RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.