Western Civilization: The Age of Perversion A Psychoanalytic Perspective Stephen Rittenberg, M.D.

https://stephenrittenberg.substack.com/

Part I

Civilization vs. Barbarism

Scholars have illuminated the historical, political, economic, sociological and religious sources of antisemitism. Almost none were prepared for its raw eruption on October 7, 2023 in our post Holocaust world. It was generally believed that education, historical knowledge provided by Holocaust museums, and the miracle of Israel’s post WWII founding would foreclose forever (“never again”) murderous and organized Jew hatred. Milder forms of antisemitism were thought to be legally manageable by laws against hate crimes. However, human nature doesn’t change and something deep in the psyche motivates murderous Jew hatred. Our hypothesis is a simple one: the quest for pleasure, the ‘pleasure principle’ is mankind’s prime motivator. Sado-masochistic acts provide intense pleasure, especially in the form of rape combined with murder. The urge to destroy, to annihilate while discharging sexual drives is what motivates Jihadists. Hitler’s einsatzgruppen killers reappeared as Hamas’s slaughterers—this time, exhibitionistically recording snuff pornography for millions. Jews are ideal scapegoat targets of sadistic pleasure for all the reasons cited by scholars. Ultimately Moses’s 10 commandments brought unwelcome restrictions on pleasure and Jews are forever hated for doing so. Civilization brought it discontent. Hamas and Islamo Nazism are attacking Western civilization at its roots.

The clinical setting of psychoanalysis provides a powerful psychosexual lens for observing human nature- up close and personal. I have employed that closeup lens for 60+ years to help suffering patients, driven by a need to understand themselves, Every one of them has revealed the conflict novelists like Conrad and Solzhenitsyn describe between the forces of light and darkness, life and death.

“Outside the civil garden of every day of love/there crouches a wild passion to destroy and be destroyed..”—W.H. Auden.

For example: a charming, intelligent woman in her forties came for treatment. She felt chronically guilty for not contributing financially to her otherwise happy marriage. As a child her younger sister was a behavior problem who consumed her parents’ attention. My patient became the “good girl” who caused no problems and therefore got little parental interest. She worked hard to keep the family intact, did well at school and was regarded as a ‘perfect’ child. Yet at night, in the privacy of her room she made a list of people she hated and would brutally murder, her “kill list.” She reveled in ways of torturing these ‘enemies’, including her sister and her parents. Now as an adult, she lived a seemingly healthy normal life— but was riddled with guilt and unexpressed longings to pursue the life of an artist—a wish she experienced in early childhood that was mocked by her parents. As analysis unfolded and her aggressive drives could be acknowledged they found their outlook as she pursued her childhood ambition to be an artist and began to receive recognition for her work. Animating her work was the desire to triumph over her sister and prove her parents wrong for dismissing her artistic talents as a mere ‘hobby.’ She was able to feel and tolerate the desires to violently destroy those she loved, to realize what Solzhenitsyn realized.

Iran and the US Administration: Mocking US Sanctions by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20613/iran-us-sanctions

Never before have sanctions been so ostentatiously disregarded without any seeming awareness by those violating them of the possible consequences.

The US administration, it appears, has actually been funding Iran to attack Israel and itself.

The Biden administration has provided a lifeline to the Iranian regime by providing it with much-needed financial relief to export more oil and terror.

The evasions of US sanctions by Iran and its allies – largely thanks to the Biden administrations’ sanctions waivers — mark a new chapter in America’s history. Never before have sanctions been so ostentatiously disregarded without any seeming awareness by those violating them of the possible consequences.

Flouting international agreements not only undermines the integrity of the sanctions themselves but has also been demolishing the authority and credibility of the US administration. The problem is that such ostentatious flouting of sanctions has been producing a global lack of respect for the United States. Such derision has been transforming the once formidable reputation of the US into little more than a punchline, and, in the eyes of allies and adversaries alike, reducing America’s stature to that of an attractive target.

Despite the sanctions, Iranian oil exports have continued to surge, funding Iran’s October 7 war on Israel — in addition to more than 150 attacks on US troops in the Middle East by Iran’s militias and proxies. The US administration, it appears, has actually been funding Iran to attack Israel and itself.

In addition, Iran continues sending weapons to Russia, to help it crush Ukraine.

Here’s How We Know The Climate Crisis Is Not About The Climate

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/03/heres-how-we-know-the-climate-crisis-is-not-about-the-climate/

Carbon dioxide is a pollutant, the Environmental Protection Agency says. It’s been drilled into us for more than 30 years that we have to cut our CO2 emissions if we don’t want the world to end too soon. But we know that the climate scare is in no way related to protecting the sky. The data tell us so.

Over the last three calendar years, 2021, 2022, and 2023, “​​​​no country has reduced its carbon emissions more than any other major nation on a per capita basis,” the Committee to Unleash Prosperity tells us.

“Even though our GDP is about 50% higher than China’s, our per capita emissions are roughly the same,” says the group.

The data also tell us that though China’s emissions grow every year, “ours have come down every year over the last decade.”

Yet the U.S. is continually singled out as the worst greenhouse gas offender, while China – and India – escape the wrath of the klimate kooks, from Greta Thunberg to Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who actually “praised China’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

10 Essential Life Skills Your Kid Will Learn At An Ivy League University

https://babylonbee.com/news/10-essential-life-skills-your-kid-wiII

The Babylon Bee is here to put parents’ minds at ease with the following list of critical life skills their kids will learn at an Ivy League school:

The Babylon Bee is here to put parents’ minds at ease with the following list of critical life skills their kids will learn at an Ivy League school:

1.How to plagiarize dissertations: Learn from the real experts.

2.How to pitch a Coleman pup tent purchased from Walmart by George Soros: Those little poles can be tricky, so learning how to assemble them is a big deal.
3.How to chant in unison by repeating whatever the leader just chanted: Few things prepare students for life in the world than doing exactly what everyone around them is doing.
4,How to hate all the bad people: And by “all the bad people,”we mean whoever you’re told to hate.

5.How to have drug-induced gay sex for Palestine: The residents of Gaza are sure to be truly appreciative and will in no way want to throw participants off of rooftops.
6.How to have an opinion on conflicts between countries you’re not able to locate on a map: You don’t have to know where it’s happening, why, or who is involved to know that one side is totally wrong.
7.How to make your parents reconsider their deeply held liberal values: In just a couple more decades, liberal education will build America into a solidly conservative nation.

How to leverage a degree that costs you $5ooK into a lucrative job selling overpriced coffee.
How to treat STDs in the field: You never know what new disease you may wake up with each morning, so knowing how to treat them is key.

10.It’s plain to see that an Ivy League education is just as valuable and respectable today as it ever was. Don’t worry about what your kids are learning, because it’ll shape them into integral, productive members of Palestinian society.

American Jewry’s poor prognosis Regardless of one’s permanent residence, the very idea of an inhospitable “goldene medina” is unsettling, to put it mildly. Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/american-jewrys-poor-prognosis/

The steep rise in antisemitism in the United States, which has soared to new heights since the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, has reawakened the debate about whether the so-called “Golden Age” of American Jewry has run its historical course. It’s a reasonable question.

Rather than arouse horror over the sadistic crimes that Hamas committed against innocent men, women and children on that Black Sabbath, the mass murder galvanized Jew-haters across America. Almost spontaneously, protests against the Jewish state erupted before southern Israel was even cleared of the thousands of terrorists who’d infiltrated the Gaza border.

This wasn’t due to a lack of information about the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust. On the contrary, the Hamas perpetrators not only filmed themselves raping, burning, beheading, mutilating and kidnapping men, women and children; they proudly posted their deeds all over social media.

The response on the part of Muslim extremists and their progressive fellow travelers has been to alternate between denial and justification. On the one hand, they reject Hamas’s brutality. On the other, they hail it as heroic.

Nor did they bother waiting for the Israel Defense Forces ground invasion nearly three weeks later to accuse the “apartheid state” of Palestinian genocide. No, they shouted their lies in megaphones about the “occupation” of Gaza just as promptly and forcefully as they tore down posters of hostages. Even the picture of 9-month-old Kfir Bibas and his 4-year-old brother, Ariel, in the arms of their terrified mother, Shiri, wasn’t spared being ripped and trampled on.

” Debt” Sydney Williams

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Many problems we face make the front pages, and deservedly so: seven and a half million illegals through our southern border over the past three years; A Messianic belief that man alone is responsible for climate change; pro-Palestine and anti-Semites protesting on college campuses for misogynistic Hamas; rising crime; an aggressive China and revisionist Russia; a domestic education system that focuses on identity politics rather than fundamentals of learning; a belief that equal outcomes should replace equality of opportunities; and that energy inflation can be cured by controlling prices and limiting supplies. With that, debt and deficits are relegated to the back pages.

Yet too much debt moves the hands of the doomsday clock closer to midnight. However, when entered into judiciously, debt can be a good thing. Mortgages, auto loans, and the purchase of appliances on time have allowed consumers to live lifestyles unavailable to their forebearers. Student loans, when not overwhelming, lead to improved earnings. We should, however, live within our means. As for the state – a nation must be able to keep secure its people and its principles. As well, it must be able to fund infrastructure projects and other necessary expenses. Because the state has the ability to print its currency, living with a balanced budget, while preferable, is not necessary.

However, when too much leverage is employed – examples being NYSE margin requirements of 10% in the 1920s and reduced/no-down-payments on housing in the 2000s – debt leads to a collapse in pricing and a loss in values. When incomes fail to keep pace with debt accumulation, risks of bankruptcies rise, as happened in 2023 when bankruptcies reached a 13-year high. And when a nation’s spending causes it to raise taxes to a level that inhibits, or limits, economic growth, everyone suffers.

Over the past several years, we have become addicted to low interest rates, which encourage borrowing and discourage savings. After years of near-zero Fed Fund rates, following the 2008 credit crisis and despite 23 subsequent quarters of positive GDP growth, the Fed only began to raise rates in the 4th quarter of 2015. With the advent of Covid in the first quarter of 2020, the Fed again lowered the rate to near zero, which is where it remained for two years, until the second quarter of 2022, despite strong GDP growth in 2021. When inflation became a problem the Fed raised its benchmark rate. Now, despite inflation still running ahead of the Fed’s target, many are urging the Federal Reserve to lower rates before year end. And perhaps they will. Politically it is tempting, especially in an election year. However, consequences of years of exceptionally low interest rates include government bloat, an increase in debt, a rise in asset prices, and inflation – an unsustainable burden on our children and grandchildren, a burden they will have to bear.

The Tyranny of the Uniparty By Josh Hammer

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-tyranny-of-the-uniparty/

Editor’s Note: The first step in winning a war is to recognize the fact that you are in one. This means, first and foremost, to come to know your enemy and his goals. In a recent essay for this site, Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards of the Claremont Institute make a compelling case that the present enemy—the “woke” or group quota regime—is a totalitarian threat, and that its aims are nothing short of revolutionary. While our own troubles may seem far removed from the hard totalitarianism of the twentieth century, Ellmers and Richards argue that the six traditionally accepted elements of totalitarianism are already present in woke America. What’s more, they identify three factors that are unique to the tyranny of the present day.

In the following essay, Josh Hammer defends and expands on one of the Ellmers’ and Richards’ most challenging assertions: that ours is, in effect, a single-party regime. As the late Claremont scholar Angelo Codevilla first argued more than a decade ago, the institutional Republican Party has become a sham opposition, complicit in—often even willingly advancing—the agenda of the woke regime. This is the second in a series of nine contributions by leading experts on the nine defining elements of what Ellmers and Richards dub “Totalitarianism, American Style.”

Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards have convincingly demonstrated the tyrannical nature of the woke-addled regime now presiding over American life. Their identified trifecta of factors that together evince a distinct 21st-century totalitarianism—a global elite, the modern administrative state, and a concomitant rejection of objective truth and the most rudimentary of Western principles—is both compelling and, unfortunately, highly apropos to our current morass.

The rise of an insidious American ruling class, far removed from the interests and desires of most Americans and hardly still accountable to them, is not a recent development. The late, great Angelo Codevilla documented its emergence 14 years ago now, in his definitive essay on the subject. I have also written about the modern American ruling class no shortage of times—both within and beyond the ambit of the Claremont Institute, where Codevilla was a senior fellow and where Tom Klingenstein serves as chairman. That American society has a deeply embedded ruling class is now well accepted by most of Red America, and it is not uncommon to hear Republican candidates and elected officials denounce its prevalence and malevolence.

Six Reasons Why Tulsi Gabbard Is Donald Trump’s Best Choice as a Running Mate Will Gabbard help Trump more in 2024 than Pence did in 2016? I think the answer is an unequivocal yes. By Richard Truesdell

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/03/six-reasons-why-tulsi-gabbard-is-donald-trumps-best-choice-as-a-running-mate/

Despite the unprecedented and coordinated lawfare deployed against him, Donald Trump has emerged as the Republican presidential front-runner. Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat who is both a centrist and moderate (by today’s definitions), has emerged as his most compelling and logical selection to be his running mate. I base my analysis on six compelling factors.

Reason Number One: She’s a woman. Let’s face 2024’s political reality. To have any chance to grab his fair share of suburban female voters in crucial swing states, Trump almost definitely has to pick a woman. While I once thought Kristi Noem would have been a great running mate, she committed political suicide last week with a puppy-killing narrative that ended any hope of that, especially after mainstream media gaslighted her in their attempt to destroy her. That narrative will never go away. Neither will the salacious reports that she had a not-too-secret extra-marital affair with Trump-aligned political consultant Cory Lewandowski. Gabbard has no such liability.

In a sane world without gender balance being an overriding consideration, I’d prefer either Kentucky Senator Rand Paul or Louisiana Senator John Kennedy to be Trump’s running mate. But both are more valuable as members of Republican leadership in the Senate. Either would be a great pick to be Majority Leader in a Republican-led Senate during Trump’s second term. And while I hate to say it, being a woman puts Gabbard in the best position among all of Trump’s potential choices to help him defuse any potentially dangerous fallout over the abortion issue—currently the only issue on which Biden has any measurable lead over Trump in polling. Gabbard’s and Trump’s positions on abortion are generally in sync, referring the issue to the states to decide.

Reason Number Two: Gabbard currently holds no elective office. This works against many others reportedly on Trump’s shortlist. These include (in alphabetical order) North Dakota Governor Doug Burgrum, Florida Representative Byron Donalds, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, New York Representative Elise Stefanik, and Ohio Senator J. D. Vance—all of whom might be more valuable as surrogates and elected politicians than as Trump’s running mate. I’ve left off this list of other non-elected officials like Tucker Carlson and Ben Carson, as well as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (who ruled out accepting such a role but who could end up being one of Trump’s most important surrogates in the fall).

The Biden Administration Must Denounce the International Criminal Court’s Plan to Indict Netanyahu The precedent of the ICC indicting Netanyahu and members of his government over the Israel-Gaza War could easily be used by U.S. adversaries to seek indictments against Biden officials. By Fred Fleitz

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/03/the-biden-administration-must-denounce-the-international-criminal-courts-plan-to-indict-netanyahu/

According to press reports, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague is preparing to issue arrest warrants for war crimes against Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, over the war in Gaza. Such an indictment would not just further isolate Israel over this war; it also would create a dangerous precedent that could lead to indictments of U.S. officials and servicemembers by this unaccountable and unconstitutional international court.

The Biden administration’s response to possible ICC indictments of Israeli officials has been extremely mild. President Biden dismissed them as “over the top.” White House Spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre deflected a question about this issue by saying, “We don’t believe the ICC has jurisdiction. We don’t support this investigation.” House Speaker Johnson said on Tuesday that a Biden official would tell the ICC “to stand down.”

These tepid responses to potential serious abuse by an out-of-control international court suggest the Biden administration would not mind if the ICC indicts Netanyahu and other Israeli officials. If this is the case, this position could come back to haunt the United States and set the stage for future indictment of U.S. officials and servicemembers.

The controversial treaty that created the ICC—the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court—was signed by the United States during the Clinton administration in 2000. Clinton officials never submitted this treaty for Senate ratification because of concerns about the threat the ICC would pose to U.S. national security and the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens.

According to John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and former deputy assistant attorney general, the ICC “represents another effort by a global elite — consisting of European governments, international organizations, and their supporting interest groups, academics, and activists — to threaten American sovereignty.”

David Rivkin and Lee Casey, both noted attorneys and former Bush administration Justice Department officials, warned about the creation of the ICC because…

[t]he creation of a permanent, supranational court with the independent power to judge and punish elected officials for their official actions represents a decisive break with fundamental American ideals of self-government and popular sovereignty. It would constitute the transfer of the ultimate authority to judge the acts of U.S. officials away from the American people to an unelected and unaccountable international bureaucracy. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his Democracy in America, “[h]e who punishes the criminal is . . .the real master of society.

Hamas and Hezbollah: How Iran Is Secretly Infiltrating Europe by Robert Williams

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20612/hamas-hezbollah-europe

“Hamas sees Western countries such as Germany as a refuge in which the organization can concentrate on collecting donations, recruiting new supporters, and spreading its propaganda.” — Germany’s domestic intelligence service, apnews.com, November 23, 2023.

In February, Belgium’s justice minister confirmed that Hamas operates in Brussels… through a network of front companies raising funds for the terrorist organization… Belgian authorities nevertheless continue to allow Hamas to operate there.

“Hamas has been in Europe for about 30 years. It’s an open secret. Of course, they don’t call themselves Hamas… They will have names like Conference of Palestinians Abroad, Palestinians in (country name), Palestinian Students Abroad, and so on. But when you dig a bit, you find out who the people are behind these associations, and what their connections are back home. It’s always the same cluster of 20-25 people. Their propaganda, their social media patterns, everything is Hamas.” — Lorenzo Vidino, director of the program on extremism at George Washington University, April 12, 2024.

“This is a typical Muslim Brotherhood tactic. They come up with a million different names for their organizations, for two reasons: Firstly, they want to give the impression that it’s a broad movement, so that when they organize a public event, there will be 50 participating organizations, or if they publish a public letter, there will be 50 signatory groups. Secondly, if one of these groups is taken down by law enforcement, well, there’s all the other ones.” — Lorenzo Vidino, April 12, 2024.

In all of this, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is a central actor. As stated by the US Congress, the IRGC “trains, funds, arms, and shares intelligence with dangerous proxy forces throughout the Middle East and abroad” and has targeted both European and American civilians.

The US Congress, Israel and thousands of Iranians have urged the European Union to designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization. Last year, by an overwhelming majority, the European Parliament passed a resolution to that effect, but the EU nevertheless refuses to designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell claims there are legal obstacles; however, that claim has been refuted as a lie.

Iran has ballistic missiles that can reach Europe, and is one minute away from nuclear weapons capability, if not already there.