Category Archives: Political Theory

Gary North: Welfarism, entitlement, and power

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Gary North has a piercing analysis of welfare-statism, where your problem  is everyone’s problem but yours:

[I don’t agree with North’s linking of the bureaucrats of the welfare state and the anxious mother. A kinship tie is surely driven by emotions and thoughts that are different from those driving a bureaucrat.  There may be a drive for power in both cases, but they are different kinds of powers, with different justifications and different levels of culpability. But, nonetheless, it’s a thought provoking piece.]

The welfare state mentality is close to universal today. Half of Americans are on the dole to one degree or another.

The outlook of this society is one of entitlements:

I was reminded of this recently when I received the following email.

“I was doing a search for my daughter of online accredited colleges and came across your video when trying to look up reviews on Ashworth University. She’s not a social kid and she’s been doing Fisher online college for early childhood and she just informed me that she wants to switch her major to Psychology. She works as a FT nanny, 19, and lives on her own. We have qualified for some financial aid but she says she doesn’t like the curriculum of Fishers. She has looked at Phoenix online and likes them but it’s very expensive, and now she just sprung on me Ashworth Univerisity. She’s a very naive girl and she’s stressing me out. I was excited when you said go to my website for my free report to download and when going there, I saw that you want a fee for it. I can’t afford this. I am a single mother trying to get my daughter to keep at it and pursue college and get a degree. Is this the only way to get your valuable information? I live in Massachusetts and my daughter has social anxieties so she prefers online college only. If you can help me in any way I would value that.”

Let me break this down, point by point.

First, Fisher College online charges $325 per semester credit hour. (Note: Fisher College charges over $43,000 a year to parents of its on-campus students. This is about $1,430 per semester credit hour. So, $325 per semester credit hour is a real bargain — one which parents of the on-campus students would be wise to take advantage of. If they don’t, they are dumber than dirt, which in fact most parents are when it comes to the trifecta of after-tax economic loss: “room, board, and tuition.” The really smart ones would pull their kids out, have them use AP exams and CLEP exams to quiz out of college courses, and get the price per semester unit down to about $35 for the first two years. To find out how to do this, click here.)

Who has been paying for this so far? Let me guess: Momma.

Second, her daughter now wants to major in psychology. Of 171 majors, Time magazine rates this as the lowest-paying of all.

Third, her daughter is a legal adult. She is 19 years old. She is still trying to con her mother by means of the usual guilt manipulation techniques into ponying up money to send her to college. She got some financial aid — in fact, a discount with a nice name — but she is not happy with the curriculum. She is a beggar, but she is a very careful chooser.

Fourth, Momma says that the daughter is a naïve girl, and she is stressing her mother out. On the contrary, the daughter is not naïve. The daughter has her mother’s number. The daughter has obviously had her mother’s number for a long, long time. Momma is naïve, not the daughter.

Fifth, Momma, being stressed out, wants to find a low-cost solution to her problem. She found my video, which has been online since 2006, on seven ways to beat the collegiate system. Anyone can watch that video and begin the first steps. You do not have to buy anything to begin. At the time, being somewhat naïve, I gave away a free report, about 60 pages long, on the details of various ways to beat the collegiate system. But then I figured out, from the fact that nobody ever thanked me for the free report, that nobody was taking advantage of it. So, I finally decided I would switch to a paid report. But I gave it away for a long time.

Sixth, Momma says she cannot afford to buy a report that will let her save $100, minimum, for every dollar that the report costs. Also, it comes with a money-back guarantee. In other words, it comes with no risk to the buyer. But Momma, who has access to high-speed Internet, pleads with me that she just cannot afford $97 to send her daughter to college.

Seventh, she says she is a single mother. This is not my problem. I did not get her pregnant. Trust me. I didn’t. Maybe she never got married. Or maybe she married the wrong man, and he did not provide enough child support to enable her to save up enough money to send her daughter to college. This also is not my problem. Maybe she dumped him, or maybe he dumped her. In either case, this is not my problem. But Momma thinks I owe her free advice and a free report. Yet the information I supplied in my video is enough to save her or her daughter thousands of dollars.

This is not good enough for her. She is picky, picky, picky.

Why didn’t she send the link to my video to her daughter? Why is she still making her daughter’s decisions for her? Because she wants to retain control. She is exactly like the politicians, who fund the welfare state with taxpayers’ money, and the tenured bureaucrats who administer it.

The welfare state is not about charity. It is about power.”

Greenwald: Torture porn promoter

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An insightful piece at reclusive leftist on one of the most prominent  activists against torture….when it’s done by the government   – “libertarian” Glenn Greenwald.

Greenwald has been unmasked as a corporate/intelligence shill and Iraq war-promoter by his own leftist ex-fans.

 

Update: I have been asked to preface this post with a warning that readers may find it disturbing.)

When I posted a link to Glenn Greenwald’s column the other day, I was unaware of his history as an advocate for torturers. Greenwald has vigorously championed torturers’ rights, has explicitly privileged their version of events over that of their victims, and has asserted — in agreement with the torturers — that “no real pain was inflicted” on the victims.

Of course these aren’t the torturers at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib. It’s the film company of “Max Hardcore,” an extreme pornographer who grossly abused women while filming the proceedings for the entertainment of other men. Hardcore claims his victims were thrilled to be tortured, and Greenwald accepts this point of view unquestioningly.

Amazing what a difference gender makes, huh?

And if you’re thinking that it’s not a question of gender, that the real difference is between prisoners of war and allegedly volunteer performers, think again. I’ll help you:

Imagine that instead of Max Hardcore, we have a U.S. Army dude stationed in Iraq with a sideline in homemade porn. Imagine that this homemade porn is of a very special kind, involving Iraqi boys and young men off the streets, the ones who are scavenging in garbage dumps and living hand-to-mouth. Our imaginary Army pornographer offers these guys $20 each to be in a porn video. Many of them say yes — after all, $20 is a fortune for a street kid.

Each porn video consists of heavy-duty homosexual sadism and racism. The young Iraqi victim in each film is violently penetrated, choked, beaten, urinated on, masturbated on, fed his own feces, and forced to crawl on the floor while saying things like, “I’m a filthy sand n*****” and “Mohammed is a pig-f*****.” The Army pornographer screams racist epithets at the young victim throughout — that is, when he’s not too busy raping and kicking and pissing and force-feeding shit down the Iraqi’s throat. By the end of each video, the Iraqi victim is shrieking in pain and sobbing uncontrollably. When the camera finally shuts off, he collects his $20 and gets the hell out — shocked, shattered, humiliated to his core.

So think about that. Think about this imaginary series of homemade porn from Iraq, and imagine that it’s widely popular — on Army bases, stateside, anywhere white men enjoy fantasizing about torturing exploited Iraqis. How do you think people like Glenn Greenwald would react? Do you think Glenn would be talking loftily about the Army pornographer’s First Amendment rights? Do you think he would say that the videos are simply entertainment? That no harm is being done, to anyone? Would he insist that the central fact of the matter is that the Iraqis are exercising perfect free will? And that by honoring their desire to be humiliated and tortured for $20, he’s respecting them as people?

Of course not. If porn like that existed, there would be an uproar. C*****! People would throw up after 10 seconds of one video. What kind of sick shit is this? The racism! The hatred! The sheer breathtaking cruelty! And the whole surrounding exploitation — god! Paying these garbage dump kids all of $20 to be tortured! It’s too sick to believe. And what kind of insane people get off on this shit anyway? What’s wrong with them? Is our society really that vicious? Liberals all over the blogosphere would be writing long posts about the black heart of American fascism. And people like Glenn Greenwald would be saying that if this shit isn’t illegal somehow, then by god, we need to find a way to make it so.

That’s if the victims were men.

In the real world, of course, there is porn just like that: it’s what Max Hardcore specialized in. But his victims were female, you see. And that makes it okay. You can do anything to a woman — anything at all — and as long as some dude gets an orgasm out of it, it’s okay.

(And I cannot resist noting the extent to which the orgasm, in our current bizarro era of human-rights-as-defined-by-Larry-Flynt, has assumed preternatural importance as a kind of all-purpose salvific justification.

If you’re a guy who likes seeing women get beaten up and raped and mauled, but you don’t get any kind of sexual charge out of it, you’re a creep who hates women. But if it gives you an orgasm, then by god, it’s a healthy and beautiful thing. And anybody who says otherwise is a prude.)”

More here on the so-called “left-libertarian” alliance and what it really fronts for.

Belief in hierarchy is psychopathic, claims leftist

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Anti-traditionalist propaganda from Paul Rosenberg at Salon.com:

A few weeks ago, I came across a reference to an unpublished conference paper, with the intriguing title, “ Does endorsement of hierarchy make you evil? SDO and psychopathy.”

So I contacted the lead author, Marc Wilson, a New Zealand psychologist at Victoria University of Wellington, to ask him about his research.

First, a bit of background. Psychopathy — once thought to be an all-or-nothing condition — is now understood in a dimensional fashion (more or less) and is measured by instruments such as  The Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. While our understanding of psychopathy first developed largely from studying criminal populations, Hare himself has said, “I always said that if I wasn’t studying psychopaths in prison, I’d do it at the stock exchange,” so it’s fairly straightforward to measure and compare psychopathic tendencies and SDO. And that’s just what Wilson has done.

“The research shows that SDO and psychopathy have a reciprocal causal relationship over time — as people become more social dominant, they become more psychopathic, and vice versa,” Wilson told me. “This is based on longitudinal research that shows that, for example, increased SDO (or psychopathy) at time 1 predicts greater psychopathy (or SDO) at time 2. I’ve done this for both convenience samples (university students) and thousands of general population.”

University students get tested a lot — as Wilson indicated, they’re quite convenient. But sooner or later it’s bound to raise questions of just how well the results hold up in a larger population. So it’s significant that he’s already taken that step, and found confirmation as well.

“When SDO was originally proposed, it was argued that group dominance (as measured by SDO) is not the same thing as individual level dominance, and indeed that’s what the original research appeared to show,” he explained. “More recently there have been a few studies that have suggested SDO and psychopathy are related, and I’ve collected a lot of data now that leads me to believe they’re flip sides of the same coin — interpersonal dominance (psychopathy) on one side and group dominance (SDO) on the other.”

This is just what one might informally conclude from listening to the Donald Sterling tape. His personal abusiveness and unwarranted accusations against V. Stiviano is on one side of the coin; flip it over, and his contempt for black people is on the other. Jerk on one side, racist on the other.

[Lila:  Never mind that Stiviano was a gold-digging exhibitionist.

Never mind that she’s  made racist comments herself.

Never mind that she either pre-texted or unlawfully surveilled someone in their house.

Never mind that that is a form of moral and mental rape several orders of magnitude worse than saying rude things in your own home for your own private audience.]

“Therefore, it makes sense that environments that promote social hierarchies will also be fertile breeding grounds for individual dominance, and vice versa,” he continued. Digging down a bit into specifics was quite illuminating.

“By ‘environments’ I can imagine a few that are good candidates — financial markets for example,” Wilson said. “Indeed, some of my other work shows that people who work in commerce focused on hierarchy-enhancing wealth consolidation also tend to be more social dominant (an old finding) but also more psychopathic — indeed, people who study commerce at university are not only more psychopathic than people in other fields of study but less psychopathic commerce students are more likely to switch majors to more hierarchy-attenuating disciplines, while more psychopathic arts students (for example) are more likely to switch to commerce degrees.”

Lila:  This is the state of moral and logical confusion in public debate in the West, which, unfortunately, sets the tone for the whole world.

Take Belle Knox, the current feminist icon.

She is barely adult, has a history of body image problems and serious self-cutting; is a  porn addict who was raped and admits that she enjoys being locked up in dog-houses.

She chooses to be routinely spit on, hit in the face, verbally abused, and gang-raped in the derriere, all on camera.

But, of course, there’s no “evil hierarchy” in any of that, nor “dominance,” nor “subordination”; no psychiatric problem there.

No,  that”s  all feminist empowerment and an honest day’s work, all the way.

And you dare not so much as roll your eyes  at her.

On the other hand, if  a young man, a conservative, signs up for a degree in commerce and enjoys the rough-and-tumble of  the business world, watch out – you have Hitler or Mao on your hands.  Call the FBI… the shrinks… the NY Times…. Get Paul Rosenberg on the case.

In Rosenberg’s tendentious, dishonest, simple-minded essay, good, decent ideas with which any conservative could agree – the dignity of manual work and the value of every individual – putrefy and turn into so much slime to fling against political opponents, albeit so clumsily, the effort says more about him than about them.

 

 

Cognitive dissonance in some libertarian circles

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Negligent burning of baby in public sector:

NAZI POLICE STATE

Dear God

[Source: Will Grigg, Pro Libertate, republished at LRC blog]

Note: Grigg is  pro-life.  No criticism of his excellent piece is  intended.

Intentional baby-killing in private sector:

A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO CHOOSE 

Cell phone photos taken of late-term abortions at the abortion clinic of Dr. Douglas Karpen (Houston, Texas).

Criminal charges against Dr. Karpen were dismissed in December 2013, but under pressure from pro-life groups and accumulating testimony from former employees, investigation of the clinic has been re-opened.

Conservatives cozy with the establishment

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The infiltration of conservative and paleo- libertarian circles by progressives continues apace, writes the paleo-libertarian blogger at MoreRight.net:

“Why does a self-admitted liberal have a regular column at a website called The American Conservative, founded by Pat Buchanan, and his column is passed off as a conservative voice?”

It should make anyone wonder about several conservative pundits. Some of them seem to be more interested in their media presence than in supporting traditionalist positions.

Whether they are simply naive or actively working to undermine social conservatism is the question.

MoreRight.net continues:

” If you dig into the archives of this magazine, you see the same refrain again and again:

And what issue is more important than life? As a practical matter, conservatives would probably do better with voters by becoming less rigid on social issues where Americans are becoming more liberal. But they also stand to gain by doubling down on the issue that should matter most.

Translation: we ought to give up on social conservatism because no one will vote for it, let’s just focus on stopping abortion and forget the rest.”

The blogger gets a part of the picture right, although I think there are other reasons for someone to focus on abortion, as recently I have begun to.

He then points out evidence of conservative pandering:

“What else? Articles written by the left-libertarians from the Cato Institute, fawning over Jim Morrison (who was found dead in a bathtub from a heroin overdose), bizarre apologetics for Communist folk musician Pete Seeger, and other one-off oddball articles.”

Lila Rajiva:

I can point out even greater pandering and compromise on paleo-libertarian sites:

  • Using the same scatological and vulgar personal attacks that the left favors
  • Constantly mocking conservatives, right-wingers, and  Republicans (admittedly these aren’t all the same thing), without anywhere near equal time for their opposite numbers, thus doing the left’s work for it
  • Promoting  disinformation sources, such as  Robert Morrow and John Loftus.

MoreRight than traces some  direct links between traditionalists and neo-reactionaries with progressives.

Last year, I  came to the conclusion that Neo-reaction (also called the Dark Enlightenment)  was some kind of leftist/government ploy, but given the anti-Catholic slant of the term “Cathedral,” I also have to wonder why this blogger uses it.

Deep waters indeed….

Imagine the reaction if one were to term the establishment the “Synagogue” or the “Temple”?

Of course, it shouldn’t be fear of reprisal that stops someone from using either of those terms.  It should be the clear evidence that the establishment uses all sides of the debate against each other, Catholic and Jewish among them.

The people who are supposed to be standing up for traditionalists in the “new media” sphere are not-so-subtly stabbing them in the back, not just in their associations, but in their heartfelt beliefs.

In the DC/NYC new media milieu, credibility emanates directly from the center of the Cathedral, that is, The New York Times. Everyone is angling for a spot at the trough, including so-called “traditionalist” conservatives.

Lila:  I was cited by the New York Times a couple of times, a while back. I daresay could have cultivated that route had I the stomach for dissimulation needed for it. Frankly, I don’t.

[Josh] Barro is part of the “media/liberal thought elite,” which includes other mediocrities and Cathedral mouthpieces such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Anil Dash, Dave Weigel, Matt Yglesias, David Brooks, Paul Krugman, and so on.

What of the connection with “paleo”-conservatives? Jonathan Coppage, associate editor of The American Conservative, is friendly with Barro. They’re both connected to Forbes writer and former Business Insider analyst Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, who acts clueless about the decline, calls himself a “former reactionary who now embraces the Enlightenment,” and tells us about how great economic and social equality are. They’re connected to Michael B. Dougherty, another “surf the decline” conservative who openly mocks reactionary politics and argues in favor of “pragmatic” policies such as embracing immigration amnesty.

All these guys are very friendly with left-libertarians like Jason Kuznicki, Cathy Reisenwitz, and Josiah Neeley, who are doing their best to turn movement libertarianism into a subdivision of Frankfurt School progressivism. They’re in turn connected to witch hunters for liberal purity such as Julian Sanchez, also at Cato, and open borders enthusiasts such as Bryan Caplan (Cato), Eli Dourado (Mercatus), and Dylan Matthews (Vox). The relationship between so-called “paleoconservatives” and these left-libertarians and progressives is far too close for comfort.”

 

ADL releases global anti-Semitism poll

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Abraham Foxman of the ADL has released his Global 100 poll of world-wide anti-Semitism.

The poll assessed the reaction of people to the following statements. Agreeing with 6 or more of the following makes one an anti-Semite.

ANTI -SEMITIC STEREOTYPES:

1) Jews are more loyal to Israel than to [this country/the countries they live in].
2) Jews have too much power in the business world.
3) Jews have too much power in international
financial markets.
4) Jews
don’t care about what happens to anyone but their own kind.
5) Jews have too much control over global affairs.
6) People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave.
7) Jews think they are better than other people.
8) Jews have too much control over the United States government.
9) Jews have too much control over the global media.
10) Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.
11) Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars.

According to the results, 1.09 billion people in the world, about 26%percent of its entire population, harbor anti-Semitic beliefs.

The highest scores were in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), which registered 74%.

This was followed by Eastern Europe 34%.

Then comes Western Europe at 24%.

Sub-Saharan Africa is at 23%.

Asia is at 22%.

The Americas are at 19%.

Oceania is at 14%.

The highest non-MENA score was found in Greece – 69%
Iran held the highest MENA score – 56%.

I don’t know what conclusions Mr. Foxman draws from all this, but here are my thoughts:

The areas with the highest levels of anti-Semitism – Greece, MENA, Eastern Europe, are also ones where either the communists or the global financial industry, has had a significant negative impact.

This is not intended as hate speech. I’m just looking for logical causes for the existence of such a wide-spread feeling, since I don’t really believe in a spontaneous eruption of irrational hatred toward one group of people for no other cause but their religion or ethnicity.

To believe in such “motiveless malignance” would require me to ascribe a mysterious and non-human quality to Jewishness, which sounds a lot like real anti-Semitism to me.

Besides, if motiveless malignance is everywhere, why is so little of it in the US?

But so it is. America has less anti-Semitic feeling than anywhere else.

It follows that humanitarian anti-anti-Semitic libertarians should be aiming their sermons about anti-Semitism at some other region of the world than the USA – perhaps at the Ukraine?

But they aren’t, are they?

Instead, it seems that the Humanitarian libertarians are making common cause with the anti-Semites in the Ukraine.

Now why is that, I wonder. Could it be that “anti-anti-Semitism” is not about anti-Semitism at all?

If so, what is it really about?

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.”

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.

Abortion: Child-killing by mothers on demand

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From DesiringGood.org

” We have allowed legal child-killing on-demand for 41 years because we’ve called it something else.

That’s why Christians, the “salt of the earth” and the “light of the world” (Matthew 5:13–14) must keep speaking the truth about what abortion is with relentless clarity. “We destroy arguments” (2 Corinthians 10:5) by not yielding the ground of clear truth. Because life is in the power of truth-speaking tongues.

Therefore, we will keep saying:

Abortion kills children and we all know this.

Our legal code demonstrates that we know this because it grants an unborn child the rights of personhood in areas such as tort, criminal, and property law, making legalized abortion a schizophrenic, arbitrary, and tragically defective legal ruling.

Abortion is mercilessly violent. Children with heartbeats, brainwaves, and a nervous system that allows them to feel pain are literally torn to pieces.

“93% of all abortions [in the United States] are performed on healthy mothers, with healthy babies . . . Less than 1% are performed because of rape or incest.” (Abort73)

The number of children killed by abortion every year dwarfs the Holocaust and other homicidal horrors of history.

  • Approximately 3,300 children are killed by abortion every day in the United States. Americans kill 1.2 million unborn children every year.
  • The World Health Organization estimates between 40 and 50 million children are killed around the world by abortion, approximately 125,000 every day.”

What made me rethink my pro-choice position on abortion was seeing its inextricable connection with modern feminism, for what is the force behind the massive number of abortions if it isn’t contemporary feminism, whose extreme face can be seen in this account from December 2012, an account you will never find in the major media:

“Extremely disturbing video footage from Argentina shows a mob of feminists at a recent protest attacking and sexually molesting a group of Rosary-praying Catholic men who were peacefully protecting the cathedral in the city of San Juan from threats of vandalism.

The women, many of them topless, spray-painted the men’s crotches and faces and swastikas on their chests and foreheads, using markers to paint their faces with Hitler-like moustaches. They also performed obscene sexual acts in front of them and pushed their breasts onto their faces, all the while shouting “get your rosaries out of our ovaries.” (Note: Some of the most graphic content has been removed from the video. Uncensored footage is available here. Viewer discretion strongly advised.)

[Lila: This link is difficult to access. Here’s another of the same video.]

According to InfoCatolica, some of the women chanted a song, with the lyrics: “To the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, who wants to get between our sheets, we say that we want to be whores, travesties and lesbians. Legal abortion in every hospital.”

During the attack some men were visibly weeping. None of them retaliated against the abuses heaped on them.”

What the Argentine feminists did in this incident was nothing more than sexual torture. It was no different from what American female guards did to Iraqi male prisoners, captured in this infamous photograph:

The psychology of Abu Ghraib can be found in modern gender feminist ideology, with its pathological aversion toward men and its denial of full humanity to them.

This is no exaggeration.

At “A Voice For Men,” Paul Elam describes how feminists in Vancouver attacked a men’s rights activist for putting up posters stating that men have rights too.

The aversion is only one expression of feminism’s warped attitude toward female sexuality. Another more fundamental one is the murder on demand of children. Modern feminists themselves admit the non-negotiability of abortion to feminism:

((Tracey Morrisey: “There is no such thing as a pro-life feminist,” Gawker)

Antonia Senior, an honest gender feminist, even admits that abortion is murder but yet goes on to argue that it is a lesser evil that must yield before the absolute feminist principle that a woman must have the right to control her reproduction.

Dr Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, described Senior’s article  as a “moral earthquake”:

“Even as she admits that her position on the moral status of the unborn child has been utterly changed, she insists that her absolutist position on abortion rights has not. When it comes down to the right of the fetus to live versus the right of the mother to abort, the abortion right wins.

Abortion, which she acknowledges is the killing of a human life, is defined as “a lesser evil” than the curtailing of abortion rights in the name of liberating women.

“As ever, when an issue we thought was black and white becomes more nuanced, the answer lies in choosing the lesser evil,” she assures. “The nearly 200,000 aborted babies in the UK each year are the lesser evil, no matter how you define life, or death, for that matter. If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.”

There you have it. To be a true feminist, in the modern sense, you must be willing to kill your baby if it interferes in the life you have chosen for yourself…. and for no other reason. The brutality of the modern female arises from this fundamental brutality to her own off-spring and the contempt she displays simultaneously for her own body and sexual nature.

This contempt is evident in the way the  Ukrainian feminist revolutionary group, Femen, deliberately uses the naked bodies of its members like weapons in public protests:

“While other groups focus on one or two issues, Femen are everywhere. Over the past few years they have protested for gay rights in St Peter’s Square during the Pope’s weekly prayers; against the use of ultra-thin models at Milan fashion week; and during Euro 2012, in Ukraine, they grabbed the championship trophy in protest against the sex industry. In London last summer, they smeared themselves in fake blood and accused the International Olympic Committee of supporting “bloody Islamist regimes”; at Davos, in January, they protested against male domination of the world economy. And in February, they provoked both raised eyebrows and a few sniggers by launching themselves topless at Silvio Berlusconi.

Their campaigning is unified by one central aim: to use their breasts to expose corruption and inequality wherever they see it. “One of the main goals,” says Inna, “is to take the masks off people who wear them, to show who they are, and the level of fucking patriarchy in this world, you know?” She says they also want to reclaim women’s bodies for women. “A woman’s naked body has always been the instrument of the patriarchy,” she says, “they use it in the sex industry, the fashion industry, advertising, always in men’s hands. We realised the key was to give the naked body back to its rightful owner, to women, and give a new interpretation of nudity … I’m proud of the fact that today naked women are not just posing on the cover of Playboy, but can be at an action, angry, and can irritate people.”

The group started in 2006, when founders Anna Hutsol, Oksana Shachko and Alexandra Shevchenko (no relation to Inna), became friends in their home town in Ukraine. It was not long after the orange revolution, in which Ukrainians had demonstrated for democracy, and Alexandra, 24, says they wanted to keep the revolutionary feeling going. They started a women’s group, and began organising against the sex industry. Sex tourism is a major problem in Ukraine, and every woman is victimised as a result, says Alexandra. “You’d walk down the street and foreigners, men, would come up to you, ask how much, touch you.”

Inna joined the group in 2009, after meeting the other women on social media. In those early days they were just developing their views. Feminism was unpopular in Ukraine; saying you were a feminist was “something similar to saying you’re an idiot, you’re crazy,” says Inna. Alexandra says she used to believe the “image created by patriarchy, where feminists are ugly women with moustaches who want to cut off men’s penises”. (They’ve played with this imagery themselves. Until recently, their website featured a picture of a woman holding an enormous scythe in one hand, a bloody scrotum in the other.)”

British Charity “Rape Crisis” Is A UK Govt Front

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From LibertarianAlliance.wordpress.com:

“One of the points I made was that RC [Rape Crisis] can hardly be regarded as an independent voice.

Bearing in mind that it gets the majority of its funding from the Home Office and the Equalities Unit, it should be regarded as a front for the British State – ie, it’s another fake charity.

I didn’t actually accuse RC of corrupt motives, but did draw attention to the scale of funding and the fact that HMG would dearly love to put Julian Assange on the first plane to Stockholm.”

Sean points to the accounts, the most recent set available, which is not very recent by company-or-private-sector-standards and would get them heavily finded for lateness if they were a simple plumber or small retailer…which says in the small print at the back that:-

(1) “Rape Crisis” received in 2008, £6,285 from charitable and fundraising activities, and £103,750 from the Home Office, “Lankelly Chase” (which must be some place or other), “UNISON” and the Government Equalities Office”.

(2) In 2009, it received £11,214 from charitable and fundraising activities, and  £196.685 from the various collectivist sources stated just now above.

http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk/Accounts/Ends80/0001119680_ac_20090331_e_c.pdf
I think that makes it a “fake charity, don’t you? It seems to exist to do PR to lobby the government into bring in laws that the government wants brought in.