RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Mueller investigation is sputtering along and Antifa are thugs and the monument debate does have decent people on both sides, so the never Trumpers have seized on a new “outrage”….namely the pardon of former Sheriff Joseph Arpaio.

Just for the record:

In 1979, Jimmy Carter released three Puerto Rican terrorists who shot at members of Congress.

In 1999 an adviser to President Clinton proposed pardons of imprisoned Puerto Rican terrorists. The pardons would be “fairly easy to accomplish and will have a positive impact among strategic communities in the U.S. (read, voters),” wrote Mayra Martinez-Fernandez, an adviser to the White House Working Group for Puerto Rico, according Debra Burlingame in The Wall Street Journal. Get that? Voters. Clinton, to be sure, issued the pardons.

In January of this year outgoing President Obama issued 200 commutations of sentences, including that of Oscar López Rivera, a member of Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (FALN), a Marxist-Leninist terrorist group who was released on May 7th 2017. The Daily News summarized FALN’s “accomplishments:

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/oscar-lopez-rivera-not-deserve-president-obama-pardon-article-1.2947628

“In 1974, the FALN began planting booby-trap bombs around New York. While most of these early explosions caused only property damage, the group’s clear intention was to kill and maim. In December 1974, an NYPD officer responding to a report of a dead body in an abandoned building on 110th St. was seriously injured by an FALN incendiary device.
In January 1975, a 10-pound dynamite bomb killed four people and injured dozens at Fraunces Tavern. The powerful blast was felt blocks away. In an eerie foreshadowing of 9/11, dust-covered victims staggered through downtown streets. The FALN quickly took responsibility for the deadly deed.
When a Chicago apartment serving as the FALN’s bomb-making factory was raided in November 1976, authorities learned the names of the group’s leadership. López Rivera and several associates became fugitives.
On Aug. 3, 1977, the FALN struck again in a coordinated attack in Midtown. An alert office worker at 342 Madison Ave., near 43rd St., noticed a suspicious package and evacuated the building. No one was hurt in the subsequent blast.
Workers at the Mobil Building at 150 East 42nd St. weren’t so lucky. An FALN bomb planted there killed 26-year-old Charles Steinberg. The building’s ground-floor windows blew out and several New Yorkers were critically injured by a shower of glass.”

Policing is not Enough http://henryjacksonsociety.org/

Part of the problem of dealing with the range of security challenges which our societies face today is that any concerted focus is kept on them for such a startlingly short space of time.

It is only a week since the attack in Barcelona and already the story has slipped from the news schedules in most of Europe. It has already disappeared in the background noise of life in modern Europe’s cities. But the details which have come out make a number of things very clear.

First is the clear fact that a far worse terrorist atrocity was only narrowly averted. It is only because one explosion went off early, alerted the authorities to a threat and that the truck attacker then also appears to have gone off early, that far worse devastation was averted. It would seem that the cell which was planning these attacks intended to create explosions at major landmarks in Barcelona, causing a level of architectural and infrastructure devastation – in addition to the human devastation – of a kind not seen for many years.

Secondly it seems clear that a local imam was involved in the cell. For the Spanish authorities this presents one of the most embarrassing as well as challenging facets of this investigation and its consequences. It seems that Abdelbaki Essati, the shadowy imam who was connected to last week’s cell was also associated with the cell who blew up the Madrid trains in 2004. Nevertheless he was able to appear in the town of Ripoll a couple of years ago and seems to have set about setting up a cell. His actions were straight out of the al-Qaeda playbook, and he appears to have used well known tactics of selections and grooming to put together the cell which plotted devastation against Spain last week.

All of this raises profound questions for Spain and all other Western democracies. Some experts are saying that the ease with which Essati moved even when he should have been on the radar of law enforcement agencies speaks to a lack of communication between Spanish law enforcement and judiciary and the regional (Catalan) branches of the same. In reality such claims only aspire to answer a tiny part of the problem. What would the authorities have done had they been more joined up? And what could they have done?

Spain, like the rest of Europe, is currently in a period of attempting to police this problem. But across the continent there is a growing sense that the policing approach – with its minimalist interventions – is not up to the job. Or rather that it is itself being let down by the unwillingness to address the problems raised at a much higher as well as wider governmental and societal level. If the Spanish authorities interpret the results of last week as presenting only a problem of intra-security cooperation then they risk failing to learn yet another lesson in this long war for the West.

First: Farewell to the print Village Voice which had the best columns on jazz of any paper while Nathan “Nat” Irving Hentoff was a columnist from 1958 to 2009.

Second: I am reminded of Nixon’s disgraced vice -president Spiro Agnew’s phrase describing an acrimonious media as ” the nattering nabobs of negativism.” It is claimed that the late columnist William Safire wrote those words for Agnew.

Third: George Orwell’s pithy quote on the media: “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”

Fourth: If a tree falls in the forest and the mainstream media does not report it, did it happen? rsk with apologies to Geroge Berkeley (1710)

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. From the Appendix of Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell, “The Principles of Newspeak.”

Orwell does not delve very deeply into the subject, but one of the shared chief goals of politically correct speech and NEWSPEAK is to literally shrink the epistemology of the mind. It is not merely a matter of “mental habits,” but to mold the preferred stunted mind of totalitarian activists like Antifa.

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.

Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

Without exaggeration, this is the shrunken state of mind of Antifa and its political allies in the Democratic Party. The new “thoughtcrime” is now to be suspected of harboring alleged sympathies with Nazism and racism, even though the accusers are grossly ignorant of the roots and practices of Nazism and even of “racism” or “whiteness,” and of the etymological roots and meanings of the words, even though there is not a shred of evidence that “racism” or “Nazism” exists in the fabric of a person’s words and actions. But evidence of innocence

Dr. Leonard Peikoff discusses the “mental state” of Nazi Germans and their Brown Shirts in The Ominous Parallels:

“The concept of personal liberties of the individual as opposed to the authority of the state had to disappear; it is not to be reconciled with the principle of the nationalistic Reich,” said Huber to a country which listened, and nodded. “There are no personal liberties of the individual which fall outside of the realm of the state and which must be respected by the state… The constitution of the nationalistic Reich is therefore not based upon a system of inborn and inalienable rights of the individual.”

Peikoff, writing in the chapter “Hitler’s War Against Reason” in The Ominous Parallels, goes far, and long before the appearance of Antifa and the statue-smashing Social Justice Warriors:

The voluntarist worship of mindless action may be designated by the term “activism.” Activism is the form of irrationalism which extols physical action, based on will or instinct or faith, while repudiating the intellect and its products, such as abstractions, theory, programs, philosophy. In a very literal sense, activism is irrationalism – in action. “We approach the realities of the world only in strong emotion and in action,” says Hitler. (p. 52 of the book)

Ayn Rand wrote in 1971:

Kant’s expressly stated purpose was to save the morality of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice. He knew that it could not survive without a mystic base—and what it had to be saved from was reason.“All within the state; nothing outside it,” proclaimed Benito Mussolini.

Imbibing PC speech and writing, and applying it to any and all issues, achieves the same ends as Orwell’s description of NEWSPEAK, one of which it to inculcate unswerving conformity in thought and deed. Not to mention automatic. And thoughtless obedience, and thoughtless action. One is initially dumbfounded by the crass ignorance of those who censor freedom of speech and the right of assembly. Thus it is fruitless to accuse an Antifa thug of practicing what he purportedly and loudly opposes – Fascism, or the suppression of freedom of speech and assembly – when he physically assaults those with whom he opposes. Anyone who disagrees with him is an “enemy.” Argumentation with the street totalitarians is impossible. “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” said Mao. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, the Perons, Mussolini, and other dictators could have said it, just as well. It is doubtful that Antifa thugs have ever heard of Mao’s “Little Red Rule.”

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/14/us/what-is-antifa-trnd/

The group is known for causing damage to property during protests. In Berkeley, black-clad protesters wearing masks threw Molotov cocktails and smashed windows at the student union center where the Yiannopoulos event was to be held.

Crow, who was involved with Antifa for almost 30 years, said members use violence as a means of self-defense and they believe property destruction does not equate to violence.

“There is a place for violence. Is that the world that we want to live in? No. Is it the world we want to inhabit? No. Is it the world we want to create? No. But will we push back? Yes,” Crow said.

Levin said Antifa activists feel the need to partake in violence because “they believe that elites are controlling the government and the media. So they need to make a statement head-on against the people who they regard as racist.”

“There’s this ‘It’s going down’ mentality and this ‘Hit them with your boots’ mentality that goes back many decades to confrontations that took place, not only here in the American South, but also in places like Europe,” he added.

White nationalists and other members of the so-called alt-right have denounced members of Antifa, sometimes calling them the “alt-left.” Many white nationalists from the Charlottesville rallies claimed it was the Antifa groups that led the protests to turn violent.

Peter Cvjetanovic, a white nationalist who attended the Virginia protests over the weekend, said he believes the far left, including Antifa, are “just as dangerous, if not more dangerous than the right wing could ever be.”

“These are people who preach tolerance and love while at the same time threatening people with a different political ideology. We go to our rallies and they harass us and attack us but they held theirs and we ignore them. You don’t see right-wing protests get like this,” Cvjetanovic told CNN affiliate KRNV.

But Crow said the philosophy of Antifa is based on the idea of direct action. “The idea in Antifa is that we go where they (right-wingers) go. That hate speech is not free speech. That if you are endangering people with what you say and the actions that are behind them, then you do not have the right to do that.

“And so we go to cause conflict, to shut them down where they are, because we don’t believe that Nazis or fascists of any stripe should have a mouthpiece.”

The Neo- Nazis are a loathsome, loutish, hateful group and the President made a dumb statement about “decent people on both sides.”As a result, the media, the left, and the never Trumpsters are out in force. Even many Republican summer soldiers and sunshine patriots are tucking up their petticoats in high dudgeon. So be it.

The right wing groups are amateur bigots- small in number with very limited national influence- none in the academies or the media. The Antifa groups are professional bigots who know how to manipulate and influence the public….and they employ every perceived gripe from every minority to inflame national rhetoric in order to destroy democracy.

The ones that really get my goat are the hypocrites who use Holocaust metaphor and anti-Semitism to denounce the Neo-Nazis. “This is the ideology that killed six-million Jews” screeched a young man recently. Funny, I never heard him denounce Islamic jihad driven genocidal goals. For that matter he supported Obama’s Iran deal which enabled a regime whose open and avowed and averred aim is to destroy Israel and kill six-million Jews. And he thinks that BDS is just an expression of tough love of Israel.

An e-pal J.P. wrote :

“But the bigger issue is the sudden interest in Nazis, when anti-semitism has been on the rise for the last ten years.Why is it that a couple of hundred anti-semites warrants such massive attention from the mainstream press, from the Democrats, and from the left? And from you? Why don’t they (or you) care when millions of college students get together every year for a week-long celebration of anti-semitism? Is the only difference that the college students don’t display the swastika? Or could it possibly be that all the faux-rage is seen as a way of scoring political points against Trump?”

Well said!

rsk

I am never quite sure whether I am really a Southerner. Texas was in the Confederacy, but West Texas is a lot more Albuquerque than Birmingham. I have never felt any sympathy for the Lost Cause. If I were building monuments to figures from that era, I’d choose Frederick Douglass, Thaddeus Stevens, or, if I’m in a mood, John Brown.

Southerners — and some conservative sentimentalists — tell themselves two convenient lies about the Civil War. One is that the Confederate cause was an honorable one, the other is that the war wasn’t really about slavery. Neither of those stands up to very much scrutiny, and the former is mostly false in no small part because the latter is almost entirely false.

There were honorable men fighting on the Southern side, to be sure, and their fight was an honorable one to the extent that risking life and limb on behalf of one’s home and people is generally honorable. General Lee is widely considered to have been an honorable military man, and so was Field Marshal Rommel. But General Lee’s cause was destroying the United States of America to facilitate slavery. The historical record, including practically every Confederate document explaining Southern separation, makes that clear enough. That the abolitionists were imperfect in their commitment to the liberation of the slaves and that there were Southern men of conscience who detested slavery and yet fought on behalf of its preserver does not change any of that. The War Between the States wasn’t about cotton tariffs.

Many of the monuments and statues now being abominated and disassembled were not erected in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War but some years after, often in reaction to such modest advances in the political and social condition of African Americans as the early 20th century produced. Some were nothing short of consecrated shrines to white supremacy erected to Southern political powers in league with such miscreants as the Ku Klux Klan. To the extent that today’s reaction against these monuments is in essence Democrats cleaning up their own mess, there is some justice to it.

But there would have been some justice to it in 1938 or 1964 as well. The current attack on Confederate monuments is only another front in the Left’s endless kulturkampf. The Left is committed to always being on the offense in the culture wars, and, with Donald Trump and his white-resentment politics installed in the White House and Republicans lined up queasily behind him, the choice of going after Confederate totems is clever. It brings out the kooks and the cranks, and some respectable conservatives feel obliged to defend them. Getting Republicans to re-litigate the Civil War is a great victory for the Democrats, who were, after all, on the wrong side of it as a matter of historical fact. Rather than embrace their party’s proudest and finest legacy, Republicans are now trying to explain away President Trump’s insistence that there were some very fine gentlemen among the tiki-Nazis in Charlottesville. President Trump’s schoolboy forensics is here particularly embarrassing. From Abraham Lincoln to Donald Trump: Evolution runs backward for American political parties.

We should not, in any case, accept the fiction that what is transpiring at the moment is a moral crusade rather than political opportunism.

Monuments have a way of being repurposed: Rome is an overwhelmingly Christian city, and its most famous monument is the Colosseum, where Christians were put to death for sport and for political gain. (It was, however, more common for martyrs to meet their fate at the Circus Maximus.) A famous Roman obelisk, originally brought from Egypt by Caligula as a symbol of imperial power, today stands in St. Peter’s Square, crowned by a small reliquary believed to contain fragments of the True Cross. The Roman Catholics might have proceeded in the same way as the Taliban with Buddhist monuments, smashing every relic of their pagan forebears. The Christian world has undergone such paroxysms from time to time: Iconoclasm is puritanism in vandalism.

Make some effort to try to understand the works, you bumpkins

.IT’S HARD TO MISINTERPRET SOMETHING WORSE THAN ART CRITIC TABASH KHAN DOES, IN THIS ARTICLE: Fad Magazine’s What’s Wrong With Art? Conceptual Art Is Complicated.

“So why are people put off by conceptual art? Often it’s because the artist or gallery hasn’t taken any steps to explain the concepts behind the work. Most visitors to galleries would happily make some effort to try to understand the works but are often only provided with a convoluted press release that includes a line about the work speaking for itself — when it clearly doesn’t.

“For these reasons many visitors will often not engage with the works and be snootily labelled by art world insiders as ‘not getting it’.”

In case you haven’t followed the stultifying degeneration of the contemporary art scene, you might not know Conceptual Art has been the Next Big Thing for about 50 years now. In Conceptual Art, the idea is now an “artist” only needs to have an idea. The actual object can be made by someone else, or be an already existing common object put into a new artistic context, or maybe even not be made at all, but only exist as a documented thought. If a new tangible object is produced, it’s likely been farmed out to anonymous technicians who have actual skills. But it’s the name brand artist who takes the credit and the big money. The lack of actual ability and accomplishment is disguised by lots of pseudo-intellectual academic jargon, designed to obscure rather than illuminate.

Writer Tom Wolfe, in his classic take down of the art world, The Painted Word, had these pretenders pegged back in 1975:

“…there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representation objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes. …Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until… it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture…”

Khan gives the game away in his article, but does not seem to realize it:

“After all, the godfather of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp’s concepts weren’t particularly complex. By placing a urinal in a gallery he was questioning how you define what art is, and whether the artist and the setting give weight to an artwork. Philosophical questions which are still relevant today.”

What Marcel Duchamp did-besides probably stealing the credit for his most infamous work from a mentally ill woman artist– was twist art from a vibrant, visceral experience into an ironic elitist assertion. The date of R. Mutt’s toilet in the gallery was 1917. It’s literally been a hundred years, and the establishment art world is all in on simply creating variations on the same old tired shock tactics.

Conceptual superstar Damien Hirst

This is different because it’s a toilet and a dead animal

Khan nails it when he says Duchamp (or whoever it really was) was not complex. Where he gets it so wrong is assuming that words can be used to justify the inadequate offerings of our corrupted cultural institutions.

Khan obviously believes art needs an enlightened priest caste to transmogrify and translate art for the ignorant peasants. It’s an arrogant assumption very prevalent inside the art world bubble. The Postmodern creative class blames the audience instead of looking at their own failures to communicate and connect.

Art does have a philosophical element to it-but it is so much more than that. And words can never act as a substitute for a visual experience which moves and inspires. Ultimately art is a mysterious, timeless expression that cannot be reduced to language. If we could say it, we wouldn’t have to show it to you.

The art world rebels the Stuckists know the truth. At the core of their principled stand for an art of the people, by the people, for the people, they state a truth we can hold to be self evident:

“Art that has to be in a gallery to be art isn’t art.”

-The Stuckist Manifesto