RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/01-02/how-the-left-turned-free-speech-into-hate-speech/

Postmodernist theory, with its emphasis on subjectivity and relativism, became the mechanism—more by happenstance than good planning—by which Marxism’s anti-bourgeois hostility reconciled itself with the anti-bourgeois sentiment of bohemianism. From there it was a short step to PC gags and censorship.

The Sixties Revolution has gone the way of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution and every other left-wing revolution that comes to mind. The radicalism of yesteryear somehow turned into PC orthodoxy or what we might call Correctism. Another revolution that was meant to be about emancipation has become humanity’s nightmare. The heirs to the 1960s Free Speech Movement have taken it upon themselves to play the role—as Google Inc put it—of “the Good Censor”.

Why did fashionable libertarians give up on libertarianism? When did the ideological successors to the do-what-you-want-to-do-be-what-you-want-to-be movement stop defending free speech in order to prosecute hate speech? The late Timothy Leary, were his mortal remains not spinning in the stratosphere, would be turning in his grave. To make sense of it all we must, as Chairman Mao would counsel us, seek the contradictions within the revolution itself.If the Sixties Revolution had an accepted theme it was freedom, and the Beatles might have encapsulated that more than anyone. They employed to great effect the anarchic, truth-telling style of the Marx Brothers in their 1964 movie A Hard Day’s Night. The Beatles were irreverent and amusing enough on screen to be applauded by the youth magazine of the Communist Party of the United States for their “refreshing, light-hearted contempt for the society that made them what they are”. Leary might have said it best when he bestowed upon the Fab Four the ultimate 1960s accolade: “I declare that the Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.”

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/jordan-peterson-the-sacred-and-the-therapeutic/

What makes Jordan Peterson so popular? There are scores of popular pundits who attack political correctness, many with more aplomb than the professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. The estimable Mark Steyn comes to mind, or Heather Mac Donald, or Dennis Prager, among many others. I’ve attempted my own diagnosis of the PC disease, as existential dread and as a witch hunt in response to the tragic failure of too many black Americans.

Dr. Peterson, though, is the people’s choice as champion against PC madness for the time being.

A full 80% of Americans think that political correctness is a problem in their country, according to polling data, and a reaction against the excesses of the new Savonarolas has been gathering for some time. But why choose Dr. Peterson as the poster-boy for this reaction?

I believe that his enormous and sudden popularity stems from his use of the language of therapy to attack the symptoms of a therapeutic society. His 2018 bestseller Twelve Rules for Life is a self-help book, not a work of politics, philosophy, or cultural criticism.
The Best Quotes from Jordan Peterson’s ’12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos’

Therein, I think, lies Dr. Peterson’s great appeal. The four-fifths of Americans who think that PC has gone too far do not want to undo the great cultural transformation of the past half-century, which has placed self-esteem at the center of human concerns at the expense of traditional virtues. We no longer wish to do what is good and upright in the eyes of God; who does this God think He is, sitting in judgment over us? We want to be our own little gods and make ourselves into whatever we would like to be.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22246/medical-jihad-means-death-to-the-patient
http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

Islam has been at war with competing ideologies since the time of Muhammad. The objective was and continues to be the establishment of a worldwide Islamic caliphate. In 1928, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Egyptian cleric Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood which continues to be the voice of Islamic expansionism and a source of virulent antisemitism worldwide.

According to al-Banna, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” The Muslim Brotherhood’s founding manifesto clearly and unapologetically states its tenets:

“Allah is our goal,

the prophet our model,

the Koran our constitution,

the Jihad our path

and death for the sake of Allah the loftiest of our wishes.”

German scholar and historian Matthias Kuntzel explains the connection between Islamism and antisemitism in his extraordinary 2007 book Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11. Kuntzel identifies the Muslim Brotherhood as the ideological reference and organizational core of radical Islam. He warns that, “whoever does not want to combat antisemitism hasn’t the slightest chance of defeating Islamism.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/new-anti-semitism-woke-progressives-old-stereotypes/

Old stereotypes resurface among today’s woke progressives.

The old anti-Semitism was mostly, but not exclusively, a tribal prejudice expressed in America up until the mid 20th century most intensely on the right. It manifested itself from the silk-stocking country club and corporation (“gentlemen’s agreement”) to the rawer regions of the Ku Klux Klan’s lunatic fringe.

While liberals from Joe Kennedy to Gore Vidal were often openly anti-Semitic, the core of traditional anti-Semitism, as William F. Buckley once worried, was more rightist. And such fumes still arise among the alt-right extremists.

Yet soon a new anti-Semitism became more insidious, given that it was a leftist phenomenon among those quick to cite oppression and discrimination elsewhere. Who then could police the bigotry of the self-described anti-bigotry police?

The new form of the old bias grew most rapidly on the 1960s campus and was fueled by a number of leftist catalysts. The novel romance of the Palestinians and corresponding demonization of Israel, especially after the 1967 Six-Day War, gradually allowed former Jew-hatred to be cloaked by new rabid and often unhinged opposition to Israel. In particular, these anti-Semites fixated on Israel’s misdemeanors and exaggerated them while excusing and downplaying the felonies of abhorrent and rogue nations.

Indeed, evidence of the new anti-Semitism was that the Left was neutral, and even favorable, to racist, authoritarian, deadly regimes of the then Third World while singling out democratic Israel for supposed humanitarian crimes. By the late 1970s, Israelis and often by extension Jews in general were demagogued by the Left as Western white oppressors. Israel’s supposed victims were romanticized abroad as exploited Middle Easterners. And by extension, Jews were similarly exploiting minorities at home.

Then arose a relatively new mainstream version of Holocaust denial that deprived Jews of any special claim to historic victim status. And it was a creed common among World War II revisionists and some American minorities who were resentful that the often more successful Jews might have experienced singularly unimaginable horror in the past. The new anti-Semitism that grew up in the 1960s was certainly in part legitimized by the rise of overt African-American bigotry against Jews (and coupled by a romantic affinity for Islam). It was further nursed on old stereotypes of cold and callous Jewish ghetto storeowners (e.g., “The Pawnbroker” character), and expressed boldly in the assumption that black Americans were exempt from charges of bias and hatred.

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/islamophobia-invention-has-served-its-purpose-spectacularly-well/

“Islamophobia” is an idea recently invented and defused by advocates and apologists for Islam for the purpose of silencing criticism of Islam. The term “phobia” indicates an irrational fear, which is how users of the term hope criticism of Islam will be understood.

As is well-known, criticism of Islam, of Allah, of Mohammed, or of the Koran is forbidden by Sharia law; violators (or even those unjustly accused) are subject per Sharia law to summary execution. Where execution for this offense is rarer due to its extralegality, such as in America and Canada, defenders of Islam have tried to avoid criticism by presenting themselves as unjust victims of persecution and by using moral suasion through the concept of Islamophobia.

Islamophobia has become a standard topic in Middle East Studies and Islamic Studies courses, often presented in conferences and publications as a great threat to the well-being of Muslims in North America. In reality, government statistics on religion-oriented hate crimes indicate that Jews are by far the most targeted group — and many of these cases are perpetrated by Muslims. Muslims are targets in a small minority of cases.

Some Middle East and Islamic Studies professors appear to believe it is their job to present Islam in the best possible light. While daily Islamist militias and proto-states fight to conquer land and populations in the name of jihad for the caliphate, professors and media commentators claim that jihad actually means “inner struggle to submit to God.” Most of the West’s most prominent political leaders announce that Islam is a religion of peace, even as they contemplate going to war against jihadis. They claim that the Islamic State “has nothing to do with Islam,” even as the Islamic State justifies its policies and actions with detailed references to Islam’s foundational texts.

The Islamic State has distinguished models to follow: Did not Mohammed spur the military thrusts of the great Arab Muslim Empire, which soon conquered land between India and Iberia for Allah? Does not the Koran divide the world into the Dar al-Islam, the land of peace, and the Dar al-harb, the land of infidels and war?

From the Koran to present-day Muslim imams and ayatollahs (read the word-for-word translations published by the Middle East Media Research Institute), a prominent theme is the commanded killing of infidels and the conquest of the world. This theme is repeated in the charters of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, the writings of bin Laden and myriad others, and by preachers of Middle Eastern origin and funding in mosques throughout America and Canada. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272514/money-doesnt-stink-bruce-thornton

In his biographies of the Roman emperors, Suetonius describes a conversation between Vespasian and his son Titus, who disapproved of his father taxing the urine that tanners and other industries collected from public restrooms: “When Titus found fault with him for contriving a tax upon public conveniences, [Vespasian] held a piece of money from the first payment to his son’s nose, asking whether its odor was offensive to him. When Titus said ‘No,’ he replied, ‘Yet it comes from urine.’”

This sentiment has been summarized in the proverb, “Money doesn’t stink.” Currency, in other words, is morally neutral. Its buying power is the same no matter how good or evil its users or creators. As such the market cannot create on its own virtues or morals or any good other than profit.

This wisdom is often forgotten by those, like Karl Marx and today’s well-heeled socialists, who criticize free market capitalism for the social disorders that in fact mostly derive from the free choices of individuals, and an intrusive, technocratic federal government that has displaced and marginalized civil society––especially families and churches––and weakened the virtues they once taught and reinforced.

A monologue by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson set off a debate over the obligation of businesses to care about the welfare of their fellow citizens, and the impact of their products on society’s morals and happiness. But the responses of both sides miss the true culprit–– the corroding effects of secularism, the two-centuries-long intellectual movement that has tried to do without God, and replace Him with government.

Carlson starts by exposing Mitt Romney’s hypocrisy in criticizing the economic populist Donald Trump for his “character.” After all, Carlson argues, Romney made a fortune as a buccaneer capitalist who bought companies, sucked them dry of assets, then left them to wither and die. He is part of an economic system and a government whose bipartisan goal is to “make the world safe for bankers.”

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/01-02/the-inherent-racism-of-identity-politics/

That only white people can be guilty of racism is preposterous. Most people are aware of non-white people vilifying other ethnic groups in racial terms. Why is this not racism? Why should the perpetrators not be held as accountable? Doesn’t it imply an inability to take responsibility — a racist presumption if ever there was one?

Identity politics racist? How can that be, you might ask. After all, is not the pursuit of “racial justice” part of the very essence of identity politics? Surely all those warriors for social justice who so prodigiously level charges of racism against others could not themselves be guilty of this offence? They wouldn’t embrace a racist ideology, would they?

Sad to say, yes they would, at least if we adopt what until recently was the standard, commonsense understanding of the terms race and racism. On these understandings, a person’s race referred to certain heritable, unalterable and visible features, like skin colour, that might indicate ancestry tracing back to a particular geographical region. A racist was someone who was inclined to think ill of, or to discriminate against, a person or group solely because of such characteristics.

Towards the end of the last century it became generally accepted in societies like ours that racism so defined was both morally odious and profoundly irrational. The classic expression of this was Martin Luther King’s great civil rights speech of 1963 in which he looked forward to a day when his children would be judged by “the content of their character”, not the colour of their skin.

The basic sentiment here, shared by most people across the ideological spectrum, and certainly those who considered themselves left-wing and progressive, was that race was something we should aspire to transcend. People must not be judged according to visible surface features that reflect trivial genetic variations. We should see each other as, first and foremost, members of a common humanity, free agents possessing certain inalienable rights.

So what has changed? A great deal, as it happens, with the wide embrace of the ideology of identity politics in Western societies, and its wholesale incorporation into the worldview of those who consider themselves left-wing or progressive. On this view, we are essentially defined not by our humanity but by our race, gender or other identity category, or some intersecting set of identities.

The notion of a post-racial future is now considered an ideological heresy by the academic high-priestesses and priests of the identitarian ideology. These ideologues are nowadays absolutely obsessed about race. They strive constantly to heighten racial awareness and to perpetuate rather than resolve racial grievances. The Enlightenment vision of a common humanity is now distinctly passé, as even the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm lamented in a speech in 1996.

https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/watergate-by-any-other-name/

Our familiarity with the Obama-Trump surveillance scandal has bred indifference.

Familiarity, it is said, breeds contempt. It also breeds indifference. For almost three years now, the intelligence services and police apparatus of the deep state have worked tirelessly to undermine Donald Trump. Beginning sometime in the late winter of 2016, when Trump’s presidential campaign was showing unexpected signs of strength, John Brennan—the Communist-voting apparatchik turned media mouthpiece whom it pleased Barack Obama to appoint as director of the CIA—began ringing alarm bells about Trump’s possible relations with the Kremlin. His concern was based on two things. One was a report, spurious as it turned out, about “contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians.” The other was that brittle sense of entitlement, fired by paranoia, that membership in the higher echelons of the deep state’s nomenklatura breeds.

Brennan convened a “working group” at CIA headquarters that included Peter Strzok, the disgraced FBI agent who was head of counter-intelligence, and James Clapper, then director of national intelligence (now, like Brennan, another mouthpiece for the left-wing media), in order to stymie Trump’s campaign. It was Brennan, too, who first alerted James Comey, the disgraced former director of the F.B.I., to the fantasy of possible “collusion” between the Trump Campaign and “the Russians.”

Then came the infamous “Steele Dossier,” the agglomeration of malicious gossip about Trump that was surreptitiously commissioned by and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. This fantastical piece of “opposition research” was essentially the sole warrant for opening secret FISA investigations against Carter Page, a low-level Trump campaign advisor, and others.

All this provided sensational pabulum for the anti-Trump press, who spent countless hours peeling back the complex, hypertrophied onion that the CIA, the FBI, and various figures within the Obama administration had built up to destroy the candidacy of Donald Trump without quite seeming to target Trump himself.

Mirabile ditctu, it didn’t work. Still, it was impossible that Trump could actually win the election. Nancy Pelosi told us that we could “take it to the bank” that Donald Trump was not going to be president. Many other politicians and talking heads made fools of themselves emitting similar pseudo-certainties right up to the afternoon and early evening of election day.

Yesterday I went to a performance of the world premiere of an opera with music composed by Ted Rosenthal, a respected jazz pianist, author and composer, with libretto and lyrics by Ted and Leslie Rosenthal and additional lyrics by Barry Singer, E.M. Lewis and Edward Einhorn. My friend Sheila W. concurred that the work, presented by the New York City Opera at the New York Museum of Jewish Heritage is a masterpiece based on a true story.

The libretto centers on a trove of letters from a mother left behind in Germany in 1938, by a young Jew who came to America- Erich Rosenthal – the composer’s father. Erich is a cold and distant father who does not reveal anything of his past to his children, as he copes with grief and loss and guilt at his failed efforts to rescue his abandoned family. The letters from his mother stopped abruptly in 1942 when she and her neighbors and family left for the death camp Sobibor.

The music, some jazz, some operatic was performed by a wonderful and brilliant cast, interspersed with haunting and devastating flashback scenes of the horrors of the impending genocide. The broken father, nearing death, ponders about his family :”Who will remember them when I am gone?”

Thanks to this magnificent opus, they will be remembered. I came home and looked at pictures of my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins- all killed in Poland and recited their names to myself….rsk