RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NG24Dj02.html

Now for something about nothing …

Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt.
Reviewed by Spengler

In the first pages of his new book, Jim Holt misquotes my old professor, Columbia University philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser:
“Professor Morgenbesser, why is there something rather than nothing?” a student asked him one day. To which Morgenbesser replied, “Oh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldn’t be satisfied.”

Morgenbesser actually said: “If there was nothing, you’d also complain.” There’s a world of difference, as we shall see, between “not being satisfied” and “complaining”. Part of the difference, of course, is the unmistakably Jewish irony directed at the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, a member of the Nazi party. Heidegger’s famous question, “Why is there something instead of nothing?” is the opening challenge of the German philosopher’s famous essay “What is Metaphysics?” and the jumping-off point for Holt’s peroration through the mysteries of Creation.

But there was a deeper point to Morgenbesser’s quip. To brandish Nothingness against Being is not an analytical procedure, but a complaint – specifically, the Devil’s complaint about Creation. Since the philosopher Parmenides taught a generation before Socrates, philosophers have confronted a paradox: We can neither think nor speak of “Nothing”, for the moment we employ the term, we are speaking or thinking about a thing, namely “nothing”. One can’t get at “Nothing” directly; one can only sneak up upon it through such things as boredom, violence and perversion.

As Holt quotes Heidegger:

The question [of Nothing] looms in moments of great despair when things tend to lose all their weight and all meaning becomes obscured. It is present in moments of rejoicing, when all the things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the first time … The question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems to hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not.

Every German schoolboy (but few American writers) would recognize in Heidegger the voice of Goethe’s Mephistopheles, who tells Faust:

I am the spirit that denies!
And justly so; for all that time creates,
He does well who annihilates!
Better, it ne’er had had beginning;
And so, then, all that you call sinning,
Destruction, – all you pronounce ill-meant, –
Is my original element.

Mephisto is a manifestation of the primal chaos which envies the light, and seeks in vain to restore this chaos:

That which at nothing the gauntlet has hurled,
This, what’s its name? this clumsy world,
So far as I have undertaken,
I have to own, remains unshaken
By wave, storm, earthquake, fiery brand.
Calm, after all, remain both sea and land.

Faust observes that the Devil can do no harm in the large, and so engages in petty acts of destruction. “Go find something else to do, strange son of Chaos!” the philosopher scolds.

That is why Morgenbesser’s actual joke – “If there was nothing, you would also complain” – is as insightful as Mr Holt’s misquotation is misleading. Holt doesn’t get the joke; he doesn’t even understand that it is a joke to begin with. The question betrays the character of the questioner, both in the case of Heidegger and Holt. A predilection for Nothing is metaphysical nonsense, but it has an existential meaning: It is the complaint of the bored, the jaded, the jealous, the perverted against life. Goethe’s act of genius was to personify the metaphysical impossibility of Nothingness as a spiritual craving for Nothingness, in the stage personage of the Devil.

As the leading Jewish philosopher Michael Wyschogrod observes, Heidegger’s predilection for Nothingness expressed itself in his membership in the Nazi Party – in perversion, destruction and hatred. “The embracing of nonbeing,” he wrote, “is violence. In violence, being is turned against itself, toward its own destruction … Killing is the purest form of deontology. And it is for this reason that Nazism is the deontology of Heidegger.”

A brilliant mind, Heidegger tragically remained in the grip of a Satanic impulse similar to Hitler’s – the disappointment of Germany after its defeat in World War I. The philosopher killed no Jews (and made no public anti-Semitic statements even while he praised Hitler). Eventually the Nazis had no use for him, but he never apologized for his Nazi Party membership or his open support for Hitler during his brief tenure as Rector of the University of Freiburg.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/investor/how-obama-engineered-mideast-radicalization/ Reprinted from Investor’s Business Daily. The Obama Record: After angry Egyptians pelted her motorcade with shoes, chanting “Leave!,” Secretary of State Clinton insisted the U.S. wasn’t there to take sides. Too late. “I want to be clear that the United States is not in the business, in Egypt, of choosing winners and losers, even […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/hostile-environment-for-jewish-students-at-u-c-berkeley/ Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Neal Sher, an attorney practicing in New York City. He was the Director the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which investigated and prosecuted Nazi criminals in the U.S. In that capacity, he was responsible for bringing many dozens of prosecutions and for barring former UN Secretary General Kurt […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/david-horowitz/alex-cockburn-a-bitter-life-2/

Alex Cockburn is dead of cancer at the age of 71. Alex was an influential voice in a generation of leftists who did an enormous disservice to this country and the world at large by carrying on a political tradition and promoting a political cause that killed 100 million people in the 20th Century – in peacetime – and consigned more than a billion others to immeasurable and unnecessary poverty, even starvation, by imposing on them the crackpot socialist schemes of Karl Marx and his misguided disciples. Alex’s father Claud was also a noted writer and both an agent of and propagandist for Stalin’s bloody regime. Alex exhibited in his own person many of the worst Stalinist traits. He was personally vicious in attacking political opponents and even friends, such as Christopher Hitchens, about whom he wrote one of the most disgusting columns I have ever read – although in fairness it must be said that Christopher himself was a master of this particular form of literary abuse.

On the other hand, Alex had worthy sense of humor, which even a target like myself could appreciate, and was a clever writer though inferior as a stylist to Christopher whom he obviously envied and paid back with insults. It could be said of Alex that he was also a gutsy individual who, like Christopher, on occasion displayed independence of mind – a rarity among leftists who are normally incapable of challenging the progressive herd. Alex’s most notorious deviation from orthodoxy was his refusal to support the idea that human beings are responsible for climate change, a cardinal tenet of the progressive faith. This caused the obituary writer for the Los Angeles Times,[1] which like most of our metropolitan papers has become a left-wing tabloid, to say of him “his thoughts on global warming aligned him with the far right” – as though matters of science should be subject to a political party line.

Needless to say, the Times obit failed to mention the fact that Alex and his father were shills for Communists, or that Alex was anti-American and an anti-Semite and a cheerleader for the Islamo-fascists of Hizbollah, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood who are bent on destroying us. Despite the unfortunate resurgence in our time of the vile ideologies of the 1930s and 1960s to which he devoted his life, Alex was at the end a bitter and spiteful man. This was the predictable fruit of a life spent badly in recrimination and anger.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/aurora-fort-hood-a-tale-of-two-massacres/ The murder victims of James Holmes, who slaughtered 12 and wounded 50 at the Dark Knight Rises movie premier in Aurora Colorado, were still sprawled in the theater when ABC News chief investigator Brian Ross on-air tried to link the killer to the Tea Party––without even a modicum of vetting the information, as ABC’s […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

The first reaction to the Aurora Massacre was the usual call for making sure that “this never happens again”. Everyone from New York City Mayor Bloomberg to author Salman Rushdie to mystery writer Patricia Cornwell called for imposing gun control to insure “this never happens again”.
And yet if we were to confiscate every privately owned firearm and outlaw the manufacture of new ones in the country, if we were to forcibly institutionalize anyone suspected of being mentally ill, and if we added naked scanners to movie theaters; we still could not insure that this will never happen again.

And yet Colorado has half the murder rate of Illinois, as adjusted for population. Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and New Hampshire, all full of guns, have far lower murder rates than gun control states like New York, California and Illinois. According to Bloomberg, “If we had fewer guns, we would have a lot fewer murders.” But guns are not proportional to murders.

Utah has the second highest gun ownership rate in the country and the eighth lowest homicide rate. Wyoming, the state with the fourth highest gun ownership rate has the fourth lowest homicide rate. Meanwhile New York is 48th in gun ownership, but is the 18th highest in its murder rate.

We escape tragedy by searching for control and this is an obscene gift that we give to liberalism and its counterpart, the police state. Both promise us a better and safer world in exchange for our freedom. After every tragedy they promise us that they can keep it from happening again. They can’t. No one can.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-look-back-at-east-german-writer-erwin-strittmatter-a-845248.html

Erwin Strittmatter was one of the most successful and popular writers in East Germany. Now, on his 100th birthday, several new books dig deep into his past. The result is an unflattering picture of a man who was forced to find his peace with both the Nazis and the communists.

An appealing figure. An unconventional codger who devoted himself to writing and horse-breeding on a remote farm in Brandenburg. A successful author and one of the best known writers in East Germany.

His novels, “Tinko,” “Ole Bienkopp,” “Der Wundertäter” and “Der Laden,” were best-sellers in socialist East Germany, and one was even used in schools. Hundreds of thousands of copies were printed, and his readings attracted large crowds.

When it came to popularity, Erwin Strittmatter could hold his own with fellow East German writer Christa Wolf. He was also inundated with letters from enthusiastic readers seeking consolation.

He received the National Prize of the German Democratic Republic several times, and he was the first secretary of the Association of German Writers for a short while. At the same time, he surrounded himself with the aura of a misfit. And there were indeed confrontations with the leadership the East German communist party, the SED, which sometimes led to printing delays and publishers’ artificially restricting the size of the print runs. This made his books all the more appealing to readers, who read between the lines and felt as if they were reading underground literature.

His success continued after German reunification. In 1996, a respected high school was named after him in Spremberg, a town in the eastern state of Brandenburg. The 1998 TV adaptation of the trilogy of novels “Der Laden” (The Shop) received both the Adolf Grimme Prize and the German Television Award.

But Strittmatter was no longer alive to receive those awards, or to experience the 1996 revelations about his collaboration with the East German secret police, the Stasi, and the doubts voiced in 2008 about his own account of his participation in World War II. Strittmatter was buried in 1994 near his farm.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/mccarthyism-and-mohamed-elibiary/?print=1 McCarthyism and Mohamed Elibiary Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and four other representatives are now being accused of McCarthyism [1] over the letter [2] they sent to defense, diplomatic, intelligence, and law-enforcement agencies asking them to investigate Muslim Brotherhood infiltration in the U.S. government. The implication is that Bachmann, like McCarthy (at least according to […]

Bulletin July 23, 2012 Israel is monster that eats Palestinian children, in Palestinian art on PA TV http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=7174 by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik A Palestinian Authority TV host asked an artist to discuss one of his paintings “dealing with the Palestinian nation’s problems such as the Gaza massacres.” This is the painting: The […]

http://www.jidaily.com/54cb1?utm_source=Jewish+Ideas+Daily+Insider&utm_campaign=f1bf018c19-Insider&utm_medium=email If the international community wants to do something useful in Syria, it could assist an orderly population separation into ethnic nation states. A massive population separation is already underway; Kurds are fencing off their northeastern corner of the (erstwhile?) Syrian state, Alawites are fleeing to their historic coastal province, Armenians are fleeing to Armenia, […]