RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/21/the-art

Prior to the Women’s March this year, controversy arose over its leaders’ relationships with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Meghan McCain pressed Tamika Mallory on “The View” last week, insinuating latent anti-Semitism because of this relationship with Farrakhan.

McCain held Mallory’s feet to the fire, pressing that she condemn Farrakhan for likening Jews to termites that promote homosexuality. She did not disavow. The conversation basically went like this:

Mallory: We did not make those remarks.

McCain: But you’re associating with a man who does publicly.

Mallory: What I will say to you is that I don’t agree with many of Minister Farrakhan’s statements.

McCain: Do you condemn them?

Mallory: I don’t agree.

McCain: But you won’t condemn it.

Mallory: No, to be very clear, it’s not my language. It’s not how I speak, it’s not how I organize . . . I should never be judged through the lens of a man.

Many conservatives on Twitter continue to take shots at the Women’s March for its leaders’ entanglements. But as it stands now, they haven’t suffered much. News coverage for the march was generally positive as usual. No one lost their livelihood over the claims, and it is entirely likely that the march will go on uninhibited again next year.

The March for Life, on the other hand, usually doesn’t make headlines. This year, video footage of an interaction between Covington Catholic High School students (in D.C. as part of a broad pro-life Catholic contingent) and a Native American drummer (there for the first-ever D.C. Indigenous People’s March) set the internet aflame, drawing harsh attention to the pro-life march for reasons unrelated to the movement itself.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/20/should-the

Since the media would doubtless answer that loaded question, “It depends on the president,” let us imagine the following scenario.

Return to 2008, when candidate Barack Obama had served only about three years in the U.S. Senate, his sum total of foreign policy experience. And he was running against the overseas old-hand, decorated veteran, and national icon John McCain—a bipartisan favorite in Washington, D.C.

During the campaign, unfounded rumors had swirled about the rookie Obama that he might ease sanctions on Iran, distance the United States from Israel, and alienate the moderate Arab regimes, such as the Gulf monarchies and Egypt.

Stories also abounded that the Los Angeles Times had suppressed the release of a supposedly explosive “Khalidi tape,” in which Obama purportedly thanked the radical Rashid Khalidi for schooling him on the Middle East and correcting his earlier biases and blind spots, while praising the Palestinian activist for his support for armed resistance against Israel.

Even more gossip circulated that photos existed of a smiling Barack Obama with Louis Farrakhan, the Black Muslim extremist and radical pro-Gaddafi patron, who in the past had praised Adolf Hitler and reminded the Jews again about the finality of being sent to the ovens. (A photo of a smiling Obama and Farrakhan did emerge, but mysteriously only after President Obama left office).

Imagine that all these tales in 2008 might have supposedly “worried” Bush lame-duck and pro-McCain U.S. intelligence officials, who informally met to discuss possible ways of gleaning more information about this still mostly unknown but scary Obama candidacy.

As of January 1, 2019, “…..residents of New York City can change their birth certificates to legally indicate they believe they are not the male or female they were born. They can also legally declare they are neither male nor female, with a simple X.”

I scoured the internet for education and illumination on a national issue that is altering perceptions as well as vocabulary, pronouns, and the laws. Who are zey? What do them want?

Eureka! In Australia, the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education (CEEHE) and a team of feminist scholars in the Faculty of Education and Arts at the University of Newcastle sponsored a conference on gender, post truth and pedagogy. December 9-12.

https://www.geaconf2018.com.au/QuickEventWebsitePortal/geaconf2018/eventinfo/Agenda

Here are some pithy excerpts:

The first speaker Prof Raewyn Connell of the University of Sydney spoke of “Truth, Power and Pedagogy.”

“Feminist critique of the mainstream curriculum remains essential. Yet we need to look critically at the global politics of our knowledge about gender, which itself has an imperial history and is challenged by decolonization campaigns. Claims for the universality of knowledge, which provide some resistance to post-truth politics, are subject to familiar feminist critiques, yet cannot be replaced by claims of epistemic privilege. We need, in current conditions, a feminist model of truthful practice as a basis for knowledge and curriculum. I hope to illustrate what this means for teachers’ working lives as well as in theory. “

Dr Melissa Wolfe who is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University explained in her brilliant peroration: “Generative knowledges: thinking the liminal within gender and education research.”

“Education assemblages, as emergent collectivities entangled with gender and sexuality, continue to be active and productive of binary relations that reiterate inequity. Liminal threshold concepts abound within the field of gender and education research. In this symposium, we propose a focus on the concept of the liminal beyond thresholds. We understand the liminal, without before and after, as an ambiguous state of simultaneous flux – of being affected and affecting, within the co-constitution that is relational becoming.”

Dr. Jacqueline Ullman a Senior Lecturer at Western Sydney University spoke of “Gender & sexuality diverse teachers & the interplay & impact of socio-cultural discourses on individual lives”

“Despite increased socio-cultural visibility of gender and sexuality-diversity alongside national discourses of tolerance, acceptance and homonormativity, gender and sexuality-diversity remains marginal across the education sector – often experienced by educators as individual identity work with significant affective outcomes. “

Ms. Briony Lipton Academic at Australian National University opined in “Care-full Academics: shifting temporalities and recognisabilities of care-work in the academy.”

“What are the personal meditations that take place when feminist academics resist and re-work ideas of care-work to negotiate how we are able to occupy academic spaces? How can care-work act as feminist resistance in queer responses to competitive career trajectories which shape academic belonging?”

I could go on and on about how much I learned from the learned about the critical thinking on binary dystopian notions, but it is time to watch another soap opera on TV where she and he do it in various permutations which are biologically sound.

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.”