RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy.

I emphasize, an impulse to destroy, because it reflects the actions of Antifa and BLM, and of the Dems in the House of Representatives. They want to “cancel”  the Declaration of Independence and our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Cancel culture is, essentially, when people who have said or done problematic things, either now or in the past, are decidedly “canceled,” and people no longer support them or their endeavors. In this day and age, examples are everywhere. Celebritiesgetting called out for problematic behavior. See my column, “New Harvard Math,’

Cancel culture is a program of dedicated nihilhism. Antifa and BLM are active, violent practitioners of nihilism.  

Most commonly, nihilism refers to existential nihilism, according to which life is believed to be without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. Moral nihilism asserts that nothing is morally right or wrong. Existential nihilism is the philosophical theory that our life has no intrinsic meaning or value. With respect to the universe, existential nihilism suggests that a single human or even the entire human species is insignificant, without purpose and unlikely to change in the totality of existence. According to the theory, each individual is an isolated being born into the universe, barred from knowing ‘why’. The inherent meaninglessness of life is largely explored in the philosophical school of existentialism, where one can potentially create their own subjective ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’. Of all types of nihilism, existential nihilism has received the most literary and philosophical attention. See my column, “New Harvard Math.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/trump-race-and-class/

The president’s authentic bluntness may be more appealing to non-elites of all races than violence and condescending lectures.

The president’s authentic bluntness may be more appealing to non-elites of all races than violence and condescending lectures.

T here are some stunning indications that the supposedly satanic racist Donald Trump could be polling in some surveys around a 35-40 approval rate among Latinos and 20–30 percent among African Americans. Other polls are more equivocal but suggest an unexpected Trump surge among minority voters.

If those polls are accurate and predict November voting patterns, then Joe Biden could lose the popular vote as well as the key swing states by larger margins than Hillary Clinton’s Electoral College losses in 2016.

Indeed, some state polls by CNN and Trafalgar already show Trump to be near even in these purple states. The polling also suggests that, contrary to stereotypical exegeses, nonwhites of the large cities in the Midwest are not necessarily a monolithic voting bloc. So how can this be — given the Obama verdict that Trump is our generation’s Bull Connor, and the Never Trump assurances that the divisive Trump lacks the empathy and appeal of a “coalition building” John McCain or a BLM-sympathizer such as a marching Mitt Romney, and lacks as well the natural resonance the Bush family enjoys with Hispanics?

A number of things are going on that may explain some of these apparent mysteries.

One, Trump is finally beginning to reshape the Republican Party into a middle-class coalition of all races, deliberately pitted against the boutique leftist rich people in Hollywood, Wall Street, the New York and Washington media, Silicon Valley, and the Washington swamp. Trump boasts far more about lowering minority unemployment than reducing the capital-gains tax, more about reducing drug sentences than the need for unfettered global trade.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/09/08/identity-politics-is-turning-violent/

One of the most disturbing and fascinating developments in contemporary public debate is the attempt to normalise looting.

Since the outbreak of Black Lives Matter protests a few months ago, there have been various efforts to rehabilitate violence and looting as acceptable and even laudable forms of political protest. This trend was previously seen in 2011, during the urban riots in England, when the BBC referred to rioters and looters as ‘protesters’. Back then, the BBC was forced to acknowledge that it was wrong to portray looting as a form of protest. Nine years on, things have changed. The American media now wholeheartedly pursue the sanitisation of looting.

Until recently, looting was seen as a symptom of community decay. It was condemned as sickening anti-social behaviour. In previous times, even those who were sympathetic to the cause and the outlook of people engaged in riots would stop short of supporting looting. Social scientists wrote studies explaining why people rioted and looted. Their aim was to understand why in some cases people adopt destructive forms of behaviour that injure their own communities. In some instances social scientists argued that rioting should be seen as the political expression of people without a voice. Today it is very different. Some in the cultural elites are no longer just interested in trying to explain why rioting and looting sometimes take place – they are actually justifying looting and extolling its virtues.

For example, Matthew Clair, an assistant professor of sociology at Stanford University, seems to resent the fact that the word looting has a ‘negative tone’. He says this negative framing of looting is motivated by racism. Apparently, ‘the term is racialised and is often used to condemn political acts that threaten white supremacy and racial capitalism’. This idea that the negative view of looting is driven by racist motives is widely echoed in the views of those who want to normalise such anti-social behaviour. What this overlooks is that, historically, the negative framing of looting also prevailed in European societies where it was the destructive behaviour of white rioters that was seen as symptomatic of civilisational decay.

https://dianebederman.com/hope-the-gift-of-the-jews/

One of the greatest gifts the Jewish people have given to the world is the concept of hope, for a better future.  And we make that future possible because of the belief in moral agency: free will. With free will we choose hope, because we choose life. God said “I give you the blessing and the curse, life and death, choose life for you and your seed.” This teaching, this exhortation, this obligation has kept the Jewish people alive for more than three millennia, despite the innumerable attempts to wipe the Jewish people off the face of the earth.

The Jewish people keep hope alive.

“Next year in Jerusalem,” has been on our lips since the 15th century. Its use during Passover was first recorded by Isaac Tyrnau. On the run for so many centuries, always choosing life, we knew to look forward with hope. And now, here we are in Jerusalem.

The Jewish people brought about the greatest change in the collective unconscious of humanity since the caveman made fire. Pantheism and paganism had kept us in bondage to the whims of nature with constant sacrifices to the gods, and never allowed us to believe that we had any control over our lives. Time was cyclical rather than linear, and we lived our lives like hamsters in a wheel. There was no sense of history or the idea that each moment has a meaning and that we are all part of a long journey that has a beginning and will have a middle and an end: historical time, in other words, not the time of the seasons of nature.

Judaism taught us that we are the subject of our future, our destiny, not the object of a pre-determined fate based on birth. We choose.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/epidemic-of-illogicality?token=

One of the many regrettable consequences of the Covid-19 crisis has been an epidemic of illogicality. Thus:

Countries which originally locked down have rising infection rates. Therefore lockdown was useless and the economic damage it caused was entirely unnecessary.

Sweden never locked down and now its infection rate is negligible. Therefore we should all have behaved like Sweden. 

Although infection rates are rising, the numbers who are dying or need intensive care have declined. Therefore the crisis is over and there’s no need for any more restrictions.

Most of the rising infection rates involve young people. Young people don’t generally have a serious form of the virus. Therefore the crisis is over and there’s no need for any more restrictions.

A lot of the statistics being banded about are rubbish. This proves the whole idea that this pandemic requires drastic action is rubbish.

Despite the panic having been unjustified hysteria from the start, government ministers are still deliberately ramping up public terror in order to increase the power of the state and seize control of our lives.

Duh?

Such arguments, and many more in similar vein, display a regrettable failure to acknowledge complexity, or the difference between correlation and causation, or the concept of being between a rock and a hard place – which means the alternative to something bad may not be something good but something else that’s bad too. Does that really need spelling out? Apparently so.

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/new-dark-age/

The foreign policy of a progressive US administration could entail a fanatical pursuit of race-based “intersectionality” policies, similar to the proletarian internationalism of yesteryear. If US foreign policy were in fact composed of such policies, many countries would consider China the lesser of two evils. A world dominated by a progressive US on the one hand and communist China on the other could devolve into a new Dark Ages.

America is in turmoil. Some believe it is in decline. Few argue whether the decline is temporary or permanent. Almost everyone agrees that Pax Americana, the post-WWII order, and the unipolar world created by the collapse of the Soviet Union are gone forever.

Naturally, everyone wants to know the contours of the world order ahead of us. Students of history look for answers in the not so distant past. The Cold War, which went on for over four decades, contained many periods that can be called upon to justify almost any historical parallel, but the US-USSR confrontation was not unique. History offers many other relatively recent examples of global conflict, though they were not generally cast as polar battles between good and evil in the manner of the Cold War.

The world order prior to WWI was not black and white. It was gray. Several empires, real and artificial, were jockeying for world supremacy: Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Austro-Hungary, and a few smaller ones. None was particularly peace-loving. However, all were at some stage of development as a liberal democracy. Some, like Britain, were well advanced, while others, like Russia, were far behind. None was purely evil and genocidal. This state of affairs more or less defined European history from the Middle Ages through the Treaty of Westphalia.

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Will the fabric of freedom prevail against the gates of hell as the lawless mob gains ascendancy in the country?

It was a question that Abraham Lincoln posed in January 1838 in his address titled “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions” and it is poignantly relevant now as it was then.

His concern was how to fortify Americans against the danger that might beset the country — not from “abroad” but rather from within.  Thus, “if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.  As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

More prescient words could not have been written as our country is currently torn into ugly camps.  There is “something of ill-omen amongst us” and it is “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country.”  In today’s America, judges are deliberately thwarting the law–consider the travesty wrought upon General Flynn.  Even though a federal appeals court ordered the criminal case against Michael Flynn to be dropped, U.S. district judge Emmet Sullivan has yet to dismiss the case. Mark Levin in his Men in Black has long warned us about the dangers of activist judges whose judicial tyranny thwarts the Constitution in favor of liberal policies.

As if he were watching the news of today, Lincoln spoke of  “accounts of outrages committed by mobs, [that] form the every-day news of the times. They [had] pervaded the country, from New England to Louisiana [.]”  We need look no further than Portland, or Kenosha, or Washington, DC; Chicago and New York City as accounts of destruction, looting, murder, disregard for police, property, and peaceful gatherings occur yet Democrat leaders and followers cheer on the malevolence.

NO POSTINGS UNTIL TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 8

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ETHAN!

https://www.theepochtimes.com/who-will-save-america-from-the-democrats-psychotic-race-obsession_3488928.html

Worse than Trump Derangement Syndrome, the Democrats suffer from Racial Derangement Syndrome (RDS)—a desire to find racism under every rock and down every rabbit hole.

Recent examples are myriad. A particularly amusing one comes from their presidential candidate Joe Biden who told a (remarkably sparse) largely black audience in Kenosha, Wisconsin that the light bulb was not invented by Thomas Edison but by an African American, Lewis Latimer.

It’s hard to know where Biden—who plagiarized in law school and a fair number of times thereafter and now has, shall we say, issues—gets his information but this would have been news to Latimer himself, a brilliant man with an inspiring story who happens to be the author of “Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description of the Edison System.” [italics mine]

More significantly and less risibly, a cabal of far left-leaning Democrats led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and House members Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) with the choral support of Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Tina Smith (D-Minn.) have initiated legislation declaring racism a “public health crisis.”

If this is true—and it’s not; it’s a politically motivated crisis—the “viral load” transmitting this particular illness comes directly from those same Democrats and their media claque. They should all have been wearing masks.

The first spores of this disease appeared during the Obama administration after a black man had been overwhelmingly elected president by supposedly “racist” America not once, but twice.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The story of the emperor’s new clothes is applicable to our times. Two swindlers, posing as weavers, appealed to the emperor’s vanity, a man fond of new clothes. They convinced him and his courtiers that only those fit for high office or brilliant of mind would be able to see the bright colors and patterns that would comprise his new outfit. For everybody else, they would be invisible. The weavers then wove air on the looms they had set up. Once finished, they had the emperor and his councilors approve what they had done. Not wanting to be seen as stupid or unfit, they all admired what they could not see. The emperor then paraded through town, while the weavers scurried away. It took a young child without pretension to alert the town folk that the emperor was naked. The people at first hushed the child, but as the truth was whispered throughout the crowd, people saw – the emperor was naked.

For the past several months, the tale has been spun that America is systemically racist and built on a foundation of slavery, that social justice must be pursued regardless of societal costs, that capitalism created privilege for white males and inequality for minorities and women, and that brutal police oppress people of color. It is a tale that says white males need be indoctrinated with critical race theory, a view that race is not biologically grounded but socially constructed by white people at the expense of people of color.

This mythical tale originated in elite universities – ironically, where endowments are the fruit of capitalism – whose wealth allowed professors and administrators to criticize the hand that feeds them. It has been abetted by a media, a vomitorium more interested in promoting ideology than in discovering truth. It is an orthodoxy that combines ignorance and shame and is intolerant of all who do not adhere to its “wokeness.” A recent survey conducted by Heterodox Academy and quoted by John McWhorter in the September issue of The Atlantic, found that “more than half of respondents considered expressing views beyond a certain consensus in an academic setting quite dangerous to their career trajectory.”

This orthodoxy instructs youth to condemn Western Civilization, the culture that has done more than any other to free people from the yoke of tyranny, lift them from poverty and extend lives. Many of these professors and journalists promote Marxism, which promises a transcendent life of sunny days and blue skies, a place where equality reigns, but which in reality is state-sponsored dictatorship and which was instrumental in the formation of Fascism, Nazism and Communism. Supporters of Socialism point to Nordic countries, failing to note their capitalistic ways and ignoring the dreary lives of Cubans, Venezuelans and the 90% of Chinese who are not members of the Communist Party.