UPDATE III (5/19): WATCH HARD TRUTH LIVE: Tucker Removed By Fox. Robert Kennedy Jr Against The Deep, Warfare, Woke, Industry-Captured State

COVID-19, Nationalism, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Populism, Regulation, THE ELITES, The Establishment, The State, War

5 Replies

Tucker, like Trump, is transformational ~ilana

UPDATE (5/19): The number of views for my latest column’s companion Hard Truth podcast-–recorded 3 weeks back with my honorable, trustworthy podcast partner David Vance—is now 29,000! Truth is timeless, especially when it’s predictive. You see, other popular podcasts have only just caught up with our insights. Namely that Fox News is doomed. Tucker and Trump were transformational. We hope against hope that RFK, Jr. will be too.

UPDATE III (4/29): On the broadcast, which now has now close to 6000 views, I disputed Megyn Kelly’s contention that, just as it happened with her; the perch (Fox News) would always outlive the host (Tucker Carlson).
Well, of course. Ms. Kelly would say so. She has a lot of cognitive dissonance to reconcile there: She is not Tucker Carlson. No sooner had she left Fox News than Tucker stepped into her stilettos—and nobody remembered Ms. Kelly. Tucker, like Trump, is transformational.

UPDATE II (4/25): Substantive and lively. I enjoyed my time with David Vance. We always go deep.

https://rumble.com/v2kbeyc-tucker-removed-by-fox.-robert-kennedy-jr-against-the-deep-warfare-woke-indu.html

THE HARD TRUTH PODCAST with David Vance and myself will be live on Tuesday, April 25, at 12:00 PM Pacific Standard Time.
https://rumble.com/v2kbeyc-tucker-removed-by-fox.-robert-kennedy-jr-against-the-deep-warfare-woke-indu.html

Please join us on Rumble, and send in your comments and/or questions.

https://rumble.com/c/HardTruthPodcast

The remarkable Robert Kennedy Jr. announced his 2024 presidential campaign. One need not agree with every word Kennedy spoke in a pellucid address almost two hours long, delivered extemporaneously, to grasp that, on the defining issues of our times, most of which Kennedy addressed in depth and detail, Robert F. Kennedy is right and righteous.

DAVID AND ILANA discuss Kennedy’s analysis of corporate feudalism, the murder of the American middle-class and the deep, warfare, woke, industry-captured state.

Many thanks for SUBSCRIBING: https://rumble.com/c/HardTruthPodcast

‘The Magus’ By John Fowles: A Sublime Work of Art

Aesthetics, Art, English, History, Literature, The West, War

1 Reply

It is remarkable how many individuals who cannot write, much less conjugate the verb to “spit” (past tense “spat,” in proper English), have attempted to review John Fowles’s The Magus.

Nick Dybek—Dybbuk, the possessed, is a better name for him—for example. No idea who he is but his grubby English alone disqualifies him from even glancing at this work.

I tried to grapple with The Magus (published in 1965, rev. ed. 1977) when barely into my twenties. I had just left Israel having returned to South Africa, so my command of English was not up to the task. I struggled.

The prosaic mind will not possess the necessary imagination and love of beauty for a book that brilliantly plays with your mind, but takes you through exhilarating labyrinths of art, history, the follies of mysticism and psychiatry, other mid-century fads of Europe and England; a lost natural world where the Greek Islands were pristine not yet swamped with smelly tourists; to metaphysics, political philosophy and the phoniness of dying for the state, for a peddled patriotism, not to mention the best description EVER of the killing fields and suicidal battle technique and posture practiced in World War One:

“…the whole butcher’s shop of war”. And, “I saw only Thanatos.” “A desert of the dead.”

Stunning writing (which only writers who craft sentences could appreciate).

I feel good for I have used “Thanatos” in my book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot, as the most apt concept to describe the drive of the white man who gives up his birthright. But I can understand the trouble an idiot reviewer would have, for most would be unfamiliar with the term and its provenance.

The Magus achieves the purpose of great literature:

If you can’t put down a work of over 600 pages—a novel has achieved its purpose. Of course, the English is exquisite and the author ever-so old Oxbridge educated. Not pretentious; just truly educated as once provided by a traditional, classical liberal arts education in the English Ivy League.

I think people who are pedantic and reductive in their oppositional inability to assimilate art and beauty will see all kinds of “isms” in this book: ” “leftism,” “postmodernism”. I disagree with such a miserable and immiserating approach to art.

Literature is either good or bad. It either takes you on a scintillating trip or mires you in dour tedium. The postmodernism tag, moreover, seems to be used as a cudgel by those who inhabit the American English department, or are of its mindset, where postmodernism was perfected—the kind of reader who has never read gorgeous English prose, and wishes to appear sophisticated by raping the literature with artificial constructs.

National Review pegged this old work correctly, as thoroughly traditional in its sweeping style.

For heaven’s sake: John Fowles was an English gentleman born in 1926. He described the mid-twentieth-century as “androgynous”! If our author toyed with the idea that the sexes had merged then; imagine his thinking had he lived today. Nuance, folks, not labels.

I’m only on page 247 and may well regret my enthusiasm. But, for now, I second the august dust-jacket reviewers on my copy, from National Review to the Charlotte Observer, to that of New York Review of Books, whose verdict was:

* “One of the most ambitious novels of the decade….”
* “Brilliant and colossal….Impossible to stop reading.”
* “A marvel. John Fowles is a master of literary magic…”
* “The book is genius throughout and often beautifully written….”
* Mr. Fowles has accomplished an imaginative tour de force, comparable to the more exciting work of Nabokov, brilliant, elegant, inventive, profound without solemnity… It is an extraordinary novel…”
* “…Fowles writes his way beautifully through the demands of text which calls for every kind of descriptive passage.”

These are observations that could not be made today. The last is particularly smart, for the storyline and the breadth of the thing–The Magus–are formidable. The text—this grand superstructure—demands the bone and blood of the author, which it gets.

UPDATE II (4/15): The Beef Vs. Bugs Phony Dichotomy

Conservatism, Criminal Injustice, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Gender, Israel, Justice, Literature, Logic, Reason

3 Replies

Animal husbandry—Intensive animal farming or industrial livestock production, in this case—is humanity’s Mark of Cain …~ilana

To be Right and reactionary (check) you don’t have to be gang-ho about and indifferent to the horrors of industrial livestock production ~ilana

The idea that humanity has only the bug vs. meat-guzzler eating options sets up a false dichotomy and gets a fail on logic and ethics ~ilana

On or around the time of this travesty—the evil, the indifference—of letting 18 thousand cows go up in flames—author Meir Shalev died, aged 74.

For the richness of his descriptions and the depth of the depictions and characters, down to his achingly exquisite unusual sensitivity and sensibility about animals—Shalev is up there with the greatest writers. (Nobel Prize winner Shai Agnon was a vegan.)

Nabokov of the Israelis? Maybe, but Shalev was unburdened by Nabokov’s prurient preoccupation with decadence, mired as he was in it.

Meir Shalev was a soulful innocent.

About the cow, Shalev said that she is the longest suffering, most abused of livestock—made to lactate unnaturally and painfully for a lifespan (which is why milk is puss-filled, by the way; to “regulated” levels, of course), her young removed, and then she, at life’s end, led to the slaughterhouse.

Shalev has described the cries of a heifer when her calf is removed. They go on for a very very long time.

Animal husbandry—Intensive animal farming or industrial livestock production, in this case—is humanity’s Mark of Cain …

*Screen pic image credit

*Shalev as screen pic

UPDATED: Animal Ethics @TuckerCarlson. NONE.

This update is from a January 18, 2023 tweet. It concerns the tenor on the Tucker Carlson Tonight show when it comes to animal ethics. Many of my readers have long-since abandoned the Republican line of rape-and-pillage-the-earth-it’s-yours. (That’s not in or from the Hebrew Testament!)

One person, whose comment I posted to Twitter and Gttr, appreciated my disgust with the flippancy on conservative shows as to animal ethics and husbandry. Other than dogs and cats, the traditional pets that comply with humanity’s slobbering needs—cons have no animal ethics bar utilitarianism: squeeze all you can from em to sate your ugly big gut.

On masking a cow:

Nobody on Tucker Carlson made an ethical argument against CRUELTY to one of the longest-suffering animals in the barnyard: the cow.

But great strides in thinking were made thanks to a cute, blond, fashionable farmer girl in serious war-paint (make-up).

AND, blond and cute is more important than ethics anytime.

Today, April 14, 2023, came a repeat performance, in the form of an idiotic segment on bug eating. Run for cover. They’ll force feed you bugs.

The Beef Vs. Bugs Phony Dichotomy

Every country in the West emulates America’s Fox News in producing their own standard issue Tomi Lahren quality thinker and lookers to compete for segments on Tucker. And so it is that the US, Fox News, creates a global marketplace for blond bimbos.

My mother, a Dutch citizen for over four decades, tells me that the Dutch, a serious and glum people, despise such Americanism. Among the Hard Right, the Dutch still carry the torch for that brilliant orator, Geert Wilders, who comes close to Assange in leading a life of martyrdom for truth.

For another, a good journalist would question the so-called veracity of the global plan to force-humanity to eat bugs en masse (don’t believe every conspiracy Tucker feeds ya). Bugs serve important ecological functions. Eat them all and you really won’t have food.

The creation of these false dichotomies and straw arguments when it comes to ethics in animal husbandry is loathsome—certainly irrational and illogical.

One can eat animals if one must and do so ethically. Of course, you cannot mass-produce animals ethically. But the idea that humanity has only the bug vs. meat-guzzler eating options sets up a false dichotomy and gets a fail on logic and ethics.

Moreover, the rah-rah of badmouthing of vegans is also worse than pathetic. Many young conservatives, or sensitive conservatives, are likely not on board. It’s of a piece with the phoniness of the old Republican, red-blooded girl and guy shtick. Not all vegans are activists with pink hair. Most are simply concerned with the ethics around eating animals.

In sum, to be Right and reactionary (check) you don’t have to be gang-ho about and indifferent to the horrors of industrial livestock production.