perhaps another organ – destroyed, one by one, the foundations of a decent and normal social order. So-called conservatives were content to wring their hands or, more often, go with the flow which they tried feebly to slow but never halt, much less reverse course.”

Thus, in arrangements that have endured more or less satisfactorily near-universally, over recorded time (and such is the physical and public dominance of men over women), the onus must be on the reformers to provide the evidence that the changes they propose will actually improve, rather than destroy, the social fabric:

“It is only natural to assume—and scientific research has gone a long way to verify this assumption—that in the evolution of mammalian, specifically primate species, males and females developed specialized roles:  Men became the experts in hunting large game and fighting the enemies of family and clan.  Because these specialties are associated with certain attributes of mind and spirit as well as with bodily functions, the nervous and hormonal systems of males and females develop somewhat differently.  The differences, in any individual cases, may be quite slight, but overall women are more verbal, men more analytical, women more inclined to what is now called “multi-tasking,” men more prone to concentrating on problems one at a time.  For a detailed survey of evidence down to the early 1980’s, see my book, The Politics of Human Nature. As human societies have grown and developed—often in strange and wonderful ways–they have always been shaped by these fundamental facts of sexual dimorphism. In a near-universal pattern of dominance, younger humans defer to their elders and females to males.”

Oliver Twist: Once Anti-Semitic, Now Universal?

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Scena.org:

“A new study by an Australian academic, John Waller, argues that Dickens took his story from the memoirs of a poorhouse boy, Robert Blincoe, published in 1832, five years before Oliver. The Real Oliver Twist (Icon Books, £16.99) may have uncovered a source of Dickensian detail, but no affinity of character.

As for Fagin, there is no telling where he came from. Dickens admitted that he knew no Jews at the time. Yet, like Shakespeare before him, he allowed the villain a certain endearing avuncularity. One feels Fagin’s sorrow as gives up Oliver to the custody of Sikes. Rachel Portman’s attractive score studiously underplays the accompaniment of Jewish music to Jewish misery.

Ben Kingsley endows the villain with tragic inevitability: a lonely old man, scrabbling for trinkets of security and a little human warmth. The story ends in his prison cell, gallows rising in the square outside. Instead of Dickens’ happy ending, showing Oliver’s acceptance into polite society, the apotheosis is cruel and appropriately sanctimonious. In this, and most other ways, the film is true to the spirit of the story and of the author’s ambiguities: for the blurring of anti-semitism is something in which Dickens himself ultimately conspired.

In 1860, Dickens sold his London home to a Jewish banker, James Davis. ‘The purchaser of Tavistock House will be a Jew Money-Lender,’ he told a friend. Some time later he added: ‘I must say that in all things the purchaser has behaved thoroughly well, and that I cannot call to mind any occasion when I have had money-dealings with anyone that have been so satisfactory, considerate and trusting.’

He took quite a shine to the banker’s wife, Eliza Davis, who reproached him in a letter of 1863 for the ‘great wrong’ he had committed in Oliver Twist. Two years later, Dickens created in Our Mutual Friend the noble character of Riah, an elderly Jew who finds jobs for downcast young women in Jewish-owned factories. ‘I think there cannot be kinder people in the world,’ exclaims one of the girls. ‘There is nothing but good will left between me and a People for whom I have a real regard and to whom I would not willfully have given an offense,’ wrote Dickens to Mrs Davis.

He set about revising Oliver Twist in light of her criticisms, removing almost all mention of ‘the Jew’ from the last 15 chapters. In one of his last public readings in 1869, a year before his death, Dickens cleansed Fagin of stereotypical caricature. ‘There is no nasal intonation; a bent back but no shoulder-shrug: the conventional attributes are omitted,’ or so the reports have it.

This attempt to make amends redeems Oliver Twist, for me, from the index of anti-Semitic English literature, a list that stretches from Chaucer through Marlow to Trollope and Belloc, Agatha Christie and T S Eliot. It was certainly Dickens’ final intention that ‘the Jew’ should be incidental in Oliver Twist and in his film Polanski has given the story a personal dimension that renders it irreproachably universal.“

Priapus: The God of Modernity

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Update: Again, the needful clarification:

I don’t support Esolen’s position on gay marriage, just because I agree with the accuracy of his exposition of Christian doctrine.

In contrast to Esolen, I fully support the right of homosexuals to marry and adopt children and raise their own children in any way they want.

I go even farther.

I think polygamists, poly-amorists, and every other bi- or trans group should be free to form their own types of marriages/group couplings…or unions… and create churches that agree with them, if they want to.

But I do object to attempts to rewrite traditional Christian teaching to make it approve these practices and I affirm my right to state that those unions are not consonant with the traditional teaching of Christianity or the major religious traditions.

Apparently, in some circles, that still makes me a “bigot” and “hater.”

One thing is true. I am bigoted in favor of truthful statements and I hate falsification of history and mendacious media campaigns.

ORIGINAL POST

I just discovered an interesting conservative Christian magazine – Touchstone, which claims to be a defense of “mere Christianity” – C. S. Lewis’ term for unadorned traditional Christian teaching.  An article there argues that the real god behind the “environmental feminism or eco-feminism” of the New World Order is not the goddess Gaia, as its naive proponents believe, but the God Priapus.

Anthony Esolen on the real god behind Gaia – Priapus:

“We may never budge one inch on what is essential. We will not tell a lie, even to please the world and win us the accolades of faculty bishops and historians everywhere. We will not move.

In our day, the issue is not Christology. We’re not so sophisticated in our heresies. The issue is sex. We’re encouraged to pretend that the child-making act is not essentially ordered to child-making. We must pretend that it’s only the friction of erogenous flesh. We must pretend that a man can be made into a woman by a saw and a trowel, and a woman into a man by pinning the tail on the donkey, or by just thinking it is so. We must pretend that a child in the womb is just some stuff or other. We must pretend that boys and girls do not deserve a married father and mother, promised to one another for life. If we are Christian, we must say to Christ, “Thus far and no farther! You can have all the world, but these few inches are mine.”

Demands of the New Religion

Now let us be quite clear. We have not chosen this fight. The new religion has come to us, and it demands total submission. It demands that we cease to worship God, and that we cease to tell the truth. We have come to the cleft in the road, what Lewis called the great divorce. God will, if we allow him, heal our evil ways; Jesus came to call sinners. But God can no more accept evil in his household than he can cease to be God. He is holy. He will wash our grubby robes white in his blood, but Truth cannot lie. He cannot declare the unclean to be clean. He can only make it clean by his grace.

The new religion of sex requires us to take down the Cross and erect something else. We must not do so. It requires us to abandon our fellow men to lusts that destroy the common good, as even sociologists, often the slow kids on the block, have begun to see. We must not do so. It requires us to subject our bodies to the phantasms of homeless postmodern man. We must not do so. It requires us to avert our eyes as our little brothers and sisters are dismembered. We must not do so. It requires us to wink as the minds of children are subjected to confusion in order to ratify the choices of adults. We must not do so. It requires us to subordinate political liberty to sexual license. We must not do so.

It requires us to spit upon the Cross, to sink our fingers in the blood of innocent children, to harden our hearts against the crushed lives of brothers and sisters who learn to their dismay that Priapus is a stupid and stupefying idol. It requires us to like ourselves rather than love our neighbors. It requires us to tell a deadly lie.

Raise One Sword

We must not do so. We shall not do so. Truth is truth to the end of time. Even if the battle appears lost, let each Christian raise one sword at least against the lie. Even if the fight is fierce, the warfare long, let each Christian remember that our Captain triumphed in and through the hour of his utter defeat upon Calvary. We set our faces like flint. While there is breath in our lungs and blood in our hearts, we will not cease to tell the truth, and we will not bend one inch in homage to the idol.

The Lord does not require that we win. He requires that we be steadfast. The battle is not ours but his. Yet let us not suppose that we are doomed to lose this fight. The gates of hell are not iron; the gates of hell are straw. For a vanguard has gone before us that our opponents cannot see, whose very existence they do not suspect. It is that great cloud of witnesses—and they are armed in the full array of God.”

“Tolerant” liberals threaten violence against orthodox nun

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Crisis magazine reports that a leftist group’s outrage over a nun’s orthodox criticism of homosexuality was really a tantrum over the resurgence of orthodoxy in a hitherto liberal enclave of Catholicism:

“All of this

(Lila: “This” refers to  the outrage of some students, parents, and faculty, at Sister Jane Dominic Laurel’s traditionalist lecture about homosexuality at a Catholic high school in Charlotte, North Carolina.)

led to perhaps the most acrimonious part of this story, the intense and vexatious school assembly where Father Matthew Kauth, school chaplain and the one who is blamed for all of this was—in the words of several witnesses—crucified. And this is where the real story of the nun’s lecture comes to light.

The story was never really about the nun. She was collateral damage for those who wanted the scalp of Father Kauth and even more want to stem encroaching orthodoxy from this otherwise Catholic-light enclave. The larger story is about how the dissenting Church is dying in Charlotte, North Carolina and this is perhaps its dying gasps.

So quickly did the poison build up in the school—what with teachers fanning the flames, parents in irregular relationships stoking the fire, dissenting nuns and perhaps a few grey-haired priests lending a hand, and all the largely unformed students wanting to be “fair” and “loving” and “non-judgmental”—the diocese decided to have an all-parents meeting to let off some steam.

The meeting started with general statements by the diocesan representatives and then a prepared apology from Father Kauth. When I first read his statement, it seemed to me he was throwing Sister to the wolves. He said she did not give the talk he asked for. But here’s the problem. According to sources close to the situation, when Kauth asked for the talk he heard previously that talk did not have the homosexual part in it.

Sister had been to the school last fall and spoken to smaller groups segregated by sex and in the company of parents. That talk had the gay stuff in it and it was received positively. When Father asked for a talk, Sister thought he meant that talk. She went to him twice to ask, “Are you sure you want that talk?” Father twice said yes, but they were talking about two different lectures. Sister knew in her bones the talk with the gay stuff would not fly in an all-school assembly.

Kauth apologized for that and that makes sense. He did not back away from the material, only from the venue and he blamed himself.

Did that stop the wolf-pack come to pick at his innards and suck on his bones?

The angry parents yelled and screamed and demanded for what was supposed to be an hour and a half but stretched into two and a half hours. Their cries were like cries of pain from deep within their souls. They were smart not to challenge Church teaching. Very few are willing to come right out and say they disagree with Church teaching, to announce they contracept, or believe in a woman’s right to abort, or that men who have sex with men can marry each other.

One mother shared with me a text message she received from a dissenting mother. I quote it in full so as not to be charged with cherry picking:

Parents’ objections were never about the churches official teaching on adultery as it pertains to homosexuals having sex. Or about the church’s teaching about any kind of sex for that matter. Contraception never came up? The objection was to the statement of non doctrine “scientific facts” made, the manner in which the facts were presented, the age range and co-gender audience it was presented to, the fact that parents were not notified of the program like EVERY OTHER program at the school, etc. No one is afraid to talk. We just want to stick to the facts of what happened and not defend ourselves against baseless claims that we are “dissenting” simply because protocol in partnering with parents was violated on purpose and non scientific, non doctrine facts were dumped on kids as young as 13. In a co-gendered audience. [Austin Ruse’s] message back to you indicates he may just be part of that crowd insinuating heterodoxy where it simply doesn’t apply just to cause more division. The division in the school is because of the way it was handled. And in so doing children were marginalized and the saddest point of all of it, not once was God’s love for all his children ever, ever mentioned. And that last part? Came straight from my daughter’s mouth. They accomplished nothing if that is what my amazing, wholesome, smart and faithful girl walked away with.

Note this mother thinks that men who have sex with men is simply a matter of adultery as if they could have sex if they were married, yet she is at pains to say she does not disagree with Church teaching.

She is upset that “non-doctrinal” facts were presented though if you go to the catechism you find the only reason for homosexual attraction is “psychological.” The church is silent on genetic factors. Note also her insistence in using the word “gender” even in the clumsy formulation “co-gendered” rather than something simple as “co-ed” or even “boys and girls.”

Their insistence on process masks their deep problem with Church teaching and a lack of courage to express it.

So, at the meeting they did not yell and scream about Church teaching but about process, and yell and scream they did. “Why weren’t we told?” “Why didn’t you stop her?” After each emotional outburst, a crowd of parents, at least one gay couple included, would stand and cheer and it all came out like the stomping of little feet among those who have not gotten their way.

Any parent who rose to defend the Priest and the school, were shouted down. Parents who tried to defend the priest and the school are now frightened, frightened physically and frightened for their children. That is why none of them wanted to go on the record.

As the meeting progressed, Father Kauth tried to answer their questions but the questions became all the same and the angry mob was not listening. Someone told me it reminded them of why Christ did not answer some of his questioners; the questioners simply were not interested in listening, only venting and getting a pound of flesh. Sympathetic parents said they had never seen such a display of anger and hatred directed at a priest.

And this gets to the slightly larger question. Prior to Father Kauth’s arrival two years ago, the school only had visiting priests, no regular confession, never regularly daily Mass. Kauth arrived and insisted on a daily presence, an open door, regularly scheduled confession, daily Mass. Mass attendance began to spike. Now half the chapel may be filled for the twenty minute Mass he gives each morning before lunch. If he runs late, there is a stack of “Mass Passes” that get them back into class without problems.

He outraged the lefty faculty not long ago when on a weekend day, not during school hours, he blessed the school, the whole school, all the classrooms, and then presided over the Traditional Latin Mass in the chapel. At least one teacher was outraged. “He blessed my room? He did this without MY permission?”

The left is dying in Charlotte and this is at least one of their last gasps. The small seminary has twenty-two young men, all orthodox. As they are graduated and ordained they come to run parishes that hitherto had been run by the pungency of dissent. One source told me, “When a new orthodox priest takes over a parish, the dissenters up and leave and have to go somewhere else and they are running out of places to go.”

Lila: Sister Laurel, meanwhile, was forced out of her public commitments:

“And what of the nun? Sadly, she immediately cancelled all of her upcoming speaking engagements. Reliable sources tell me she received too many threats of violence to proceed. Such is the tolerance of the sexual left.”

Also at Crisis Magazine, Rev. James V. Schall describes how the liberal intolerance of orthodox belief has led to the existence of two churches. He identifies a “church of the media,” whose doctrine is expected to follow state legislation, and the real church, where a “remnant” of believers cling to the traditional doctrine of the Christianity, in defiance of modern mores:

“By identifying religious and philosophical ideas as the cause of civil discontent, Hobbes was able to justify giving the state absolute power over public expression. This prevention was accomplished by the presumed fear of violent death if the law was violated. In a way, modern public opinion produces the same effect, a kind of civil death in which a reasonable position is simply said not to exist. If we do not allow anything but what the state or the culture permits, no matter what it is, we will end up with a “peaceful” society that has been intimidated and ridiculed into silence.

As a result, the arguments against these disorders are never heard. Society becomes locked into itself. No one is able to diagnose its ills. But this new form of suppression of dissent works also in the churches. Since their members also display widespread instances of divorce, homosexuality, in vitro births, abortions, and various other ways of life considered to be unnatural or harmful, it makes opposing these things in church also problematic.

Many basic teachings are simply seldom heard from the pulpit out of fear of dissent in the congregation or the loss of state funds. Politicians and other public figures who advocate positions against basic Church teachings are not expelled. They remain members in good standing. In this context, an ordinary person will conclude that the Church is silent about these teachings because they are indefensible. Protests are immediately heard whenever a strong and informed case is made against these deviations from Catholic teaching; as a result, the Church is often found speechless.

And if the arguments are seldom heard, it will not be surprising if the majority of people assume that the Christian churches have in fact abandoned their teachings as they have been urged to do. There will be in effect two churches. The first is the old-fashioned one, the minority, that still advocates the orthodox positions that are now largely against the civil law and public opinion. The second is the church of the media in which everything is understood as evolving and developing in the direction of what the civil law establishes. This will be presented as what is best for man and what the churches ought to teach. The orthodox Christian view will appear to undermine civil peace. A remnant will be left that will not go along with what modern society permits.”

Professor Anthony Esolen, in another Crisis article, argues that this “not getting along” with the world is the church’s very heart and soul because the teachings of Jesus Christ always scandalize society, even though they are objectively true in the moral realm.

Today, it is Christ’s stringent teachings about sexuality that create scandal:

“The Church’s teachings liberate. I’ve experienced it. The habits of the Sexual Revolution enslave, and bring in their wake a great deal of human misery, and even blood. That may make people unhappy to hear, but it is a fact.”

Vladimir Putin: The NWO’s man in Russia?

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UPDATE:

Zahir Ebrahim in the comments questions the figure $75 billion.  Well, I used the term “apparently” because there’s not much concrete to go by, but that is the figure (or $70b) given out by critics.

How credible is it? No way to know for sure, but besides the Gazprom shares, Putin is said to secretly own shares in many other companies:

“While many previously state-owned industries were privatized, Putin allegedly has used his power to build large secret ownership stakes several multi-billion dollar commodity firms. His most vocal critics assert that Putin has leveraged his power to acquire a 4.5% ownership stake in natural gas producer Gazprom, a 37% stake in oil company Surgutneftegas and 50% stake in Swiss oil-trader Gunvor. Gazprom alone does over $150 billion in revenue annually, Guvnor does $80 billion and Surgutneftegas over $20 billion. Using their most recent market capitalizations, Putin’s combined ownership stakes would give him a personal net worth of $70 billion!So what evidence is there of Putin’s secret obscene fortune? Let’s start with the small stuff. Putin is known to sport a $150,000 Patek Philippe watch on most occasions and his total collection has been valued at $700,000. He also has full access to a $40 million ultra-luxury yacht that features a wine cellar, Jacuzzi, helipad and outdoor barbecue area. In terms of living accommodations, Putin has access to 20 mansions throughout the world including a lavish ski lodge and Medieval castle. The crown jewel of his property portfolio is a $1 billion palace overlooking the Black Sea that he allegedly owns through an anonymous trust. Furthermore, Putin makes frequent use of 15 Presidential helicopters and more than 40 private jets, many of which feature gold plated interiors.”

The reports are  based on an interview given by Stanislav Belkovsky to Die Welt, also described here.

Some other related links about Putin’s associations with the oligarchs:

Roman Abramovich once had close and privileged ties to Putin.

Abramovich fell out with one-time associate Berezovsky but stayed friendly with Putin.

Oligarchs like Abramovich, Fridman, and Miller are close to Putin.

The second plundering of Russia, according to Stanislav Belkovsky

More here about Putin’s business dealings.

Corruption alleged by Boris Nemtsov, Deputy PM under Yeltsin and an Opposition leader.

NOTE: I’m going to do another post about Putin because I think I might have swallowed some disinformation put out.  I didn’t realize that the $70-75b. figure only came from that interview, because I saw it repeated by another investigator, but I’m wondering now if there is some disinfo  in all this.

ORIGINAL POST

It’s been interesting to me to see the right regarding President Putin as some kind of Christian hero

Even Bill Lind has joined the chorus.

It’s certainly true that Putin says a lot of things that conservatives want to hear.

He’s outfoxed the Bolsheviks of the US State Dept.

But, as I’ve pointed out before, there’s plenty of  evidence that Putin himself is beholden to the right wing of the New World Order.

One can accept the secession of Crimea as a relatively peaceful process and an understandable reaction to the US’s own belligerent posturing and meddling in the region, but it doesn’t follow that one should then swallow the narrative of Patrick Buchanan that Putin stands for Christianity.

These are deep waters. Nothing is as it seems. Anyone who subscribes to black-and-white narratives can be easily manipulated by the powers-that-be.

A lengthy article on the Russian Orthodox church since the fall of communism argues that the Moscow Church was completely under the Soviets and acted as an agent of the KGB; that the transition to “democracy” in the 1990s was only a transition to criminality and a change in rhetoric not substance; that there is little real orthodoxy left under the Sovietized Orthodox Church; and that simony, occultism, paganism, and ecumenism reign in the present-day Russian church, not traditional belief.

The blog La Russophobe has a list of  what it calls “Putin murders” – assassinations of civil society figures – journalists and activists.

That list would be the Russian equivalent of the Clinton body count.

In India, The Hindustan Times points out that no world leader annoys America’s belligerent leadership more.

But the enemy of my enemy is…sometimes….just another enemy:

The red flags are there to see:

1. Vladimir Putin to revive Soviet Hero of Labor award (Daily Telegraph, Dec 11, 2012)

2. Vladimir Putin compares Lenin to holy Christian relics (Daily Telegraph, Dec 12, 2012)

3.  Vladimir Putin’s net worth

I am going to retract this assessment of Putin’s  net worth. The reason is that the origin of the figure comes from an interview by a Putin biographer, Stanislav Belkovsky, in Die  Welt, who claims Putin has never sued him. The estimate seems to be based on Belkovsky’s book on Putin’s finances and his research as head of a Moscow think-tank. It’s not improbable, given Putin’s career as a close associate of several oligarchs, himself a KGB chief, and allegedly involved in corrupt dealings following the death of Yeltsin, who passed on power to him.

However, I went back to look more closely and came across a retraction by the Economist of one of Belkovsky’s claims, on threat of suit.

($75 billion $40-70b, apparently from shares in companies including his 4.5% shares in Gazprom revenues). That makes him the richest man on earth

[Lila, added  on 4/8): He is said to own shares in several other companies, the total of which at market valuation in 2007 was $40b. I assume the $70-75 is accounted for by the valuation since then, but I didn’t calculate it myself.]

4. Vladimir Putin’s Jewish embrace: Is it love or politics?

QUOTE: “Putin has carefully cultivated relationships with Russia’s many subgroups and regions as a means of projecting his government’s authority.”

QUOTE: “Under Putin, harsh laws have led to a crackdown on ultranationalist groups that once had flourished in Russia.”

QUOTE: “Putin may be good for Jews, but he’s bad for Russia,” said Michael Edelstein, a lecturer at Moscow State University and a journalist for the L’chaim Jewish newspaper.”

QUOTE: “Freedom of expression has been severely restricted and politically motivated prosecutions remain widespread under Putin, according to Amnesty International’s 2013 report on Russia.”

QUOTE: “The preferential treatment of Chabad by Putin’s government “is creating a monolithic Jewish institutional life and preventing grass-roots development, which is the real key for Jewish rejuvenation,” said Michael Oshtrakh, a leader of the Jewish community of Yekaterinburg.”

5. Putin targets foes with zombie guns, which attack victim’s central nervous system

‘Such high-tech weapons systems will be comparable in effect to nuclear weapons, but will be more acceptable in terms of political and military ideology.” (Exactly the same rationale used by the CIA to justify “torture-lite,” radiation weapons, microwave weapons, etc.)

7. Putin is alleged to have been a Royal Arch Mason who trained with MI6, according to The Big Breach, a memoir by a disgruntled MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson.

The relevant material is summarized at this blog.

8. 9/11 insider job “impossible to conceal” says Vladimir Putin (Russia Today, August 2, 2011)

Why does Putin deny that 9/11 could have been an intelligence coup?

Perhaps, because he himself came to power in just such a KGB/FSB coup and has too many skeletons in his own closet…

Perhaps, because one way to fight the opposition is to lead it….

Vox Day: the gloves are off in America (note added)

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NOTE ADDED:

I  don’t endorse Vox Day’s point about Christians “inventing” the Crusades and the Inquisition. A lot more was going on in both historical events, but that’s for another post.

UPDATE:

Oh…oh. This is the brouhaha that got VDay purged from his position. Apparently, he got into a verbal duel with one Ms. Jemisin, about the purpose of self-defense laws in the US.

Ms. Jemisin, probably a knee-jerk leftist on such issues,  made a snide remark that provoked Day’s undoubtedly racialist rant:

Guns, she said, exist so that people like Beale (whites) can “just shoot people like me , without consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence.”

This run-of-the-mill articulation of a leftist bromide was apparently too much for Vox, who came unhinged and did his bit to get the boot from Science Fiction Writers of America…(he called her a “savage” and compared the IQ of her tribe unfavorably to the IQ of his).

Oh dear. Childish and offensive. But all day long English teachers teach texts, written in cold-blood, printed, and distributed to minor children, that make far more offensive statements, and it’s called “English Literature.”

Should we boot out half of our academic texts to save someone’s hurt feelings?

Or should Ms. Jemisin learn the art of racial riposte well enough that no one would dare trifle with her?

With black writing and art celebrated everywhere, it’s time for an accomplished professional to be able to shrug off that kind of thing, instead of calling for purges.  Thought-control is the last thing any writer should urge, for whatever reason, at this stage of the game.

ORIGINAL POST

From the comments on a post by VoxDay, a writer who has joined the list of “purged” bloggers on the net:

“Bigot, homophobe, racist,”- the words have been used up. All you had was shaming language and polite enemies. Now you have neither.”

And more here from Vox, the “brutalist”…

(Repeat: I do not endorse Vox Day’s views in toto, nor do I share his Arianism or his beliefs about genetics or cultural history):

“This is for the benefit of all the logical slowpokes. It is logic so basic that even those who are intellectually limited to the rhetorical level should be able to follow it:

  • If you have the right to demand that I bake you a cake, then I have the right to force you to attend church, mosque, or synagogue.
  • If you have the right to fire me because you don’t like my political position on the legality of homogamy, I have the right to fire you because I don’t like your political position on the legality of homosexuality.
  • If you have the right to deny me access to the news media because I don’t believe in climate change, I have the right to deny you access to the media because you don’t believe in God.

If atheists truly want a power struggle for the right to be intolerant, Christians will eventually engage and win. Because we will die before we will give up our beliefs and you will not. We invented the Crusade and the Inquisition, two institutions so historically intimidating that atheists still shiver and tell each other scary stories about them centuries after the event.

We will revive them before we will abandon our faith. And while we would prefer to live with both Christian and traditional Constitutional values, if we are forced to choose between the two, we will choose the former without even thinking twice.”

Rabbi Shternbuch: We Have Begun Messianic Times

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NOTE: None of the interpretations below tallies with the evidence of history and archaeology that points to Gog and Magog being historical types that portend future actors:

Gog in history was the king of Lydia in Asia Minor.

“The erroneous belief that Russia is Magog can be traced back to a small group of 18th and 19th century theologians who wrote long before the primary evidence from the ancient Assyrian records was discovered, translated and made available to the public. Instead, they based their assertions on secondary sources, historical works written over 500 years after the time of Ezekiel, and to make matters worse some of these sources had come to be purposefully altered. These altered references include statements attributed to the first century AD Jewish historian Josephus, and first century AD Roman historian Pliny.”

You wonder if these discredited interpretations that surface in popular newspapers have something to do with the intelligence agencies of different countries stirring up the masses to support violent confrontations…

Lydia was the home of the Etruscans who emigrated to Italy and came to dominate Roman culture. The last Roman king, before Rome became a republic, was Etruscan.

So, Gyges of Lydia (Gog of Magog) is best seen as a historical type of a future ruler of the world, in the style of Rome.

Therefore, it’s plausible to argue that Gog = One World Government, or the New World Order, which is the popular name on conspiracy and right-wing sites for the corporate and financial powers behind NATO and the European Union.

Gog is not Russia at all.

Update 2: Here is a more complex interpretation, which considers Ar Rum (Rome) to be the one-world government. That suggests that the current dialectics in play (West versus East, US versus Russia;  Secular vs Orthodox) are working toward a more complex end.

Update 1: An Islamic interpretation of Gog and Magog. It doesn’t identify Russia with Gog and Magog, but identifies it with militant Zionism.

In this version, the subversion of the Ukraine was effected by Soros and Co. (corporate or economic annexation). Russia is instead identified with the defense of Christianity and with “Rum” (Rome) in the Quran.

Russia,  in this version, is seen as the defender of orthodox Christianity, which is seen as the true heir to the church of Rome. The inference is that the Vatican, having succumbed to materialism, atheism, and statism, is now allied with the enemies of the true church.

“Prophet Muhammad (sallalahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) prophesied that Muslims will make an alliance with Rum in Akhir al-Zam?n, and it appears to me that Tatar Muslims now have a historic role to play in the fulfillment of that prophesy.”

I suppose the Muslim allies of Gog must be Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Brunei, and similar states.

ORIGINAL POST

From Haaretz.com, some Apocalyptic thinking:

“Of course, if Gog is Putin, then we all know who the natural candidate for the Antichrist is. But let’s put that aside for now. In any case, there is a nuclear confrontation (“I will start a fire in the land of Magog and along all the seacoasts where people live undisturbed, and everyone will know that I am the Lord) and then a massive seven-month cleanup and a mass burial, somewhere in Jordan, it seems.

If you’re a Christian, the fun is just beginning: An army of “200 million” men will come from the East, according the Book of Revelations, and there’s only one country that can raise such an army. Then, in quick succession but in a sequence that is disputed by scholars, the End Times really get going: Armageddon, Desolation, Tribulation, Rapture, Redemption, the Second Coming – the works.

Jews, by the way, make do with just the war of Gog and Magog, after which messianic days are here and “swords are beaten into ploughshares” etc. Nonetheless, Christians aren’t the only ones who are getting excited about the standoff in Eastern Europe. According to a report catching fire over the weekend in the haredi press in Israel, the Gaon Rabbi Moshe Shternbuch told his disciples this week that the times of the Messiah are upon us. And who is the source for his amazing analysis? None other than one of the top Jewish sages of all time, the Vilna Gaon himself, the Gra, “the genius of Vilnius”, the famously harsh critic of Hasidic Judaism.

According to said Shternbuch, he is privy to a closely guarded secret handed down from the 18th Century Vilna Gaon through generations of revered rabbis: “When you hear that the Russians have captured the city of Crimea, you should know that the times of the Messiah have started, that his steps are being heard. And when you hear that the Russians have reached the city of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul), you should put on your Shabbat clothes and don’t take them off, because it means that the Messiah is about to come any minute.”

I don’t know if Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan knows about Russian designs on Istanbul, but if I were you, I would take your Shabbat clothes to the cleaners, just in case.

Finally, from Moshiach.com: The husband tells the wife, “The Rabbi said that soon we will no longer suffer from the Cossacks, the Messiah is about to come and take us all to Israel.” The wife thinks for a while and says, “Tell the Messiah to leave us alone. Let him take the Cossacks to Israel!”

Examiner.com has the Zionist Christian version of the End Times. Putin is still Gog, trying to expand Magog,  but in this version, the Messiah has some way to go.

More about the differences between Christianity, Reform Judaism, and Orthodox Judaism on the interpretation of this prophecy.

Here’s the relevant chapter – Chapter 38 in the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel.

Brutalist Humanitarians Vol 3: The Pederast as Pedagogue

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I formally apologize – nay, grovel – before STEVE HORWITZ

for his incorrect, hasty, and shoddy perception that I was intentionally attributing a review of Paul Goodman, a libertarian, to him, with the explicit purpose of “insinuating” that he was a pedophile apologist, which he claims is “insane.”

Since his remark was extraordinarily rude for a person in his position, I deleted it.

Since it was accurate as to confusion of identity, I have taken the essence of it and placed it above.

He also said I was a “shoddy researcher.” Weep.

How will I endure?

Well, in this post, there was certainly a mistake, but not anything crucial.

The misattribution of the quote doesn’t in the slightest bit deter from the central argument.

To be honest, though, I’m nonplussed.

There is nothing immoral or wrong about writing about Goodman’s homosexuality or his pederasty, so why should anyone get so upset – incorrectly – to be associated with that writing, especially when it’s critical of Goodman?

If I suggested anyone was a pedophile apologist, it was Goodman….and I didn’t even really do that. I cited people who documented he was a pederast.

Meanwhile, I found Horwitz’s phrasing interesting.

It’s exactly the opposite of the phrasing Bob Wenzel used about me (“Careful researcher”) at EPJ just yesterday, for analyzing Tucker’s piece with the brutalist metaphor. Hmm….

I also note that I wrote this blog post almost five days ago, but that Mr. Horwitz only posted this today, after Bob’s comment.

Apart from Goodman, the only person I could be said to have questioned (in the faintest way) was Charles Burris at Mises, for citing Goodman…but I didn’t even do that.

As for Horowitz, the author, I insinuated nothing about him, except to say that he was a Tuckerian libertarian. Is that hate speech now?

I didn’t even actually identify the author Horowitz with the BLHer Steve Horwitz.

For all anyone knows,  the author of the passage, Horowitz, who is a neo-functionalist, as Goodman was (look that up), might well be a Tuckerian libertarian, even if he doesn’t know it.

That was the point of my piece. Tucker’s term is typically leftist.

I actually wrote the author’s name correctly as STEVE HOROWITZ, when I originally read the piece.  Then I came back to my incomplete draft, in between reading stuff on the BLH site ( trying to figure out if they were Tuckerians or not), and saw the name spelled HORWITZ in one part (accidentally).

That made me wonder, so  I put down Tuckerian libertarian in the draft, thinking I would check back to find out if it was the BLHer of that name.

When I got back to the blog, I forgot that I’d set it aside to research and just published it, without checking, with the note still in brackets, as it was published.

Hasty, true. Over-worked, true. Too many fingers in too many pots, very true.

How to shoot down daily propaganda from all sides, with most people unwilling to get in the direct line of fire, without making a silly mistake?

But shoddy? Not really.

Insane, no more than Mr. Horwitz, and much less than this BLHer friend of his whose sock-puppet internet adventures as a female are described here.

In any case, Tuckerian libertarians (including the BLHers) would never consider homosexuality or pederasty (which is promoted with it) a negative.

So why would anyone be that upset because they were mistaken for an apologist for it, especially when the alleged apologia was NOT an apologia?

So one last time – the only thing I’m insinuating in this piece is that Tucker’s division is one-sided and that brutalism is found on both sides of the political and ideological divide, as Mr. Horwitz just proved.

We’re all human beings here.

So, I apologize for your hurt feelings, Mr. Horwitz, and I give my regards to you and to your friend, Mr. Tucker.

Tell him I’ve been waiting for his apology…..or the correction from his friends, for nearly two years now…

ORIGINAL POST

Charles Burris comments on left-libertarian Paul Goodman and his critique of compulsory education.

Pedagogy being an interest of mine, I began researching Goodman. I’d known only that he was an influential figure in the counter-culture and a prophetic social critic.

Turns out he was also – interestingly for a writer on education cited by a paleo-libertarian site –  a practising pederast:

“Goodman is now mainly remembered as a notable political activist on the pacifist Left in the 1960s and early 70s. Politically he described himself as an anarchist, sexually as pederast (Rossman, 1976, pp.87-92), and professionally as a “man of letters”. Less widely known is his role as a co-founder of Gestalt Therapy.

Born in New York City, he freely roamed the streets and public libraries of the city as a child (and later developed, from this, the radical concept of “the educative city”). He taught at the University of Chicago while he was taking his Ph.D., but fell in love with a student and was dismissed. He fathered a family by two common-law wives, and his early years were characterized by menial and teaching jobs taken to enable him to continue as a writer and to support his children. ……
The freedom with which he revealed, in print and in public, his homosexual life and loves (notably in a late essay, “The Politics of Being Queer” (1969)), proved to be one of the many important cultural springboards for the emerging gay liberation movement of the early 1970s. However, his own views ran counter to the modern construction of homosexuality. It was his opinion that it was pathological not to be able to make love to someone of the opposite sex, but that it was equally pathological “not to be able to experience homosexual pleasure.” Likewise, it was his view that sexual relationships between men and boys were natural, normal and healthy, and that they could lay the foundation for continuing friendship even after the sexuality is outgrown (since “sex play does not last long between males, as a rule”).(ibid, p.88)

In discussing his own sexual relationships with boys, he acknowledged that public opinion would condemn him, but countered that “what is really obscene is the way our society makes us feel shameful and like criminals for doing human things that we really need.” In diagnosing the problems of modern education, which even in his time was accused of killing the spirit of the youngsters and leaving them bereft of curiosity and creativity, he underlined that “a good pupil-teacher relationship inevitably has sexual overtones” and that acknowledgement and proper channeling of these tensions would lead to a better educational environment.”

A substantial portion of Goodman’s literary output was devoted to discussing his sexual proclivity in fictional form, thus, Martin, New York, 1933.

What’s even more interesting is that Goodman’s difficulty with the educational establishment was only partly due to its bureaucratic structure. It was mainly due to his habit of diddling, or trying to diddle,  his young charges. Indeed, that was the subject of an autobiographical novel he wrote three years after one of his three firings. Steve Horowitz reviews Goodman’s book, “Parent’s Day,”

“DESPITE Paul Goodman’s accomplishments as a writer and social critic, he has been best remembered as an educator. Yet Goodman hadano great success as a teacher. He never could get along well with the bureaucracies of large institutions, and though he had many teaching
jobs, they rarely lasted more than a year. Goodman’s positions were not renewed, usually because of his homosexual activities.

Goodman’s theories on education generally concerned children rather than college students. He was angry about the way the  American school system functioned to reduce a child’s individuality. Goodman was especially interested in questions about adolescent sexuality and school structure. The “most pressing issue in most of our homes,” he wrote A.S. Neill of Summerhill fame back in the early 1950s, was “the witnessing or not-witnessing (and participation or censoring) of children in the first years of the sexual intercourse of the adults.” Goodman believed that educators needed to help students with their sexual development. Ideas like this earned Goodman a reputation as a dangerous crank during the 1940s and 1950s. Neill considered Goodman a theorist, rather than a pragmatist, when it came to education. But Goodman had taught at Manumit, a progressive school in upstate New York, back in 1943. Goodman was fired from this job, again because of his homosexual activities. Parents’ Day is the story of Goodman’s experience at Manumit. It is a work of autobiographical fiction, as Goodman exaggerates what happens as he struggles to gain perspective. The homosexual relationship between teacher and student is bluntly stated. Goodman wrote the book three years after the fact as part of his Reichian self-analysis. He tries to understand his behavior, rather than justify it. Parents’ Day could not find a publisher during the 1940s because of its explicit homo-erotic content.

A friend printed up an edition of five hundred in 1951. It received only one review and has been unavail­able for many years. Black Sparrow Press, which has been reissuing much of Goodman’s self-published work, has recently made Parents’ Day available to a wide audience for the first time.

The book is often hilariously funny. The seriousness of the mem­ories and ideas discussed does not dampen the narrator’s enthusiasm.

His predicament (Why am I living/how do I get laid?) is only exacerbated by this constant self-questioning. He never finds any satisfactory answers, but after a while, just asking the questions brings him relief.

It’s like that joke with which Woody Allen begins Annie Hall : two large middle-aged Jewish women are eating dinner at a popular

Catskill resort hotel. One woman says to the other, “The food here is awful.” To which the other responds: “Yes, and such small portions.”

[Lila: Not surprising that Horowitz would bring up Woody Allen, since Goodman made a cameo appearance in Annie Hall and Allen’s resume also includes pederasty and pedophilic abuse, which it would be brutalist, I suppose, to mention.

It might also be brutalist to point out that Goodman endlessly cruised the waterfront for young males, even while going through two common-law wives and had a reputation for being callous to people – not exactly a preferred trait in an educator. Indeed, he was a poster-child for arrested development (he was, after all, effectively fatherless):

“He would, as the composer Ned Rorem tells it in the film, make “passes at literally everybody. I mean everybody—men and women and people’s mothers and the president of the university.”

He once shocked guests by French-kissing his dog.

Nathan Abrams in The Triple Exthnics lists Goodman, along with Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, as the intellectual vanguard of the sexual revolution that normalized homosexuality and pornography in the US in a matter of a few decades:

“Goodman knows he cannot resolve his mixed feeling about his tenure at Manumit. He acted on his sincere desires, yet he hurt other people.

Still, Goodman isn’t sure if he would act any differently if the situation reoccurred. He is introspective, but non-judgmental.
What Goodman learned from teaching at Manumit, and his reflec­tions while writing this book, form the basis of his thought on young  adult education. In Parents’ Day, one can glimpse the human teacher inside the humanitarian educator with all his faults. As such, the book makes a powerful statement. Follow your impulses, Goodman says, but be prepared to suffer the consequences. That is the only moral choice one can make in this imperfect world.”

Here we see a core principle of  the politically correct libertarians – every choice is equally good and none can be judged. The only wrong is to find anything wrong.

The only brutes, to paraphrase Jeffrey Tucker, are those who condemn brutality.

Yet, what could be more brutal than a grown man, with ample outlet for his sexual proclivities, abusing the trust of parents to violate their children and then indoctrinate them with beliefs in direct opposition to their own?

A man who teaches young children that every impulse must be followed? A man who was incapable of controlling his own impulses, and more importantly, incapable of regretting them.

“His private journals, Rosenberg wrote, were a chronicle of hunger for sex, recognition, community, and transcendence.”

A man who could not ever escape from his hungers and his own self.

A defender of pedophilia:

“My own view, let me say, is that no sexual practices whatever, unless they are malicious or extremely guilt-ridden, do any harm to anybody, including children. Certainly far more harm is done by any attempts to repress, frighten, or denigrate.”

One of the trio (Marcuse and Reich were the other two) who sold the West on the gospel of sex.

A disappointed man, even in lust:

A historian trying to explain the emptiness of modern leftist thinking could do worse than start with Growing Up Absurd.

An arrogant men, obsessed with his own sexual prowess:

“Goodman was a hard guy to like. Acquaintances described him as arrogant, self-absorbed, and sexually unremitting. When he wasn’t coming on—to women and men (mostly men); old and young (mostly young); sailors, waiters, and college presidents—he was talking about it. “He was so goddamn proud of his prick,” Grace Paley notes, visibly unimpressed, in Lee’s film.”

If that is not brutalism, what is?

Goodman was, of course, much more than his sexual identity practices.

But clever theories and high-flown rhetoric aside, the liberty he  practiced – and espoused- conforms to the Jeffrey Tucker vision of “humanitarian” liberty, wherein those with the loudest lobbies determine which exercise of liberty is brutal and which humanitarian.

I guess children aren’t part of the humanity that can pay good money to propagandists to put lipstick on libertarians pigs.

40% of acid-attack victims are men

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A Voice for Men overturns the feminist claim that acid-attacks are gender-based violence (a claim that I, unfortunately, once trusted):

“On another acid survivors website from Cambodia they have numbers from 1999 – 2013. There numbers show that 40% of the adult victims were adult males, 44.8% were adult females, 7.3% were male children under the age of 13 and 8% were females under the age of 13.

Despite about 40% of the acid attack victims being male acid survivors foundation true to feminist form states:

“Acid violence is a form of gender based violence that reflects and perpetuates the inequality of women in society.”

And helping that lie spread was boosted by COMBATING ACID VIOLENCE IN BANGLADESH, INDIA, AND CAMBODIA

This is subtitled as:

Report by the Avon Global Center for Women and Justice at Cornell
Law School, the Committee on International Human Rights of the New
York City Bar Association, the Cornell Law School International Human
Rights Clinic, and the Virtue Foundation

Notice the list of organizations who are helping promote this heinous lie that acid attacks is gender violence? All of them owe a duty of care to us, society to be honest but hey their feminists so that duty of care is tossed in the manure pile. Too bad their reports aren’t there too, where they belong.
Here is what these alleged groups wrote when describing acid attacks;

“Acid violence is gender-based violence that reflects and perpetuates the
inequality of women in society and as such is prohibited by international law

I call BULLSHIT. There is a about a 10% difference between the sexes in acid attacks. That is not gender based violence. Even if we include the children the percentage of men only drops down to just over 35% that is still not gender based violence.

And what about the criminals inflicting incredible human suffering you ask. Well it is not just men who are tossing acid on women:

Woman throws acid on sister-in-law over land dispute

Two women accused of plotting an acid attack that left a local woman disfigured have been found guilty

Just like every other feminist claim of gender-based violence this one too is a half truth. Omitting the male population from the awareness campaigns is the standard operating procedure of feminism.

To reference my compatriot, Robert St. Estephe again, please note: neither historically nor in modern times have acid attacks been something “men to do women.” It’s something people do to each other, in various times and places. If you doubt there’s anything weird or unusual about women using acid as a weapon, in addition to Robert’s other article (referenced above) see Three New York “Acid Queens” of 1901.

I’ve said it earlier in this article and I’ll say it again:

The feminist claim that acid attacks is gender violence is BULLSHIT.”

Comment

See

“Mystery of the sudden surge in acid attacks on men by women,” Kerry Mcqueeney Daily Mail, UK, May 10, 2012

“Acid attacks on men related to gang violence, say experts,” Ruth Evans, BBC,  November 9, 2013

As Partners for Law in Development notes in a paper on the subject, acid-attack legislation needs to be framed gender-neutrally, so that the increasing number of male victims and female perpetrators will be included in its provisions.