RUTHFULLY YOURS

Progressive Hebrews promote the national liberation movements of all victims of imperialism and oppression…as long as those folks are not the world’s longest surviving victims of imperial conquest and oppression—Jews.

They absolutely love Tikun Olam—healing the world—as long as Jews, as JEWS, aren’t included. And as if believing Jews have not been in the forefront of such endeavors for millennia. The latter are expected to simply remain G_d’s Suffering Servant—as the Bible called Israel. With the above in mind, now let’s proceed…

A good friend asked me if I ever asked folks like “Progessive” professors—especially Jewish ones—why they oppose such things as President Trump’s potentially very positive decision to issue a new Executive Order on December 12th regarding aiding and abetting antisemitism, in all of its overt and camouflaged forms, in academia. The following is a result of that conversation…

President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order on December 12, 2019 which has the potential, if properly enforced, to change “business-as-usual” on too many campuses these days. Unfortunately, this subject brings back very bad memories from my own doctoral studies in Middle Eastern Affairs—which have been written about elsewhere.

Fast forward to President Trump’s new Executive Order…

No sooner than the ink dried, “Progressive” Hebrews condemned it. They did likewise when President Trump recognized the same city that King David purchased for his capital 3,000 years ago—before most other peoples made their historical debuts—as the capital of the sole, resurrected Jewish State…Jerusalem. And then failed to ask them permission to move America’s embassy there as well. 

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/12/just-politics?mod=article_inline

“We have reached a period of political partisanship where people are so willing to suspend reality in order to pursue an agenda that they view real-life events almost entirely through the prism of their own bias. Like football fans watching the video replay of a penalty—one set of people are able to scream that one thing is “clearly” the case, even as the other shouts that it is “blatantly” the opposite. The same footage, the same evidence, through almost identical sets of eyes, is capable of spinning wildly contrasting views. . . . We have reached the stage where manipulation of the facts by spin doctors or government departments is no longer necessary—people take the raw evidence before them and mould it themselves in real time. But what is every bit as chilling is just how effective it is at drowning out reasoned debate on serious subjects.”

In what now seems a distant epoch of pre-history, President Bill Clinton came before a joint session of Congress in 1996 to deliver the State of the Union Address and announced that “the era of big government is over.” Even in 1996, no one thought that the era of big government was actually over, least of all Bill Clinton. But it must have seemed like the right thing to say at the time, in order to show that one was in tune with the popular mood—in fact, leading it rather than following it—by putting into a pithy sentence what people were beginning to think, or thought they were thinking, before they had quite thought it. This happened, you may remember, just after the newly elected Republican Congress, the first in forty years, was forced to knuckle under to Mr. Clinton after shutting down the government in a vain attempt to limit big government–style spending. Thus the President, as it might have seemed, was being magnanimous in victory—making a gesture in the direction of the ostensibly small-government philosophy of his opponents before adding: “But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.”

Needless to say, the reference to “the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves” was as empty of real political content as the claim that the era of big government was over. No one was proposing, as no one would have dared propose, to abolish the social safety net. The President was merely juggling partisan clichés, but in an original enough fashion that the media were inclined to regard it as a political masterstroke, part of his campaign of “triangulation” in which progressive desiderata were introduced cautiously or with an alloy of conservatism (or, failing that, conservative rhetoric) in order to make them more palatable to the centrists in both parties. We disgruntled conservatives used to speak of this as “the triumph of style over substance,” but in retrospect the joke was on us. Bill Clinton saw sooner than we did that, in the post–Cold War 1990s, style was substance—or as much substance as most people wanted to bother themselves about.

Politics, in other words, had become a fashion statement rather than a serious program for governing. The real business of government was already in the process of being turned over to judges and what is now being called “the deep state,” leaving politicians free to posture and virtue-signal without consequence. With the departure of seriousness and responsibility from the political culture, what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences” took over, and the rancorousness and hatred which are now the salient features of our political life have been increasing ever since. Way back in the ’90s I tried coining the name—I’m sure I wasn’t the first to think of it—“post-modern politics” to describe this new, style-centered political culture based on moral preening, but it didn’t catch on. Of course, we had no need for the name once all politics became post-modern politics. It was just politics.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/12/wanted-a-positive-deviant-in-the-trump-mould/

“The ultimate political positive deviant, of course, is Donald Trump.  And, wow, has he been under siege.  Basically, he has thrown a live grenade into the cesspit that is American politics.  He and his ghastly Deplorables.  He has pitched American politics a curve ball.”

Some years back a former colleague explained his theory of “positive deviants”. Simply put, a positive deviant is an employee or representative of an organisation who refuses to go along with the party line and who speaks truth to power within the organisation, and through some form of contact with the organisation’s stakeholders, especially its customers, saves the reputation of the organisation.

Here is how he discovered the theory.  He was at the time living in New Zealand, and as a visitor was having trouble arranging health insurance for his family.  He tried repeatedly to get people at health insurers’ call centres to clarify complex systems, explain options and provide basic assistance.  To no avail.  After a time he figured out a solution.  He began to cut off the call centre folks mid-conversation and, using call centre shortcuts, keep trying different people till he found someone who would offer him practical help – solutions even – sympathetically acknowledge his frustrations and, above all, stop simply spouting the company line.  And really, really annoying him.

He concluded that about one in four employees was actually interested in customer service and not merely in getting rid of difficult complainants – “managing them” – and so making life easy for “company policy”.

Anyone who has suffered from CCHC (call centre hatred complex) – and who hasn’t? – will relate to this story. But my friend went further.  He concluded that these oddball helpful employees who bucked standardised behaviour actually saved companies from the wrath of their customers and helped them to survive.  Absent positive deviants, many an organisation would go bust amid a welter of seething malcontents.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/fbi-corruption-how-dirty-cops-spied-on-trump-campaign/

The falsified documents and the many errors all disadvantaged one side. That’s not bias?

White-collar criminals should hope for one thing this Christmas: that they get to live under the Horowitz rules.

Michael Horowitz has testified that he found no evidence of political bias on the part of the decision makers who, under the Obama administration, relied on hilariously implausible “evidence” and falsified evidence of their own in order to launch a federal investigation of the Trump campaign. Rather than political bias, Horowitz says, the investigation uncovered a series of “basic and fundamental” errors. Democrats are cheering that aspect of the report, because they believe that Horowitz’s words can be used to silence charges that the investigation of the Trump campaign was, as the president charges, part of a politically inspired “witch hunt.”

Here’s Horowitz in his own words:

Errors were made by three separate, hand-picked investigative teams; on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations; after the matter had been briefed to the highest levels within the FBI; even though the information sought through the use of FISA authority related so closely to an ongoing presidential campaign; and even though those involved with the investigation knew that their actions were likely to be subjected to close scrutiny.

No bias, just honest incompetence. Or so we are expected to believe.

Dutch politician Geert Wilders delivered a powerful speech at the Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend in Palm Beach, FL (November 14-17, 2019). He sounded the alarm that Islamic supremacist incursion is already advanced in America — and advises the U.S. to learn from Europe before its too late. Don’t miss it!

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/geert-wilders-speaks-freedom-centers-restoration-frontpagemagcom-0/

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/07/the-tortoise-and-the-hare-of-modernity-reconsidered/

Hares do not countenance irrational impediments such as “taboos.” Their response to the tortoises who deploy them is a mixture of loathing, hysteria, and contempt. But as a wise man put it, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

Not to be overly paradoxical about it, but the names Donald Trump, Adam Schiff, and Jerry Nadler will not appear in this essay. Like you, I am weary of that shrill and unproductive static. Let us, then, take a brief holiday and consider a different sort of problem, a problem that stands behind—admittedly pretty far behind—that static I mentioned and which we might do well to think about. Let us, for lack of a better phrase, call it “Modernity and Its Discontents.”

No educated person in the English-speaking world can hear that phrase and fail to think of the memorable English title that James Strachey gave to Freud’s late masterpiece: Civilization and Its Discontents. Pressed to give a single word summary of what Freud concluded about those Unbehagen, those “discontents,” one could do worse than offer the brief imperative “No.” “Sad is eros, builder of cities,” W. H. Auden wrote, and that sadness, Freud thought, followed inevitably from the basic instinctual denials that made civilization possible. 

“Modernity,” it will be pointed out, is not quite, or perhaps I should say “not hardly,” coterminous with “civilization.” If pressed to give a one-word précis to describe the Unbehagen in die Modernität, I might venture to suggest that it centrally involved the diminishment, the attenuation, the abandonment of that imperative denial that Freud analyzed. 

Unfortunately, the loss or—more to the point—the active repudiation of “no” does not necessarily get you to any positive “yes.” 

That’s the idea, of course: that by kicking over the traces, by saying “no” to all those inherited constraints, habits, structures, customs, prejudices, and dispositions that made us who we are, we thereby emerge into a glorious sunlit upland in which we enjoy the cities but dispense with the sadness. 

The reality has been somewhat different. George Orwell gave dramatic expression to one set of differences when he noted that “For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.”

https://www.steynonline.com/9853/once-more-into-the-fogged-bottom

Yesterday I caught a bit of the impeachment theatre en route to a lunchtime speaking engagement. To be honest, if they’d come round and performed it live in my hotel room, I’d still have fled. If universally respected eminent lifelong career foreign-service bigshots Bill Taylor and George Kent are Adam Schiff’s star witnesses, their chief purpose seems to be to get Democrats pining for the charisma of Bill de Blasio and the self-effacement of John Kerry.

In a functioning system, the head of the government sets foreign policy and the diplomats enact it. So naturally there’s not a chance of that in Washington. When Taylor and Kent whine that there seemed to be a “shadow foreign policy”, the shadow is theirs; they spent a day testifying that everything had been going ticketty-boo for decades just as they’d always done things – and then Trump came along and took a different view. Oh, my! Anyone would think that, as Barack Obama once proposed, “elections have consequences”.

First up was George Kent, the “Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Eastern Europe and the Caucasus”. He warmed up the crowd with some extensive biographical material about the “nearly sixty years” of George Kents (I believe he’s George III or some such) who have “chosen” to endow America with the blessings of their “public service”. It didn’t help that he wore a bow tie. Eventually he stopped talking about himself and started talking about Ukraine:

Our strategic aim for the entirety of my foreign service career is not possible without a Ukraine whole, free, and at peace, including Crimea and Donbas, territories currently occupied by Russia.

Crimea is, of course, familiar to anyone who’s read “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:

Theirs not to reason why
Theirs but to do or die…

Or, in the case of low-level diplomats who’ve never had a single conversation with the President, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or tender their resignations after first ensuring that their pensions won’t be affected. Instead:

Into the valley of the SCIF
Rode the six hundred hearsay witnesses…

As I said, any Tom, Dick or Harry can bandy Crimea, but it takes a career striped-pants Foggy Bottom public servant to toss in “Donbas” with gay abandon. It would have been interesting to see whether Adam Schiff or anyone else in the room could have found Donbas on a map. The odds of pinning the tail on the Donbas blindfolded are better. It’s bordered to the north, east and south-east by Russia, so it’s akin to the Russian foreign ministry regarding northern Mexico as a vital national-security interest of Moscow’s.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/opinion/politics/antisemitism-europe-corbyn.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

DPS Note:

It has got to be pretty bad and likely to get a lot worse if the NY Times is willing to publish an acknowledgment that some Muslims and lots of left wing politicians (here and abroad) hate Jews and aren’t shy about saying so.

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Two years ago, a 27-year-old man named Kobili Traoré walked into the Paris apartment of a 65-year-old kindergarten teacher named Sarah Halimi. Mr. Traoré beat Ms. Halimi and stabbed her. According to witnesses, he called her a demon and a dirty Jew. He shouted, “Allahu akbar,” then threw Ms. Halimi’s battered body out of her third-story apartment window.

This is what Mr. Traoré told prosecutors: “I felt persecuted. When I saw the Torah and a chandelier in her home I felt oppressed. I saw her face transforming.”

One would think that this would be an open-and-shut hate crime. It was the coldblooded murder of a woman in her own home for the sin of being a Jew. But French prosecutors decided to drop murder charges against Mr. Traoré because he … had smoked cannabis.

If France’s betrayal of Sarah Halimi is shocking to you, perhaps you haven’t been paying much attention to what by now can be described as a moral calamity sweeping the West of which her story is only the clearest example. A crisis, I hasten to add, that’s perhaps less known because it has been largely overlooked by the mainstream press.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/where-have-all-the-alphas-gone/

For some time now I have watched the immensely popular HGTV as a window on the culture—a large picture window letting in “lots of natural light,” as the rather silly and predictable house hunters are fond of saying—providing a cameo on the conventions of middle-class society. One notices, with few exceptions, that the wives tend to be voluble and bossy; they speak first, far more often, more insistently and more authoritatively. Their needs and desires are clearly predominant. The husbands, for their part, are mostly bland and subservient, almost leguminous in comparison, generally deferring to their wives with only the occasional mewl of protest.

One notes, too, the lack of genuine taste, the utter preoccupation with trivialities, and the cloying banality of conversation among the often obese participants. They are obviously hewing to script, but the ideas, habits, physical attributes, speech patterns, attitudes and expectations on display are close enough to the cultural norm to seem authentic. People recognize themselves and their aspirations in these TV episodes. Although the self-indulgence and broadly decorticate behavior one observes is certainly off-putting, the absence of gender parity, in favor of the wives, is perhaps the most conspicuous quality that affirms itself.

One might dismiss these observations as making too much of a mere reality TV show, but HGTV does let in a lot of natural light on a culture grown flaccid and critically disoriented. The ascendancy of the now-dominant, rule-giving female and the attendant decline of the proud and assertive male is the order of the day. The male essence is not a privilege but a fact of nature—that is, when nature is allowed to take its course. Yet, everywhere we look men are surrendering their right to be men—to be strong, confident, honest, unashamed and productive. I do not blame the vindictive and self-righteous feminists for the debacle. I blame the men who have allowed a social disaster to come to pass. We now see the gradual disappearance, or at least the alarming paucity, of alpha males in the social mix accompanied by the rising tide of beta males—apologists for their “toxic” nature, Michael Kimmel types— who are complicit with the feminist agenda.

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/topic/politics/

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 and moved to its present location on Fifth Avenue ten years later. It has benefited from the work of many illustrious architects from the 19th century on – all adding to the elegance and majesty of America’s premiere neo-classical palace of Art. Its collections are priceless, ranging from ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Assyrian, Chinese and many other cultures to contemporary painting and sculpture with an emphasis on international presentation of art in all its myriad forms.

Each season, the museum publishes a brochure called What’s On that features descriptions of the temporary exhibitions as well as gallery talks, tours, concerts, talks by the artists, conversations with curators and art historians It’s an excellent way to get acquainted with activities you might not know about and parts of the vast museum you might never have visited. It undoubtedly has an international mailing to members and patrons and perhaps an even broader audience online; as such it represents the grandeur and diversity of the museum itself.

In the current Winter brochure, there is a description of the Great Hall Commission which consists of two monumental paintings by Kent Monkman, a Cree artist, which will be on view in the Great Hall from December to April. According to the brochure “Central to his work are themes of colonization, sexuality, loss, and resilience, and he often enlists his gender-fluid alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a time-traveling, shape-shifting, supernatural being, to challenge notions of history and indigenous peoples.” I’m not sure who wrote this but it sounds a lot like a sophomoric college student majoring in Gender Studies. In the Welcome article on the first page of the brochure, the new director of the Met, Max Hollein, had this to say about the artist: “His two monumental paintings are the latest in a series of contemporary commissions in which we invite artists to create new works inspired by the Met collection. Monkman’s themes of migrations and displacement, provocatively expressed with the help of his alter-ego, Miss Chief, disrupt our notions of history while recalling iconic American and European works.” You will notice that he left out Miss Chief’s name, a wise decision to overrule either the artist’s own words or those of his agent or the decision of a trendy-wannabe editor of What’s On.

In another location, The Museum of Sex for example, Monkman’s feeble attempt at humor or p.c. obedience might not stand out, but at the Met, it sounds as silly and crude as a child shouting curse words at church. It rings shallow and hollow under the rubric of the pinnacle of American Culture. Whoever allowed it to remain has cheapened the dignity of the Met and sadly, unlike an inappropriate comment that is spoken, this one will stand out in black print for five months. Sic transit gloria mundi………