Category Archives: Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

UPDATED: Weiner Worm Poster Boy for Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism, Democrats, Economy, Islam, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Politics, Technology

Someone has to say it. Everyone is thinking it. Better that a Jew do the job gentiles fear doing, and thus defuse the issue. Hypersexual. Hyperbolic. Obnoxious. Pushy. Left-liberal. Bright: These are some of the stereotypes that attach to Jews, at least to Jews of East-European origins. (Herein more information about ethnic dynamics in Israel, ignored by most American pundits.) And these are some of the subsurface traits people have in mind—but won’t mouth—about Rep. Anthony Weiner’s antics. Despite this “engorged organism’s” delusions to the contrary, his appearance doesn’t help matters.

But there’s more. Here’s what makes the Weiner worm more toxic. The Democratic congressman from New York is married to Huma Mahmood Abedin, a gorgeous, modest-looking, evidently devout Muslim woman.

Weiner, a libertine liberal, has demonstrated enormous ignorance of Islam, in general, and of Islam vis-a-vis the Jews, in particular. I can already see placards hoisted high, by angry mobs in the Middle-East, bearing Weiner’s ugly mug. This idiotic Jew has dissed and disrespected a Muslim woman.

Before you brand me a self-hating Jew (and I know that the “Age of the Idiot” dictates that my accuser will so do without searching my writings on Jews/Israel in support of his accusation), listen: In conspiratorial anti-Semitic “thinking”, Jews qua Jews are said to possess certain inherent, immutable, saboteur traits. I disagree. My opinion is this: What makes Jewish misguidedness more pronounced than gentile misconception is that Jews are more likely to rise to the top in many fields and professions, politics included. (See the “THE JEWISH CONNECTION.”)

As to Israel’s very different demographic dynamics: Most Israelis are descended from the Sephardi Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and 1497. From their exile in the Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East, they fled to Israel as refugees after 1948. Fierce Zionists, Sephardis are as indigenous to the region as the sand dunes and the Sabra cacti. Their loyalty to the Likud Party derives, in part, from a loathing of what the Labor Party stands for, not least, a racist condescension for dark-skinned Jews. Sephardi Israelis often voice hostility to the leftist rank-and-file European Ashkenazis that populate Labor, as they are fed-up with being looked down upon and mistreated by them.

In other words, Weiner would likely be regarded as a foreign organism in Israel.

UPDATE (June 12): ISRAELI ECONOMY. The assertions about the Israeli economy in the comment below probably reflect the lack of coverage of the Israeli private sector achievements by the media. As well as this mummified media’s bias. They are wrong. We just don’t hear much about Israel’s economy. The information can be Googled. I’ve covered it in recent columns, so … search the Mercer archives.

Although Israel’s economy is by no means ideal, it is not much different from Western Europe’s Third-Way, mixed economies, with a respectable per capita GDP. Warren Buffet has invested billions in the private sector there, with good returns.

Israel’s high-tech industry has been on the cutting edge for ages. We Americans (including CNN’s Zomby Zakaria, who knows nothing about “innovation”) like to pretend we’ve invent everything we successfully market. Some of us do. But many times, small companies in Israel (and Asia) do the work, and sell off to big, lazy American companies.

For example, who does our reader think invented Microsoft’s “Kinect,” which is in the Guinness Book of Records as the “Fastest-Selling Consumer Electronics Device” ever? A tiny Israeli outfit called Primesense. (I once watched in horror as one American tot, clearly retarded, pranced in front of this TV-operated invention like an epileptic having a petit mal seizure. This, when my (now-grown) girl would have been building Lego, painting, reading, or playing outside. But the American Idicoracy rising is another issue entirely.)

I am affiliated with the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Those who’re interested in tracking the liberalization of Israel’s economy will get a good idea by following JIMS’ remarkable work in Jerusalem.

This is an old column, but still relevant:

True, Israel’s founding fathers were socialists (although there’s something to be said for voluntary forms of socialism like the kibbutz, in contrast to politically imposed socialism). Born of a collectivist political philosophy, Israel has been progressing, albeit slowly, toward greater economic freedom (as America regresses). Trade liberalization, financial market reforms, increased privatization and decreased regulation have been part of this historical retreat from socialism. But the steady abolition of state subsidies and the enhancement of competition supported by Sharon’s Thatcherite Finance Minister (Bibi Netanyahu) cannot easily offset the effects of endemic violence. Coupled with the slowdown in the U.S. economy, terrorism is one of the main reasons for slumps in the Israeli economy.

Conservative Hollywood Hooey?

Conservatism, Gender, Hollywood, Intelligence, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Economy, Pop-Culture, Propaganda, The Zeitgeist

The “case that Hollywood is liberal” is hardly novel or new, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg observes about Ben Shapiro’s book “Primetime Propaganda.” I’m not even sure that getting “a whole bunch of liberal Hollywood muckety mucks to confess their very liberal agenda” serves to out these shameless idiots.

Does Shapiro get at the core of the problem?

One aspect is that, as I wrote, “Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn.”

However, there’s more to it. Does Shapiro enunciate the fact that on a meta-level, Hollywood’s increasingly impoverished scripts, with few exceptions, have indeed created a parallel reality, one that is increasingly reflected in real life (say, in the workplace)?

*Gender junk: Woman is brawny, brainy, and beautiful; man is a buffoon. An 80-pound waif manages to wallop a 200-pound gangster with no punctures to the silicone sacks. Her hulking cop partner trots after Great Woman obediently, and is forced to endanger his life to compensate for her lack of physical prowess in police work, firefighting, etc. As in “The Killing,” normalized is the dysfunctional life of the anemic, morose midget of a female detective, while her decent male partner, who ought to be her boss, is cast as the out-of-place brute.

*Junk Science: Take your pick. The choice is endless, from the multiple personality disorder falsehood, to the global-warming canard and the root-causes-of-terrorism rot, to the “diseasing” of all aspects of evil.

Who can forget James Cameron, who having “worked extensively with robot submarines,” imagined he could help the film directors of BP to plug the oil plume? Cameron’s plan included that liquid metal robot from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”

*Good Government must always temper bad business.

*The canonization of kids and critters. In Hollywood’s case, America’s kids, who’ve never been dumber, are deified. The depiction of the natural world is a cartoon, festooned with errors and ignorance and plain delusions.

This Idiocracy was at work, I believe, in the film “Rio,” in which parrots, who resemble only humans and primates in their unique, brainy ability to manipulate objects with their adorable, human like digits—are depicted as having the claw-configuration of a common bird. Here my T. Cup is manipulating a toy block and reading Reisman’s Capitalism. (T. Cup has since grown his flight feathers and acquired 30 words, including sentences used in context, a feat Hollywood types would find hard to accomplish.)

Such was the ignorance of those who put this film together (and they call conservatives stupid?). Hollywood may mirror the cretinism of America at large, only many times amplified.

*General affirmation of slut and celebrity.

Alas, judging from their Bio information, too many Facebook friends who call themselves conservatives or libertarians profess to favoring movie and TV programing that does all of the above. Other than their penchant for FoxNews, the programing these Facebook friends favor and support is the most perverse of Hollywood programing (in terms of some of the parameters above).

My impression is that unless a protagonist is against G-d or for abortion, conservatives are culturally deaf to the piffle spewed by Hollywood pea brains. What’s more, conservatives are obsessed with Hollywood. If they were serious, they’d write Hollywood off—stop writing about these phony fools, begging them to grace their shows and panels, and simply withhold buying power by not purchasing/patronizing Hollywood’s crappy cultural products.

More later.

UPDATE III: SEALs & The Feminized Fate of Supermen

Business, Feminism, Gender, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Labor, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Military

Navy SEALs are incredible specimens, both intellectually and physically. Every interview, over the past few days, with members of this elite unit, has demonstrated the superman qualities SEALs possess. They even look like cut-out images from an episode of “The Unit.” It’s a shame that these magnificent men must place their skills at the service of the state. I suspect, however, that if you are SEAL material, you don’t have many options.

American men have endured decades of emasculation—legal and cultural—in civilian life. Hobbies and work that require such a perfect amalgamation of mental and physical prowess, as being a SEAL demands, are hard to come by. Or are illegal. These men are … manly men; they are chivalrous and disciplined. These qualities are penalized in the feminized workplace culture that has been crafted by the feminists manning Human Resources (Y chromosome carriers included). Frankly, manly qualities are being bred-out of men.

(HR makes my contact behind enemy lines—the American corporation, which works a lot like the US State does—take “Diversity” tests and PC quizzes to keep him in-line.)

Punish a little boy time and again at school for “Bang-bang you’re dead,” of for playing “Cowboys and Indians,” and then teach him do so to his own tyke—and you get generations of girly-boys (down to the fussy sounding falsettos with which many heterosexual men now speak).

I even wondered in “Manly No More,” whether it was possible that “the feminization of society over the last 20 to 30 years is changing males, body and mind. Could the subliminal stress involved in sublimating one’s essential nature be producing less manly men?”

In any event, if one were so endowed, where could a man find private-sector work or hobbies that allowed him to put into practice the skills he would use as a SEAL? That is, without being arrested by the powers that be, or sent to de-Nazification camps/programs (Dr. Phil, anger management, etc).

Although Demi Moore kept getting in the way (and blocking views of Viggo Mortensen), I watched “G.I. Jane” many times over for the impossible training. Of course, not even Amazonian women should be considered for this kind of Special Operations team where, esprit de corps is everything. Fortunately, “G.I. Jane” was just fiction; women are precluded from the Navy SEALs.

UPDATE I (May 8): I think Robert G., below, has been reading and contributing to this (moderated) site long enough to know what a traditionalist means when she points to manhood. Mr. Glisson’s mentors are certainly of a piece with the manhood described. But there is more.

I was referring to something else SEALs seem to possess. We’re talking here about different expressions of manhood. However, the culture has prohibited open discussion of the things my post addresses, very specifically. These are a combination in some men (and certain women too) of qualities that make them scale mountains as the explorers of old did, take to the seas to discover new places, and slay dragons, to use a metaphor.

Have we forgotten the superman (one among a few hundred kids) who graduated with us, and who managed, with equal easy, higher math (in my days they divided us into groups according to ability), marathons, while charming everyone around him with his drive and decency? I remember the specimen! And I am not going to pretend he didn’t exist so as to make everyone feel better. I am quite able to live with the reality that I was not of that species; others prefer to deny that there is such a specimen.

Mr. Glisson seems to want me to say that such supermen end up as killers for the state. As a young girl who partook of the mixed-sex scouts in Israel, I remember so well our 16-year-old group leader. A mere boy, who, when we were lost in the scrubby mountain range of Israel’s tiny interior, in temperatures of 120 degrees, with one water container per child—how with absolute cool, this boy navigated back to base, using the primitive navigational instrument of the day—the compass—sans cellphones and 911 helis hovering above.

On his back he carried the kids who passed out for lack of water. He was already about 6 feet and 3 inches tall. I was but 12, but I recall looking at his face to see if I should be fearful. His young face reflected the enormous responsibility he had undertaken—and was given. But by looking at him, I also knew he’d get us back to base. I even recall his name: Avner.

Doesn’t any one remember that kind of kid? Serious, studious, focused—nothing he couldn’t do??? I doubt these types are allowed to flex their mental and physical muscle to the fullest these days—and certainly not in the repulsively politicized, feminized scouts. The Avners of today, if they persist in contributing to society to the fullest—in the scouts, for instance—would be programmed not to show superior skill (lest stupid, fat kids be made to feel bad); not to comfort sad kids, not to mentor kids like themselves, in case he risked transmitting and excess of machismo competency. Blah, blah.

UPDATE II: rch’s note: It’s succinct, apolitical, and to the point; as you would except from One of These Men. I’m proud to know him too. Enough said.

UPDATE III: Mr. Glisson and I always have a good dialogue; between us we get to the soul of the subject. Each SEAL is an individualist, capable of becoming a leader at the drop of a hat. It is sad that this kind of core character is under assault. This pushes men—whose biology and mentality craves the excitement and the challenge—to serve the state.

UPDATED: Monarchy Vs. Mobocracy (“Albion’s Seed”)

Ancient History, Britain, Bush, Celebrity, Classical Liberalism, Democracy, Founding Fathers, History, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, The West

Trashing the British monarchy is an unfortunate, liberal (not in the classical tradition) impulse, prevalent in the US. Never mind that the British monarchy is purely titular. This American instinct mirrors the deracinated nature of American society, epitomized by the neoconservative creed. Strategically, Americans are taught, in state-run schools, that they form part of a propositional nation, united by abstract ideas, rather than by ties to history, heroes, language, literature, traditions.

In truth, America was founded on both. There was the Lockean philosophy of individual rights. But this philosophy, as the American Founders understood, didn’t magically materialize, or come into existence by osmosis. “Our founding fathers’ political philosophy originated with their Saxon forefathers, and the ancient rights guaranteed by the Saxon constitution. With the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson told Henry Lee in 1825, he was also protesting England’s violation of her own ancient tradition of natural rights. As Jefferson saw it, the Colonies were upholding a tradition the Crown had abrogated. Philosophical purist that he was, moreover, Jefferson considered the Norman Conquest to have tainted this English tradition with the taint of feudalism.”

The fathers of this nation, moreover, loved the American people; they did not delegitimize their ancestry and history by calling them eternal immigrants. John Jay conceived of Americans as “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and custom.” The very opposite of what their descendants are taught.

To denounce the monarchy, as some libertarians have done, with reference to that 18th Century Che Guevara, Thomas Paine, is radical alright, but it is also nihilistic. Paine sympathized with the Jacobins—the philosophical progenitors of today’s neoconservatives—and he lauded the blood-drenched, illiberal, irreligious “Revolution in France.”

Pat Buchanan, in one historically rich column, provides an interesting juxtaposition between king and a despot far worse:

“Louis XVI let the mob lead him away from Versailles, which he never saw again. When artillery captain Bonaparte asked one of the late king’s ministers why Louis had not used his cannons, the minister is said to have replied, ‘The king of France does not use artillery on his own people.'”

In his seminal book, Democracy: the God that Failed, master of praxeology Hans-Hermann Hoppe provides ample support—historical and analytical—for his thesis which is this: If forced to choose between the mob (democracy) or the monarchy, the latter is far preferable and benevolent.

“[I]n light of elementary economic theory, the conduct of government and the effects of government policy on civil society can be expected to be systematically different, depending on whether the government apparatus is owned privately or publicly,” writes Hoppe.

“From the viewpoint of those who prefer less exploitation over more and who value farsightedness and individual responsibility above shortsightedness and irresponsibility, the historic transition from monarchy to democracy represents not progress but civilizational decline.”

… democracy has succeeded where monarchy only made a modest beginning: in the ultimate destruction of the natural elites. The fortunes of great families have dissipated, and their tradition of a culture of economic independence, intellectual farsightedness, and moral and spiritual leadership has been lost and forgotten. Rich men still exist today, but more frequently than not they owe their fortune now directly or indirectly to the state.

MORE.

[SNIP]

The democratically elected ruler has no real stake in the territory he trashes for the duration of his office. (Besides, Court Historians and assorted hagiographers will re-write history for him.) It was no mere act of symbolism for the Clintons to have trashed the White House on the eve of their departure.

The Queen of England might be a member of the much-maligned landed aristocracy, but she has acquitted herself as a natural aristocrat would—Elizabeth II has lived a life of dedication and duty, and done so with impeccable class. (It was a sad day when she capitulated to the mob and to the cult of the Dodo Diana.) The queen has been working quietly (and apparently thanklessly) for the English people for over half a century. According to Wikipedia, Elizabeth Windsor was 13 when World War II broke out, which is when she gave her first radio broadcast to console the children who had been evacuated. Still in her teens, Elizabeth II joined the military, “where she … trained as a driver, and drove a military truck while she served.”

It looks as though William, her grandson, has more of a sense of duty (not my kind, but nevertheless a patriotism his countrymen may appreciate) than most members of the pampered American political dynasties. Did any one of the atrocious Bush girls do anything worthwhile over and above preach for daddy’s wars and promote Obama’s healthCare?

But to reiterate, the monarch in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. has far more powers, and uses them far more destructively, than does the monarch across the pond.

UPDATE (May 1): To the ahistoric contention below that American freedoms originate exclusively in … The Netherlands: I guess that the historian David Hackett Fischer, author of Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, got it completely wrong. Ridiculous too is the contention, moreover, made by the letter writer (I never publish untruths about my written opinions) that I was an Anglophile for stating that historic fact. There is a chapter in my forthcoming book titled “The Anglo-America Australian Axis of Evil.” Yes, that’s the writing of an incorrigible Anglophile!