Huh? Huh?

Asia Times Online :: Snaking the Scotch:


Spengler, who is actually Reb David Goldman, begins his article with this ironic sentence:
Ethnocentrism is the snake in Christianity's garden. 

In this highly ethnocentric article, he then suggests a causal link between support for Israel (which he equates with pro-Jewish attitudes) and the prospering or demise of various Gentile groups.

I am finding the narcissism of some Jews as irritating as the gay variety, where everything is always about "us." Blacks are past masters at this game.

I am either differentiated or confused about Jews. The "typical aggregate impact", in terms of politics, is hugely leftward and therefore deeply unwelcome. I would take Israel over its surrounding sea of barbarous Arabs any day. And I know Jews as people, in family and out, who are quite decent human beings.

But for an obviously ethnocentric Jew, in an article about Israel, the ultimate Jewish ethnocentricity, to attack Christianity for ethnocentrism....a double Huh?

'via Blog this'

Smooth criminal

A 27 second video I made from a movie has been removed from my YouTube site for copyright infringement. And to get access to my account, I had to take a copyright law test! I am being a bad boy today.
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Role reversals

Along with the Phallic Females and Numinous Negroes who have long populated the fictional world that the Bien-Pensants want us to believe is both how things are and how they ought to be*, Precocious Brats are another character set which should be waaaaaay rolled back. This is the child --usually, though not always, a girl-- who is the family Alpha Dog, to whose mood swings, cartoon ideas and snappy rudeness the adults in the family defer. Or whose superior emotional insight puts the oldsters to shame. The "adults" appease, coddle, explain and justify. It's revolting.

Unlike the women and Blacks in these roles, who are far more rare in real life, the Precious Brat is common enough.
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A rightwing thinker recently wrote: "We set up entire social systems and ideologies at odds with our most basic instincts, and wonder why the world seems to have lost its mind."

Declining made personal

Aside from getting some very unpleasant financial news, on my way home from that meeting, a guy yelled at me from his car as I finished crossing the street, "Get a move on, grandpa!"

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Sunday nite TV

No Dexter for a while, so the quality is iffy.

High points in the past have been X-Files, then Six Feet Under and Sopranos, Rome, Deadwood and Carnivale, all terrific. I skipped Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Nihilism does nothing for me. (Especially the Larry David style. He's a symptom all by himself.) True Blood started out well but degenerated into a manic soap opera, as do most series who overstay their natural course. Speaking of blood, that's pretty well all Spartacus had going for it. Even the wall to wall muscle and testosterone couldn't save it.

Game of Thrones. The mediocrity continues along its gruesome way.
The Borgias. If you thought it couldn't get any worse, you were wrong.

On weeknights, Hannibal has its moments. Elementary is excellent.

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Hard to please

Ex Cathedra can be judgmental.

Pope Francis canonized new saints today: two nuns --zzzzzz-- and 800 men who were slaughtered by the invading Muslims in 1480 at Otranto, on the heel of Italy's boot. After sacking the town and murdering the upper classes and the bishop, they rounded up the men remaining alive and "invited" them to accept Islam. (This is the Muslim technical term. If the invitation is refused, you are fair game as a "disbeliever.") The men were led by the town shoemaker, who said they'd "rather die a thousand times than become Turks." They were beheaded or sawed in half, one by one. Their bones and shrine:

A more panoramic view here.

The Turks apparently dispute this, but then they deny the Armenian genocide. And the most popular Turkish film, Conquest 1453, presents a pro-Turk cartoon version of the end of the Christian Roman Empire. Self-criticism is hardly a Muslim virtue.

In his homily, and in the official document, we hear about the "Ottomans" as the perpetrators, but no direct mention of either the words Islam or Muslim. And the Pope said over 800 "people" died (persone). They were 800 men, not politically correct "people". Francis made a generic reference to Christians  suffering "violence" today.

He was much more effusive and detailed about the do-gooder nuns. That's apparently his thing.

Pussy.

More scattershots

Having taken a peek at a few Jungian sites this morning, I find that their utter embeddedness in the leftliberal worldview continues.

From the movies, why on earth Harry Potter likes Ginny Weasley is beyond me. She's a humorless prig. I have never once seen her laugh. She'll smile, but no laughing.

The smoky black ink effects in the movies --with the Death Eaters or with the memory fragments in the pensive--are really good.

I wish Richard Harris had lived to complete the Potter movies. With his gravitas, Dumbledore's lately revealed being gay would have felt different.

Beautiful light, sky, sun, breeze, trees in San Francisco on a May afternoon. What a nice planet.

Re-doing my therapy website, I find myself writing that, from the point of view of our post-feminist culture, while women may have problems, men are problems.

Simple things make good food: hard boiled eggs, garbanzo beans, black pepper, anchovies, olives, tuna, lemon juice and Caesar dressing.

And here it is, May, and I suddenly have a yen for mince pie.

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Oooooh, scary Right Wingers

Jason Richwine, Heritage immigration expert quits

Another one thrown under the bus for his realism.

You can see how dangerous the Right Wing in America is. Not.

"If you want to know who your real masters are, discover who it is that you are not allowed to criticize."

'via Blog this'

PS. My very liberal GayJewishNewYorker office mate, from whom I lease my therapy space, has reduced my rent. He joked that I could send the extra money to the Heritage Foundation. Not bloody likely.

Bumper Sticker Brains

Jonah Goldberg, agreeing with me. As does Thomas Sowell, about words like diversity.

Wow, a Jew and a Black agreed with Ex Cathedra. That must mean...that since both of them are straight males, I remain condemned as a homophobic misogynist.

Oh, well. Time for another cup of coffee.

(I mean, really. If you were told at age seven that your sins, yours, little man, were what caused the crucifixion of Christ, how can a few PC epithets throw you off course?)

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It's hard to be consistent

I have been known to hold opinions that, on the surface at least, seem incompatible. Well, it's part of the inductive lifestyle.

But I was struck once more today at the hugely contradictory attitudes liberals espouse about nature, or Nature. A not simple idea, to be sure. But.

Their worship of Gaia and natural ecosystems is, well, worship. The liberal attitude is nothing if not deeply religious when it comes to endangered owls or CO2 levels or the evil of plastic bags. Nature is a pre-existent and inviolable whole which requires reverent compliance and absolute respect. It is not at all uncommon to hear liberals speak of humanity as a virus destroying the planet and to fantasize wistfully of how our species' demise would return our mother Gaia and her other children to her natural and unregulated paradisiac state.

But when it comes to human nature, all bets are off. Let the social engineering begin. And any appeal to things like the structures and functions of the human body --especially as a binary sexual difference--as a clue to identity or purpose, well, that's just essentialist concretizing, totally lacking in either anthropological or socio-historical sophistication.

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