Balam Acab, Oh Why

Petty Profundities

I opened the front door to the cool slick fall night and the cat raced past my feet. Normally he'd rise, languidly stretch and walk inside with feline nonchalance.

I looked one way then the other, saw nothing, closed the door. Moments later I notice the bird he's brought inside--for some reason he's abandoned it for the moment on the floor. It's a sparrow. Do they come out at night? He's on his  back and gasping for air. I'm conflicted, if mildly--proud of the old cat's hunting prowess and sorry for the bird.

You can go your whole life without confronting death face to face, as it were, in the modern world. I wonder if this makes it harder or easier when you at last have to face it. I'll probably find out myself. I've grown old never having seen a corpse outside of a coffin.

Wearing a plastic bag like a glove I picked him up as gently as I could. He didn't move. I took him outside and laid him down, squeezing the air out of the bag slowly until I was holding him there in between my palms. Now what to do with him?

Putting him in the garbage wouldn't do so I took him out back. There's a creek there, just over a picket fence in a ravine, indicated in the deep dark only by its sound. Throwing him into the creek seemed a respectful enough means. I was compelled by some slight God-is-watching sense of guilt to make a show of it. Also vanity, somehow, as always, the sense that everyone is watching that never goes away if you're me. I'm not sure these are two different things.

He was still warm. I couldn't bury a warm body. What if he's still alive? He seemed to get warmer in fact; does body heat surge as the life passes out? I would wait. If there's some tiny bit of sentience there, of suffering, then perhaps this ameliorates it. You won't die alone I thought, holding this bird that was likely already dead as a boot.

He took his time. I was in a shadow of black between the house and a massive evergreen that emerges improbably from the middle of the little creek. The half-moon and stars appeared three dimensional behind the flat screen of the skeletal bare branches of an oak tree.
I wavered. It's a bird. This is ridiculous, I know it is. But I'm looking for profundity wherever I can find it. I'm also looking for something else. What?

He cooled and I went back inside where it's warm.

Here and There

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Alt Right Torah Talk with Luke Ford

Today's reading is Parasha Vayeshev (Genesis 37:1–40:23)

Luke Ford Talks to Greg Johnson

Just Sayin' you can't Just Say That

Is this for real?

Donald Trump retweeted three video clips of anti-white Muslim aggression, without comment. Instantly the news cycle was convulsed. Trump's tweets course through the neural pathways of the system like dopamine.

The outrage seized on the source, a British woman facing jail for speaking against Muslim immigration. Guilt by association always helps to distract from substance. And of what is she guilty? Stuff like the offending tweets, I imagine.

As for the substance of those tweets, there's always the obscurantist option

  

Glenn Greenwald might be slipping into millennial-speak when he issues the nonsensical phrase "random Muslims", but it helps his argument still. He means presumably random acts by Muslims, but there's nothing random about patterns. These videos are documentary proof of a pattern. They only reach us through the interference of Glenn and his ilk.

(I'm reminded of something I witnessed a few years back. A newly assigned New York Times reporter working in Palestine wrote of her impressions of Palestinians mourning for those killed by Israeli troops. The funerals were outpourings of intense lamentations, but after and beyond that the deaths were taken with a stoicism this western, Jewish woman did not recognize.
The implications were clear, if not to her. A cyber-posse rode out, Glenn and others, I think all Jewish, and she was publicly chastised for the racism of suggesting even a cultural difference between Jews and Palestinians. She quickly pleaded ignorance and apologized. Her impressions were mistaken, coercion made clear to her now.
After this satisfactory conclusion Greenwald observed approvingly "this is how it's supposed to work." What "it" is exactly he didn't say, but I don't think it's journalism.)

It is surreal: the Anglo-descended president of the United States roundly denounced by the West's respectable class for documenting foreigners attacking and humiliating westerners in their home countries. With the vast pozzed middle acquiescing or supporting them. One British luminary promised Trump would be met with massive protests if he dared visit, and he's to be believed. A vast, motley horde is at the globalists' command.

"Delete your account" British pols literally demanded, without the customary humor. Indeed, ashen is the only way I can describe the pallor of one horrified luminary who suggested Trump be charged with hate crimes. The elite appears terrified. Trump's actions are unfathomable.

Trump's re-tweets constitute a revolutionary act.

 As much as it's rustled the gilded jimmies of our degenerate elite, it may--it has to, one thinks--be giving hope to indigenous British caught between a hostile government and hostile Muslims.

Trump's intrusion into British domestic politics subverts and betrays the global elite, talking past them to the white populations they loathe and fear. It's astounding that it's happening, and that it needs to in the first place.

The progressive order is global, and by its very nature. Opposition tends to be local, by its very nature. Beyond the harried and harassed of the alt right there is no global opposition. Trump may have changed all that. Just the--forgive the phrase--raised consciousness of it could be transformative.

What a global alt right would look like is anyone's guess. But just the idea of it, widely held, has the potential to accelerate a showdown with the global elite that seems better coming sooner rather than later.

Ross Douthat called Candidate Trump a "traitor to his class" for his economic nationalism. Now he's a traitor to his time, the Current Year. As for the Brit-pol suggesting Trump could be charged under the same laws as the woman he retweeted, the law is the law. The president isn't above the law in his home. Why should he be above Britain's laws? US citizens have been denied visas for political views. Why not the president?

Leonid Bershidsky is a Jewish Russian expatriate journalist who writes opinion for Bloomberg. Here he makes a show of leaving Russia in 2014, citing Putin's press restrictions and the annexation of Crimea. He's spent a career in Russian media for a western audience, working for such as the Moscow Times.

The New York Times' profile of Tony Hovater, "the Nazi Next Door", went down harsh, from the hard left to the normie middle. Mr Bershidsky offers a chaser:

Tony Hovater, the Ohio man whose profile in The New York Times caused much indignation last weekend, would have been in jail or at least under close police surveillance if he lived in Germany. In the U.S., Hovater is free to keep posting swastika-filled pictures on Facebook — but the writer and editors who published a piece about him that was bleakly neutral in tone face ferocious anger for "normalizing" the Nazi sympathizer. 

A certain part of U.S. society's desire to set rules has been frustrated by the election of Donald Trump as president — though, in fact, it was frustrated even earlier, by years of Republican majorities in Congress. That frustration is manifesting itself as vocal outrage campaigns on the same social networks that have enabled Trump supporters to organize and white supremacists to find like-minded people in other parts of the country. But rather than bring change, the outrage will deepen rifts.

Everyone who's anyone is angry the Nazi in the story is so nice and harmless--but they would be untroubled in Europe, where he would be thrown in jail for dissent no matter how decent. Bershidsky has the profile of the soulless international bug man, and this piece on its face is a common enough type: an author implicitly suggesting a radical solution in ostensible neutrality. But he goes so far I'm tempted to think it a disguised satire or something. If Bershidsky was alt right, a conspiracy theory of his working for the Deep State to make the movement look ridiculous.

After 1945, Germany chose to pass laws that made most radical right propaganda, as well as Nazi symbols, illegal. These laws are still in force. The Constitutional Protection Office watches people who tend to cut it too close. A tourist who throws a Nazi salute in jest can get arrested. It's not just swastikas that are banned — schools routinely forbid the wearing the clothes of certain brands that are associated with the neo-Nazi movement. Hate speech against groups of people, including races, is a crime. A vast majority of Germans approves of these rules. Those who don't — such as members of the far-right NPD party or the most radical elements within the milder Alternative for Germany party — keep quiet about it or run legal risks. Other countries without Germany's history of Nazi rule — such as Sweden and Switzerland — have also legislated against Nazi symbols.

The standard social-media outrage campaign that quickly brought the NYT to heel is nonetheless waged over media that allows "Trump supporters to organize" and frees "white supremacists" from their isolation. The implied argument here is that social media may have to be sacrificed to social justice. The Left isn't winning there, but, as the author realizes, the Left was winning before social media's democratic revolution messed up the program. Social media is a front and fight the powerful don't need because they run everything outside of it.

I expect nostalgia to kick in eventually, for those simpler times.

A citizen who doesn't break the law is protected by society as a whole, however immoral his actions. It isn't writing about Hovater that "normalizes" his behavior; it's the lack of legal consequences when he embraces Nazi symbolism. Trump's election, Hovater told New York Times writer Richard Fausset, helped drive that home. He now brushes off attacks with "Yeah, so?"

That's a mess of a paragraph. I'm not sure how Trump's election freed Hovater from thinking about criminal sanction. It's social sanction that has been lifted, slightly, for those with less to risk. What he seems to be getting at here is that social sanction doesn't cut it anymore, so criminal sanction may be our only recourse. That and not criminalizing a thing is "normalizing" it.

All the outrage campaigns against "normalizing" white nationalism and sexual harassment, two sins of which Trump has been accused, might seem like a call for legislative change. But there is no serious movement for German-style hate speech laws or Nazi symbol bans making their way through Congress. There are no proposals to match this year's German law that requires social networks to remove hate speech or face steep fines.

But there's no support for that here. The noise of these daily controversies is just that for the most part. So far the Left hasn't had to give up its own freedom of expression to silence opposition for the most part, having the socials under their control and applying unashamedly biased policies. But that only goes so far. The Left is losing the Battle of Social Media and may have to call a bomb strike on their own position.

They might not have had to do that if Hillary Clinton had won.

“Research shows that the dynamic that leads to outrage is not the same as that which effects change,” says Ronny Patz, a nongovernmental organization researcher at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University. “When such waves, such scandals come into focus, it helps when there’s already a process afoot that matches the outrage.” He means a legislative process, and he's right. In response to the criticism of Fausset's piece, The New York Times felt compelled to issue a deftly worded nonapology and to remove from the piece a link to a website selling swastika armbands. But it's a long way from this kind of damage control to real, lasting change.  

Such change would require going through the normal political process: drafting legislation, pushing it through Congress and getting it signed by the president, or overriding his veto. In the U.S., of course, the Supreme Court could also legislate outside this process, as it effectively did with gay marriage — something that wouldn't work in European countries, where referendums and parliamentary majorities have made the decision. 

We have here a chilling vision of what might have been. Hillary Clinton and her Supreme Court instituting controls on speech and media, with a punitive vengeance for our defiance in bringing forth Trump.

Places of our Own

The College Fix: 

‘For people of color by people of color’ 

The student newspaper at Evergreen State College has a section in its opinion pages described as “for people of color by people of color.”
“This should be a place where we can be us without it being overshadowed by the dark cloud that is living under white supremacy and having to see things from a white perspective. This is why when we do cover these issues it will be in the context and from the perspective of POC and POC only,” according to the section’s editors as they reintroduced it to readers in September.
The anonymous column, known as “POC Talk,” debuted in the bi-weekly Cooper Point Journal last year and returned this fall to the newspaper’s pages following racial unrest that erupted at the public university this past spring.

“Dear White people, please take a step back, this isn’t brown-people-answer-white-people’s-questions-hour, we’re asking specifically for submissions from POC,” the section’s editors added in their September intro. “As being told no seems to be a difficult concept for some of y’all I await your emails about the Irish, how the term white fragility is mean (great example of white fragility) and how we need to view people through a color-blind lens (just lol). You will 100% not get a response!!!”\

Published in the Journal’s Letters Opinion section, POC Talk says it provides “no-holds-barred commentary on local happenings.” In the inaugural POC Talk column, it was suggested that a subject touched on in the column could possibly include “how do I rid myself of white-dread [sic] roommate’s numerous micro-agressions.” Topics the column has discussed include student activism, self care, the local comedy scene as well as the turmoil that upended the college after students in May accused a white biology professor, Bret Weinstein, and the university of perpetuating racism. 

The Cooper Point Journal did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the column.

This is the same Evergreen College that was being patrolled by a band of lesbians led by a black alpha trannie, all armed with baseball bats, after having shut the school down over some minor offense to their collective pride. Say what you will about the Left, it has the most colorful riff raff. Rightwingers are just embarrassing in comparison.

These guys remind me of Orson Welles' kinky Tijuana street gang in A Touch of Evil. That group featured fifties rock and rollers, a bull dyke and a middle-aged tio with a bad toupee. There is a musical in l'affaire Weinstein if only we can find some gays with both the inclination and willingness to strike this close to their own home.



But home is the thing. Are the kids of color and woe entirely full of it when they lament their status and experience at American universities?

If you leave out the Theory, if you apply the working assumption that rationalization of personal interests is being expressed, however clumsily, by largely self-deluded, immature and mostly unintelligent people who are nonetheless struggling with genuine and powerful emotions--emotions continually aroused by indoctrination--you find something at least honest at the base of it all. And that is the feeling on the part of these kids that they don't "belong" in an academic environment, that they can't compete and that its demands are oppressive.

These things are all true. The university is, perhaps, a microcosm of the minority experience in America, with a particular intensity due to the "white" nature of the university--a white invention. There are two ways minority students can feel alienated from this environment, closely related: they are either incapable scholastically because of affirmative action, or the totality of the environment is oppressive and foreign. As oppressive and foreign as the 'hood would be to the sort of white scholar who thrives in this environment. Because it was literally made for him.

Of course that is changing, by a deliberate process punctuated by the occasional violent whim of students and faculty.

That's what so much of the racial strife is really about right now. People want to fashion the world to conform to their personal and group desires. Black people have made an awful lot of progress, using musical and athletic ability, to shape America in their image. Jews--unashamed of their ethnicity, unlike their WASP counterparts--determine the way we think, laugh and, largely, act.

There is a difference. Jews don't feel the need to lobby for "safe spaces". They simply create them. One could say they're making of the West one giant safe space for the Jews. Blacks, proud as only they can be of their cultural influence, wage culture as ethnic warfare to great effect. But the same suite of stereotypical traits that make black culture seductive ensure blacks will never master the political or social realms to improve their position. But they have managed to change us. The average pozzed normie is a second-rate black person (or Jew) culturally. The first he accepts like a cuck, the second he isn't even aware of.

Sometimes I think a lot of this is payback. Someone like Philip Roth is perpetually offended by the foreign nature of his world. Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man transcended the black genre as a tale of the alienation of the man living in an alien and hostile culture. Now it's you're turn, Whitey (Goyim).

Having had the "racism" wrung out of us we can barely conceive the thought, much less the language, to consider the possibility that our world is increasingly ill-suited to the individual white because it isn't his. He laughs at crude black humor because everyone else does. He pretends to "get" thoroughly Jewish stories and themes. Life for him--us--is one long bad evening nodding along to the ramblings of a boor.

He isn't alone: no individual is suited to a society without a single ethnic and cultural core. Indeed, is there any "society" left in such a society?

The peace of mind of genetic and cultural affinity the minority member must seek in the minority community.

At least he has that. What do you have?