RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2018/12/20/feminisms

Reading the news stories about #MeToo and sexual harassment, and the barrage of social media posts that accompanied these headlines, I became saddened but also increasingly frustrated. It wasn’t the reports of men behaving badly that angered me, but the despair that seemed to be the expected response to these stories, and the helplessness that my female friends appeared to attach to femininity itself that I found troubling.

The unintended and painful irony of recent feminism’s preoccupation with overcoming male oppression has been to place men at the centre of female identity. This makes the feminine experience something like an echo; women’s voices seem to be little more than a response, or a rebuttal, to men’s voices, which are taken to be primarily an instrument of patriarchal oppression. But, in my own experience, men aren’t interested in maintaining power and control over women—they simply don’t see women as a group that they are oppressing, or that they would like to oppress.

We hear a lot about “male privilege” but historically it has been the “privilege” of men to make their way in the hard world in order to first win a woman’s affections, and then support the family structure financially. We might call this “patriarchy,” but this term isn’t the synonym for misogyny that contemporary progressive political culture seems to think it is. (One has to appreciate the misplaced sincerity of many of my university students who roundly condemn The Patriarchy, while driving their father’s Toyota to campus every day, and using his savings to pay for their tuition. Not infrequently it occurs to me that the people who are most vocal against The Patriarchy are those who have benefited from it the most.)

A further concern I have with the message and tone of contemporary feminism is that women have evidently forgotten that we have power over men as a result of the fact that we’re women—men adore us, and almost all their efforts at work or at home or in social settings, are made to win our approval, if not our admiration. In short, I am bewildered by the fact that in a culture in which The Patriarchy has never had less power over women, women seem to want to attribute to it a greater power than men in fact have, thereby confining women to a position of victimhood and powerlessness.

Victim status holds its own form of power, of course, but this nurtures resentment which is always utterly joyless. Curiously, mainstream feminism seems designed to perpetuate the story of male power and oppression: feminists seem to need it as an antagonist against which to define themselves.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/alice-walker-anti-semitism-the-left-lends-cover/

Ignoring anti-Semitic actions or comments depending on the perpetrator’s ethnicity or background allows hatred of Jews to spread.

This week, The New York Times Review of Books printed an interview with Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple. The interviewer asked Walker to list the books on her nightstand. Most were unobjectionable. One was not: a book titled And the Truth Shall Set You Free, by David Icke. Walker described the book thusly: “In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.”

As Yair Rosenberg of Tablet noted, this is a bit of problem. As it turns out, Icke is a rabid anti-Semite, and And the Truth Shall Set You Free is a tome of vitriolic Jew-hating garbage. Rosenberg explains that in the book, “The word ‘Jewish’ appears 241 times, and the name ‘Rothschild’ is mentioned 374 times. These references are not compliments.” The book itself suggests that the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic hoax tract written in the late 1800s, was indeed genuine.

The Times itself has received the lion’s share of the blame for Walker’s reference. But the more interesting question is why Walker herself has been able to escape censure. As Rosenberg points out, Walker has repeatedly praised Icke’s work, has written openly anti-Semitic poetry (“Simply follow the trail of ‘The / Talmud’ as its poison belatedly winds its way / Into our collective consciousness”), and has personally refused to allow The Color Purple to be translated into Hebrew. Yet she is still a well-respected member of the leftist intelligentsia.

https://quadrant.org.au/
Donald Trump Is a Good President One foreigner’s perspectiveBy Michel Houellebecq, John Cullen (Translator) https://harpers.org/archive/2019/01/donald-trump-is-a-good

Those who have read Michel Houellebecq’s memorable Submission, which Douglas Murray reviewed for Quadrant upon its release, will know the author as a remarkably independent thinker — a brave one, too, given his novel tells how France’s elite learns to stop worrying and love the Islamic takeover of their former country. Writing critically of Islam is dangerous, which perhaps explains why feminists in Australia and elsewhere get themselves histrionically upset about tampon taxes but utter not an adverse word about burkas, the veiling of young girls, patriarchal oppression, arranged marriages and genital mutilation.

Houellebecq’s courage turns out to by multi-faceted, as he has just published an essay on Donald Trump (“a good president”) that offers offers a unique perspective on the US president’s virtues, albeit garnished with a full measure of rather more typical Gallic sneers. A taste from Harper‘s:

… Trump is pursuing and amplifying the policy of disengagement initiated by Obama; this is very good news for the rest of the world.

The Americans are getting off our backs.

The Americans are letting us exist.

The Americans have stopped trying to spread democracy to the four corners of the globe. Besides, what democracy? Voting every four years to elect a head of state—is that democracy? In my view, there’s one country in the world (one country, not two) that enjoys partially democratic institutions, and that country isn’t the United States of America; it’s Switzerland. A country otherwise notable for its laudable policy of neutrality.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Recently, a granddaughter, a senior in high school, was asked to write an essay on morality and evolution. It was a subject that caught my imagination. Was not Jesus, who lived two thousand years ago, the most moral person ever? Can one argue we are more ethical today? Do our grandchildren have better manners than did our grandparents as children? How did a world that produced the Enlightenment, two hundred years later create a Hitler and a Stalin? Would anyone suggest that Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton are more respectful of others, have higher ethical standards and are less narcissistic than George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison? It is hard not to conclude we have witnessed a reverse form of evolution, at least when it comes to morality

Evolution is a natural condition. Civilizations evolve, mostly for the better. Consider the buildings we live in, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the cars we drive. Technology has changed the way we communicate, how we shop and the care we provide the sick. We have sent men into space. We grow more crops on less acreage. Evolutionary forces have reduced poverty and extended life expectancy. Even laws and prisons have become less draconian. Government has evolved – from authoritarianism to democracy. According to the website www.ourworldindata.org/democracy, 13 million people lived in democracies in 1830, while 3.92 billion did in 2012. Additionally, racial segregation has been addressed and government care is provided the elderly and impoverished. There has been a downside. War has become more horrific. A small number of social media companies influence how we think; privacy issues have been raised, and the prospect of cyber-war fare has increased. Still, technology-driven evolutionary forces have given us much, including time. But have they made us more gracious and considerate? Has compassionate government made us more respectful, thoughtful and thankful?

Different people will offer different answers, but one possibility is what William McGurn recently called “The Crisis of Good Intentions,” reminding this reader of Milton Friedman: “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than results.” In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Mr. McGurn noted that there are those who claim that capitalism is facing an existential crisis. He cited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“wild-west capitalism”), Thomas Pikety (“patrimonial capitalism”) and the Archbishop of Canterbury (the gig economy is “the reincarnation of an ancient evil”). These are people who see capitalism as pernicious and government as the genesis for equality and social good. Yet California, the most socialistic of U.S. states, has the greatest income inequality of any state. It has the highest poverty rate, as measured by the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which allows for differences in cost-of-living; yet, with 12% of the nation’s population, it is home to 24% of the nation’s billionaires. In his op-ed, William McGurn quoted Chapman University’s Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky: “California is creating a feudalized society, characterized by the ultra-rich, a diminishing middl

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/16/the-globalist-mindset-

Against what or whom is the contemporary Western public pushing back?

The French non-Parisians against new green taxes on already unaffordable gasoline? Broke southern European Union nations against the financial demands of German bankers? The Eastern Europeans against French and German open-border mandates?

The British masses against both the EU and their own government that either cannot or will not follow the will of the people and implement Brexit? The American populists against outsourcing, offshoring, and illegal immigration?

The common target of all these populist pushbacks is an administrative and cultural elite that shares a set of transnational and globalist values and harbors mostly contempt for the majority of their own Neanderthal citizens who are deemed hopelessly unwoken to environmental, racial, gender, and cultural inevitabilities.

In a word, the Ivy League, Oxbridge, and the Sorbonne masters of the universe assume that the world is on a predetermined trajectory. We are to follow an arc of history bending toward state-managed social justice if you will—to end up as a sort of global Menlo Park, Malibu, Upper West Side, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Schwabing, or Kensington. No wonder, it is their ethical duty of transnationals to goad the fated, but sometimes stalled, process along.

Like Aristocrats of Old
Voters in consensual societies are often assumed too ignorant of the world beyond their borders, too encumbered with traditional racial, ethnic, gender, religious, and nationalist prejudices, and too ill-informed to know what is good for them. No wonder that sometimes hoi polloi must either vote repeatedly until they get it right, or follow executive and judicial fiats issued from their betters on high. In the globalist mindset, Brexit passed not because it was felt to be good by a majority or even advantageous for the United Kingdom, but because racists, xenophobes, nativists, protectionists, and chauvinists deluded the clueless public into thinking a pre-EU, and more racist and sexist Britain was somehow superior.

A postelection depressed Hillary Clinton had to travel all the way to Mumbai, India to find a more enlightened audience that would appreciate her insight that the ogre Trump had beat her because:

If you look at the map of the United States, there is all that red in the middle, places where Trump won. What that map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that own two-thirds of America’s Gross Domestic Product. I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards. You don’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women getting jobs, you don’t want to see that Indian American succeeding more than you are, whatever that problem is, I am going to solve it.

The globalist elite is certainly transnational and is sickened by localism, traditionalism, and autonomy. Monsieur Macron shares much more in common with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Justin Trudeau than he does with rural Frenchmen. It is almost as if in 2019 our elites are emulating the interlocking aristocratic families of late 19th-century Europe, but instead of being common descendants of Queen Victoria they are the godchildren of Menlo Park, Brussels, Strasburg, Davos, and Wall Street.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/12/how-identity-politics-imperils-the-liberal-tradition/

As a vehicle to satisfy the human thirst for recognition and belonging, identity politics has proven an empty vessel. While promising to elevate the status of various minorities it has eroded human dignity, and while claiming to offer solidarity it has sown division and discord.

In the midst of the 1949 election campaign, Robert Menzies told a Melbourne audience, “We denounce all attempts to create hostilities against any migrant or group of migrants, whether Jew or Gentile, on the grounds of race or religion.” The aspiring prime minister went on to declare, “Once received into our community, a new citizen is entitled to be treated in every way as a fellow Australian”, and that “the strength and history of our race have been founded upon this vital principle”.

To be sure, Menzies in 1949 accepted “White Australia” as a pillar of the “Australian Settlement” and desired “as many immigrants as we can get of British stock”. Nonetheless, the Liberal Party founder attempted to strike a new tone that marked a clean break from the bitter religious and racial sectionalism of Australia’s past. Committed above all to reviving the tradition of Australian liberalism, Menzies envisioned an Australia where citizens would be judged less by their background than by their moral character and contribution to society. As the historian and Liberal Party elder David Kemp observed, Menzies created a party and subsequently led a government that would go beyond the collectives of class, race and gender to promote greater opportunities for all Australians.

The liberal philosophy Menzies embodied stands out as not only a repudiation of the old class warfare and sectionalism but also as a rebuke to the contemporary fad of “identity politics”, the phenomenon of “group identities” defining and driving political discourse in Australia and much of the Western world.

Subject to a variety of constructions and meanings, “identity politics” embodies two main related ideas. First, that individuals are defined primarily by their “identity”, the three main classifications being race, class and gender; and second, that politics, history and sociology can be primarily understood through the role played by those identities and the conflict those identities generate. As a 2017 report by the Institute of Public Affairs noted, “the underlying philosophical premise of identity politics is that individuals are distinguished by their differences, rather than by their similarities”.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272235/democracy-deliberation-and-internet-bruce-thornton

For 2500 years a consistent criticism of giving political power to the masses has been the question of competence. To critics like Socrates and Plato, the knowledge of history, philosophy, and facts necessary for governing are beyond the abilities of the average citizen. Hoi polloi had to spend their time making a living rather than studying these disciplines, or they were by nature driven more by their self-interest, appetites, and passions than by the rational search for knowledge of the true and good. Thus from Plato’s Republic to today’s progressive technocrats, some form of technocracy has been preferable to rule by the “low-information” voting masses.

In the last few decades, the explosion of information instantly available on the internet has made this fear of giving political power to the uninformed more urgent in an age of “fake news.” Has the availability of an astonishing volume of information worsened the dangers of ignorance to governing, or has it provided a means of correcting it?

Plato’s student Aristotle, in his critique of his old teacher, points toward one answer to this perennial discomfort with mass democracy and voter ignorance. Responding to Plato’s complaint of the lack of technical and philosophical skills among the people, Aristotle pointed out that what we now call “crowd-sourcing” can still make democratic deliberation effective:

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21862/the-socialist-the-jihadi-and-the-tooth-fairy

What do socialists and jihadis have in common? They both still believe in the tooth fairy. This is not funny.

Like most groups, socialists and jihadis are divided into leaders and followers. First, we will discuss the leaders.

Socialist leaders promise social justice and income equality to their followers in this life. Jihadi leaders promise 72 virgins to their suicide bombers in the next life. Leadership promises specifically address the particular desires of their adherents – the leaders aren’t stupid – they are manipulative and extremely successful at luring their believers with false promises.

The leadership disingenuously focuses on the promised benefits to their followers while the actual benefits to themselves are ignored. Any cursory study of history exposes the deceitfulness of the leadership’s promises and shows how reality benefits the ruling elite at the expense of the people. So, why do socialists and jihadis still believe their leaders? Because like children they still believe in the tooth fairy. I will explain.

The people of Cuba, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Honduras believed the promises of social justice and income equality made by their scheming socialist leaders. The people were lied to and are now living the equality of suffering and scarcity that socialism actually provides. Socialism necessarily fails because there is no incentive to be productive and eventually you run out of other people’s money.

The ruling elite in socialist countries suffer no such deprivation and the jihadi leadership worldwide remains alive and well – only their duped sycophants end up dead.

The population invasion at our southern border threatens the economic security and homeland security of the United States. Unregulated unvetted mass immigration will bankrupt our welfare system and simultaneously allow criminals and jihadis to enter the country – both create massive chaos.

The border wall is a defense against illegal entry into the United States. So, why would any politician reject it?

Leftist politicians who support socialism reject the border wall because they want a flood of illegal immigrants in the country to vote Democrat and keep them in power. Leftist politicians reject voter ID and any investigation into voter fraud that could expose illegal voting and/or deny voting rights to their followers – they sacrifice national security for their own job security. Their latest scheme is ballot harvesting.

Ballot harvesting is when organized workers or volunteers pick up absentee ballots and drop them off at a polling place or election office. There is absolutely nothing to safeguard the integrity of the ballots or to insure that all votes are delivered. Ballot harvesting is a powerful election-stealing tool that should be eliminated in favor of mailing in sealed signed ballots. If a voter cannot manage the mailing then that voter’s ballot will not count – period.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-defends-the-international-order-11544573701

Does the European Union place the interests of its people above those of its bureaucrats? One audience member reflexively shouted “Yes!” when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asked the question during his speech to the German Marshall Fund in Brussels last week. That knee-jerk reaction to an honest question illustrates the uphill battle the Trump administration faces as it tries to restore a corroded international order. The administration’s efforts won’t be popular with defenders of the status quo, but systems don’t reform themselves.

Consistent with the postwar tradition of American global leadership, President Trump is now reasserting the role of the nation-state in a free and open order, with the goal of making institutions more effective and accountable. Mr. Pompeo’s remarks came on the sidelines of last week’s meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, one of the many international bodies the U.S. helped create after World War II to promote security, economic growth and cooperation among like-minded states. Organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank are in the same category.

This web of institutions and agreements historically has served the U.S. and its allies well. It was a bulwark against communism and terrorism. It limited interstate conflict and decreased the likelihood of war between great powers. It also helped lift millions out of poverty while impeding the rise of totalitarianism and promoting democracy, prosperity, human rights and freedom.

But this free and open order has gradually begun to fail the world in several ways. Flawed doctrines have taken hold: Multilateralism is an end in itself; the more treaties we sign, the safer we are; the more bureaucracy we have, the better the job gets done. International institutions have steadily encroached on the rights of sovereign nations. Witness how the International Criminal Court is considering investigating American military personnel when the U.S. is not even subject to the court’s jurisdiction.

At the same time, authoritarian regimes have regularly exploited the order for their own ends. Some of the world’s most egregious human-rights abusers, such as Cuba and Venezuela, sit on the U.N. Human Rights Council. China enjoys the benefits of membership in the World Trade Organization while systematically deploying unfair trade practices to protect its domestic market. Iran has used its windfall from the 2015 nuclear deal to support terrorism and other malign activities. Russia has flagrantly violated the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty by testing and deploying prohibited missiles that target Europe. Should responsible nations abide these abuses?

With the international order under siege from actors that would remake it in their own illiberal image, the Trump administration is acting to preserve a just, transparent and free world of sovereign states. This project will require the cooperation of democracies around the world.

President Trump knows nothing can replace the nation-state as the guarantor of democratic freedoms and national interests. When institutions fail to support the sovereign interests of their members, those members must reform them, lawfully cease to participate in them, or eliminate them entirely. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://readgreatliterature.com/trollopes-the-warden-empathy-v-the-media

What famous novelist attacked false news and the unbalanced power of a money-driven mainstream media, and in what novel?
What famous novelist, in this same novel, faulted popular storytellers for creating blind emotion and simplistic portrayals of “good” or “bad” people?
What famous novelist attacked a famous public intellectual for his bombastic cynicism about everything in the modern world?
What novelist thought the central character of a work should be neither a faultless victim nor a morally pristine super-person, but rather an ordinary man, weak but well-meaning, a “mixed” character with good and bad, noble and foolish characteristics all mixed together?

Answer: My favorite novelist Anthony Trollope, in the first of the Barchester Chronicles “The Warden” in 1855. rsk