RUTHFULLY YOURS

Grey snow and early sunsets keep me home bound many evenings. So I decided to read “Fire and Fury” by Michael Wolff. It is really entertaining and gratuitously insulting to our President but Wolff has missed his calling. Since it is so easy to see the con here…a bitchy attempt to “prove” that Donald J Trump is ignorant and possibly nuts and not fit to be president of the United States.

Wolff should have written a novel which would then make a great miniseries. It would lack the bite of ” The West Wing” because Wolff has only a half-wit of the brilliant screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. A transmogrified Kevin Spacey could play the part of the unhinged president, and Meryl Streep could play the First Lady, and Jack Nichols could play Bannon, and Michael Moore could play Wolff. And the press secretary could be played by Oprah Winfrey.

It could go on until 2020 whereas the book “Fire and Fury” is full of innuendo and outright fabrications …all signifying nothing. rsk

I met a friend last week for a 90-minute lunch and, mirabile dictu, the name Donald Trump did not come up. I say that this was miraculous because it is rare to go more than an hour without Mr. Trump’s name cropping up in conversation, just about any conversation. In the lobby of my building, in our elevators, neighbors bring it up. The news—television, print, internet—is riddled with it. In front of the Whole Foods where I sometimes shop, a man in baroque sunglasses wearing a blue-and-white striped cape collects money he claims is for anti-Trump rallies.

Every Friday I meet for lunch with three or four friends from high-school days. Some while ago I instituted at these lunches what I called the No Trump Rule: “No” not in the sense of being against Mr. Trump’s politics but against talking about him at all, for doing so seems to get everyone worked up unduly. The rule, I have to report, has been broken more than the Ten Commandments. No one, apparently, can stop talking about our president.

The problem, for me, is that most of the talk isn’t highly intelligent. Instead it is vituperative, though cloaked in astonishment. Many sentences begin, “Can you believe . . .” Liberals wish to demonstrate their superior virtue by attacking Mr. Trump; conservatives wish to show their strong sense of reality in defending him. Neither are very convincing. Meanwhile the conversation, like flies in the soup, tends to spoil the lunch. CONTINUE AT SITE

Previous presidents have attracted mockery, disgust, hatred. At a brief meeting more than 50 years ago, Mort Sahl joked to me that a planned meeting between President Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson had to be canceled because the translator didn’t show up. I’ve known people who loathed Jimmy Carter, others who have long thought the Clintons irrevocably tainted by scandal. I was once at a dinner party of 12 where everyone at the table had something derisive to say about George W. Bush, until the woman seated at my right remarked that it seemed to her a sadness that the country couldn’t come up with more impressive people than the Clintons and the Bushes to lead the country. CONTINUE AT SITE

LIBERAL GRAVE JUMPERS

Not long after the November 2016 presidential election, I was at a luncheon surrounded by a large group of powerful, sophisticated, and formidably wealthy women, actually full-bore capitalists––dripping in diamonds and wearing pricey designer outfits––who all voted for the Socialist Hillary for president and twice for the Marxist poseur “president” Barack Obama.

At casual glance, you would think this gathering was a lavishly catered fundraiser for a good cause, with gorgeous flowers on display and wine flowing. But in truth it more resembled a wake.

“It’s not fair,” one woman lamented, echoing the age-old mantra of the left, and completely oblivious to the fact that most Hillary voters would consider it “not fair” to be wearing a seven-carat diamond ring and driving to a fancy luncheon in a Bentley when this privileged woman could––progressives believe actually should––be “sharing her wealth” with the deserving masses!

“Everything we worked for is lost,” another diva announced––“what will happen to choice?”––again referring to the Holy Grail of the left, i.e. ending the lives of living fetuses who simply need a few more months of in-utero development to become vibrant human beings, babies who would be adored by millions of would-be adoptive parents throughout the world.

Significantly, none of the leftist women I encountered at the luncheon has defected to Cuba or Russia or China to prove how ideologically pure they are or how genuine their belief is in socialism or communism. Au contraire…all of them keep living the high life while they keep telling the rest of us not to wear fur coats, not to drive gas-guzzling cars, not to send our kids to private schools, on and on, while, to a person, they do exactly the opposite of what they pretend to stand for!

This luncheon was held a couple of weeks before the National Day of Mourning on January 21, 2017––also known as the Women’s March on Washington––in which thousands of women gathered to express their shock and fury at Hillary’s loss of the presidency.

As a pessimist, I’m part of that small but vitally important segment of humanity congenitally disposed to anticipate the worst. Yes, we live in an age of ‘progress’, but how much comfort can be drawn from our age of marvels when youths of African appearance are kicking in your granny’s door?

Our parents’ generation, inferior to that of our grandparents, brought forth ourselves who are more worthless still and are destined to have children yet more corrupt
— Horace, 65 – 8 BC

Clearly Horace was pessimistic about progress. So was Malcolm Muggeridge, who Paul Phillips in Contesting the Moral High Ground quotes from an address to a Catholic assembly. Muggeridge, he wrote, went on, rightly or wrongly, to assume that “no notion of such a ridiculous thing as progress has ever been put in your heads. If it has, dismiss it at once. There are various things that human beings can do; but there is one thing they can’t do, and that is progress.”

Let me put Tom Switzer in this exalted company. Writing in the SMH (“Gloom, doom and optimism,” 26 December) he expressed an exuberance of positivity. Prominent in his mixed bag of auspicious happenings were declining world poverty, the collapse of the Soviet Union, medical advances, and increased life expectancy. Surprisingly, for a conservative, he trotted out the canard that even when ISIS was in its pomp “you were more likely to drown in the bath than die in terrorist violence.” At least he avoided scary falling fridges. But that is by the way.

Let us go back to 1928, with economic collapse imminent and Hitler, Tojo and human misery on a vast scale only a decade or so away. Economies were booming, Alexander Fleming had just discovered antibiotics, the Ottoman Empire had collapsed, you were more likely to drown in your bath than be killed by an anarchist bomb. My point: potted accounts of progress are seriously deficient in informing us about the state of play and, more particularly, about the near and not-so-near future.

You can look at today and find promise. Equally (more than equally), you can find omens of gloom and doom without looking too hard. Think of the threats.

North Korea, and probably soon enough Iran, with nuclear arsenals. The inundation of Europe with Muslim refugees and the rise of Islam more generally in and outside the West. Chinese expansionism. Russian imperialism. According to the UN (July 2015) the world’s population will have grown by 2.4 billion as of 2050, of which half will come out of Africa. And ‘come out’ a lot of them will, seeking refuge in the West. Anyone who finds any of this promising is definitionally a cock-eyed optimist.

And if this isn’t enough, we have Christianity, the foundation of our civilisation, falling away. We have self-loathing leftists running schools, universities and most of the media. Our politicians, apart from Trump and a few others, have a fetish for putting their citizens second to whatever is the international cause du jour (e.g., global warming or accommodating the never-ending hordes of refugees). Children are being presented with untoward sexual material as part of their “education”. The list goes on. Optimism doesn’t cut it for me; though I see it around me unaccountably. Why? Well, perhaps, because it is part of human nature.

There is evidently a predisposition to optimism among the human race. This might be an evolutionary personality trait which allows us to deal better with life’s difficulties. Psychologists Charles Carver and Michael Scheier, who have written widely on the subject, suggest in the Handbook of Positive Psychology (Oxford, 2002) that “optimists are less distressed when times are tough, cope in ways that foster better outcomes, and are better at taking steps to ensure that their futures continue to be bright.” However, beware: “Too much optimism might lead people to ignore a threat until it is too late … optimists may fail to protect themselves against threats…” This is backed by author Kai Erikson in Everything in its Path, which tells the human story of a West Virginia town devastated by a flash flood and its aftermath:

“One of the bargains men make with one another in order to maintain their sanity is to share an illusion that they are safe, even when the physical evidence in the world around them does not seem to warrant that conclusion.”

What is fractal wrongness? Let’s begin with a fractal. A fractal is a geometric pattern that repeats itself at every level of magnification. Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot introduced fractal geometry in 1975 and defined a fractal as “a geometric shape that can be separated into parts, each of which is a reduced-scale version of the whole.” This means that a fractal is a self-similar never-ending pattern that repeats itself at different scales.

The famous Menger sponge is a fractal in math. Fractals in nature are trees, rivers, lightning bolts, and crystals. Russian nesting dolls are fractals. In computer science fractals are images that are the same at any level of scale which means that it is impossible to determine how much the image is zoomed by simply looking at it.

Fractal wrongness is the state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution – the person’s entire worldview is wrong. The political Left has decided that anyone who disagrees with their platform of political correctness, moral relativism, and historical revisionism is fractally wrong. Fractal wrongness explains why the Left views the entire worldview of conservatives as wrong, deplorable, and contemptible.

Leftism, like any orthodoxy, has embraced its tenets with religious zealotry and a tyrannical demand for conformity that ignores obvious contradictions in its own narrative. Leftists, who pride themselves on being tolerant, are hypocritically intolerant of anyone who embraces a world view that differs from their own. Leftist faux tolerance only tolerates those who look different – it does not tolerate those who think differently. This presents a philosophical inconsistency that Leftism solves with Leftist Newspeak, the official language of the Left.

Newspeak is the language of George Orwell’s dystopian city Oceania described in his classic novel 1984. Newspeak is the language of official propaganda in Oceania that was created to replace Oldspeak – standard English. Newspeak replaces the meaning of a familiar word with its unfamiliar opposite. The key to translating Newspeak is thinking in opposites.

Leftist Newspeak is the language of opposites that imitates taqiyyah – deliberately lying or obfuscating to further Islam. The Islamic world understands the word peace to mean when all the world is Islamic. The Western world understands the word peace to mean pluralism, tolerance, and the absence of conflict. Leftist Newspeak interprets peace as manifest when all the Western world embraces Leftism. Taqiyyah and Leftist Newspeak share an intentional replacement of one set of meanings for another. Leftist Newspeak is the language of contronyms.

Anyone hoping that the #MeToo panic would be left in 2017 will have been disappointed this week, when Hollywood A-listers launched their new campaign: Time’s Up.

Spurred on by the momentum of the so-called ‘silence breakers’ and the flurry of exposés, allegations and sackings related to sexual harassment last year, celebrity women have given their cash to fund legal aid for poor women who are apparently being abused in the workplace.

The launch letter, published in the New York Times, begins with ‘Dear sisters’. It reads like a charity pledge – and this is exactly what it is. ‘We particularly want to lift up the voices, power, and strength of women working in low-wage industries where the lack of financial stability makes them vulnerable to high rates of gender-based violence and exploitation’, it says. Apparently Emma Stone, Sarah Jessica Parker and hundreds of other female celebrities think their money will give poor women a voice. How Dickensian. And what about the suggestion that there are high rates of ‘gender-based violence’ in low-wage industries? Where’s the proof?

This sense of paternalism runs through the letter. ‘We see you’, it tells the members of the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas (a female farmworkers’ union) which wrote in support of #MeToo last year. Yes, those hitherto invisible female farmworkers should now be overjoyed after having been ‘seen’ by the cultural elites of New York and LA. The wealthy feminists of the #MeToo movement are now posing as the saviours of helpless, stupid, poor women:

‘To every woman employed in agriculture who has had to fend off unwanted sexual advances from her boss, every housekeeper who has tried to escape an assaultive guest, every janitor trapped nightly in a building with a predatory supervisor, every waitress grabbed by a customer and expected to take it with a smile, every garment and factory worker forced to trade sexual acts for more shifts, every domestic worker or home health aide forcibly touched by a client, every immigrant woman silenced by the threat of her undocumented status being reported in retaliation for speaking up, and to women in every industry who are subjected to indignities and offensive behaviour that they are expected to tolerate in order to make a living: We stand with you. We support you.’

The worst thing about Time’s Up is the hollowness of its support for workers.

A real resistance, a brave resistance against an oppressive government that has created real problems of poverty and repression among its citizens, continues in Iran. Women are taking an active part despite significant dangers to their safety, their lives. Indeed, two of the most iconic photos from Iran symbolizing the protests are of young women.

In one (click the link to see), engulfed in a tear gas cloud, a young student defiantly raises her fist while her other hand covers her mouth to avoid inhaling the dangerous fumes.

In the other photo, another brave young Iranian woman climbs on top of a concrete street structure, where, standing tall above the crowd, her uncovered hair visible to all, she waves a white scarf.

I repeat: her hair is not covered. She is probably waving her scarf. And that is brave resistance because:

For nearly 40 years, women in Iran have been forced [emphasis added] to cover their hair and wear long, loose garments. Younger and more liberal-minded women have long pushed the boundaries of the official dress code, wearing loose headscarves that don’t fully cover their hair and painting their nails, drawing the ire of conservatives.

The protests in Iran today differ greatly from the ones in 2009. The latter were led by a devout Muslim and his hijab clad wife. Carping at Obama’s failure seems a waste of time.
For years Moslem apostates and critics have evoked a reformation within Islam. What is happening with a hurricane force in Iran is a revolution against oppressive theocratic regimes. This time it is against the chains of brutal and faith driven Sharia laws. Scarves are tossed to the ground, mosques and seminaries are pillaged, and the “honor “laws which proscribe even the holding of hands between men and women are being flouted.
This is not the Green Movement of 2009, and the people will fight for the end of the rule of mullahs. Remember that Iran was the fount of radical Islamic fervor, oppression, exile, executions and strict Sharia laws. Those are the shackles that are being broken by people of all ages who are willing to struggle for the purpose. God bless them! And Bravo to our president!

When the French résistance was fighting the Nazis in 1940, the British and the Americans encouraged them with oratory but withheld any material help. This led the French to say “the British will fight the Nazis to the last drop of French blood.”
I hesitate to encourage the women to resist to the last drop of their blood, but I am dismayed by a number of stylish, well coiffed, décolleté and manicured “feminists” in America, including Iranian expatriates, who urge the courageous women of Iran to continue their bloody struggle against the regime in Iran without naming the real enemy….Sharia. It is like telling them to die in vain.
The poster-boy for the rebellion is Moussavi and he and his “reformist” wife, who dresses in hijab, utter not a single word of opposition to Sharia, the cruel, misogynist Islamic law that oppresses women and reduces them to the status of animal.
The women of Iran were led down this path before by their mothers and grandmothers who encouraged them to overthrow the Shah and plunged that nation into the repressive hell-hole ruled by the Ayatollahs.
Revolution cannot be successful if sacrifice brings more Islamic repression and degradation with another face and a new set of Ayatollahs. Their jail is Islam and changing the warden from one thug to another will not set them free.
Women of Iran:
Freedom is what I see daily in my supermarket…women in saris, in hijab, Orthodox Jewish women in wigs or headscarves, girls in miniskirts, girls with navel rings who live and play and love and pray without fear of “honor killings” or stoning or lashing or rape, or forced marriages even at the pre-puberty age of nine.
Freedom is not just the right to vote for candidates that are both sides of the same coin. It is the right to live without fear that your father or your brothers will murder you for committing adultery or apostasy or a perceived insult to the Prophet. It is the right to read books…porn if you choose….see movies from musicals to erotica….to dance and to kiss in public….to divorce or marry …to drive and to travel and to choose how and when and if you must wear that scarf, all with the protection of the state and not the religious dictates of the state.
You are being compared to the crowds of oppressed people who brought down the Soviet Empire. They named their enemy. It was an evil ideology named Communism. Your enemy is an evil ideology named Sharia, which enables your tormentors.