Steve Browne's columns

[SWBrowne]

The monsters among us
By Steve Browne

James Gordon Meek is a paragon among journalists: ABC news senior producer, senior counter-terrorism advisor to the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, winner or two Emmy awards, and the Foley Foundation World Press Freedom Award. And he is a monster.
Meek has pleaded guilty to child pornography charges in a plea deal after the FBI received a tip from Dropbox about images of the sexual abuse of children on his account.
But there’s more not referenced in the charges. Meek has evidently used social media to get minors to send him nudes and seems to have been trying for meetups.
And most disturbing, so disturbing I was at first inclined to dismiss it as sensationalism, he allegedly asked someone on a chat ap, “Have you ever raped a toddler girl? It’s amazing.”
Has he actually done this? He has spent time in Third World countries where the most perverted appetites can be indulged for a price.
Meek is facing charges which carry a mandatory minimum of five years, and potentially up to 40 years.
For those salivating at the thought of “prison justice” I hate to tell you but a friend, an investigator who has donated countless hours to child protection, tells me it’s a myth. Your status in prison is largely determined by how tough you are.
What’s terrifying about this is, Meek functioned in society without anybody suspecting he was a monster until he got careless with evidence.
We know monsters live among us. Sometimes we recognize them from a feeling there’s something “off” about them.
A Facebook friend told me he once had an encounter with someone who turned out to be a serial killer and knew within a minute he was somehow bent.
I once worked with a guy who murdered an old man who stopped to help him when his car broke down one night after he’d robbed a convenience store. No one at work was at all surprised.
On the other hand I once briefly met a fellow I immediately liked who I later found out was killed by his own daughter – and the Grand Jury no-billed her after learning he was a monster.
The Wichitaw BTK killer murdered 10 people over a period of 30 years and probably would have murdered many more but for his egotistical habit of taunting police and media by sending detailed descriptions of the crimes.
His wife and children are still dealing with the fact their loving husband and father was a monster.
We know ordinary people are capable of terrible things under stress. We know potentially decent human beings can be warped by their environment growing up. And those of us who study history know it’s normal for people to behave mostly decently towards people in their own tribe, but often badly towards outsiders.
And anyone capable of honest introspection knows we are all capable of self-justification when our self-interest is at stake.
But what are we to make of those whose motivation appears to be evil for its own sake? Who get nothing from their acts but the delight they experience from destroying the lives of the innocent and helpless?
Our therapeutic society is ill-equipped to deal with the concept of evil. We like to think of anti-social behavior as the result of a sickness of some kind. It’s a comforting idea because it lets us believe it’s within our control, that we can fix it.
But we can’t always fix it, and that’s terrifying.

 





 

[DougMacG]

Excellent work, as usual.

[Crafty_Dog]

Really glad to have you with us Steve.

[Crafty_Dog]

(Column)
Country boys and dwarves
By Steve Browne

“I got a shotgun a rifle and a four wheel drive and a country boy can survive!”
Are those the lyrics America is currently obsessing over in a song by Jason Aldean extoling the virtues of small towns?
Oops no, that’s Hank Williams Jr.’s hit single from 1982. So what’s the difference?
The difference is I’d actually heard of Hank Williams Jr. I became aware of Jason Aldean only after all the fol-de-rol about the music video of his song Try That in a Small Town. (The song itself was released in May.)
So as soon as I heard about the controversy I went right over to YouTube and played it.
Apparently so did a lot of other people because it’s currently at the top of the charts in spite of being banned on Country Music Television. Which is now experiencing a backlash from country singers standing in solidarity with Aldean and demanding their videos be removed from CMT.
Critics claim its message is racist and promotes vigilantism. Aldean protests it’s about how in small towns, "We all have each other's backs and we look out for each other."
The fact anyone can interpret, "Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk / carjack an old lady at a red light" as racist is kind of creepy, and frankly sounds pretty racist. Like somebody mentions crime and you automatically jump to the conclusion they’re talking about race?
On the other hand, "Well, try that in a small town / See how far you make it down the road / Around here we take care of our own” does sound like it approves of people taking the law into their own hands.
But if you want a song that is straight up about personal vengeance in a small town it’s hard to beat Martina McBride’s 1995 song Independence Day, about a battered woman who sets the house on fire, immolating herself and her husband.
And half a country and worlds away from the country music scene, Disney is getting very nervous about their live action remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It seems they’ve removed all but one of the dwarfs and replaced six of them with a highly diverse cast.
So striving to make a version promoting diversity and inclusion, Disney has excluded – and denied jobs, to the smallest minority in the acting community.
Uh, maybe I shouldn’t have phrased it that way…
Obviously this is all about “message” in entertainment, bringing to mind Samuel Goldwyn’s advice, “Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union.”
But messages have been in entertainment since the first storytellers sat by the fire and gathered the tribe around.
The Trojan Women was written and staged by Euripides a year after he participated in the massacre of the men of Melos during the Peloponesian War. It was translated to film in 1971, and widely interpreted as a commentary on the Vietnam war.
Obviously it stands well as entertainment with a timeless message about the horrors of war and the plight of the conquered.
I could cite a lot of excellent movies and songs with messages. So why is it some make your heart swell and your eyes tear up, and some just irritate the heck out of you?
I want to say it’s the difference between subtle and hitting you over the head with the message but The Trojan Women isn’t subtle at all, it reaches into your chest and rips your heart out.
Could it be about the coherence of the message itself? I wish I knew.
 

[Crafty_Dog]

He is a stone killer - and apparently irresistible to some ladies.
When conservatives go for commies
By Steve Browne

One of the most bizarre things to come out of the war in Ukraine is the emergence of conservative women who are “Rootin’ for Putin.”
No, I don’t mean the remnant of our home grown commies who miss the Soviet Union and proclaim, “That wasn’t REAL communism.”

And I don’t mean the naïve libertarians among us who lionize Edward Snowden for exposing the dirty deeds of the NSA and throw hissy fits when you point out he is by definition a Russian asset (and now a Russian citizen as well).

I don’t mean Old Right style isolationists who take the position we’ve got enough problems at home and don’t need to spend precious resources trying to set the world to rights.

And I certainly don’t mean the people who are rightly alarmed about playing nuclear brinksmanship with Russia.

Commies are actually simple to deal with. You just have to recognize this is a person who would murder you and your family in the event they were told it would serve the Cause and treat them as a potential, if presently unlikely threat.

Naïve libertarians are frustrating to deal with and like to accuse you of being a “Fed” when you point that out about Snowden. So what? You don’t have to deal with them and as a political force they’re of negligible importance anyway.

Right-wing isolationists, conservatives and more sensible libertarians, are another thing. They have well thought out objections to foreign entanglements that need to be considered. And we may very well have to default to something closer to their position in the future as our ability to project power lessens due to the sheer expense of it all.

No, I’m talking about middle-aged Christian ladies who think Putin is “a great and good man” in the words of one such.

There is a Russian propaganda apparatus that has operated in the United States for just over a century now. It would be naïve to think it went out of business in 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

You can see its footprints all over social media. People repeating boilerplate Russian talking points, and some who appear to be more directly plugged into the source.

But traditionally they have aimed their appeal at left-wing intellectuals. The kind who read The New York Times and think the country went off the rails when Adlai Stevenson didn’t become president.

Nowadays they seem to have pivoted rightwards to appeal to social conservatives by crafting the narrative Russia has wholesale rejected communism and returned to its Christian roots.

"I identify more with…Putin's Christian values than I do with Joe Biden's," said Lauren Witzke, 2020 Delaware GOP candidate for U.S. Senate.

In a word, horse pucky.

You don’t get as high as Putin in the KGB if you’re a believer and you don’t get there with clean hands.

Putin is a stone killer who likes to have dissident journalists and political opponents murdered in their living rooms to send a message you’re not safe anywhere. Something Putin fangirls seem to wave off with, “Oh everybody does that.”

But Patriarch Kiril of Moscow and all Rus, Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church supports Putin and endorses the war!

So Putin has a Patriarch in his pocket, what a surprise.

For some Putin seems to have the appeal of a charming bad boy, more masculine than any Western leader, skilled in Judo and Sambo, and smooth talking when he wants to be.

Ladies, just remind yourself how that worked out the last time you fell for that line.

[SWBrowne]

Are you awoke yet?
By Steve Browne

Oh dear, Dr. Suess has been cancelled! What shall we read to our children?

Well, not exactly. The Suess trust has removed a very few of the very large canon of children’s literature because they have caricatures of Chinese and Africans considered offensive.

Fact is, though some of the criticism is kind of odd, “Chinese kids eat with sticks” (they do), the illustrations of Africans with bones through their topknots are pretty cringe-worthy.

I’m old enough I used to see caricatures like this in Saturday morning cartoons. And I remember Popeye punching sneering buck-toothed Japanese sailors over the horizon in the re-cycled WWII-era cartoons.

My impression is that contemporary Japanese find these caricatures amusing rather than offensive, and if they do get woke we can always dig up the historical woodcut images 19th century Japanese artists made portraying Commodore Perry and his men as gross barbarians with huge noses.

But now Looney Tunes has consigned Pepe le Pew to the trash heap of history for behavior considered “rapey,” or as some say – French.
(I’m only half-joking. I grew up with French kids and I remember they simply assumed a woman who resisted their advances was just making a pro forma protest for modesty’s sake. And fairly often they were right.)
But the Pepe is more complicated than it seems. The female cat who was the object of his affections was repelled by his smell, and when he is doused with perfume the roles reverse and she starts chasing him.
She is obviously Odor-ist!

We might have seen this coming after the announcement that a musical number, “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” performed by Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams (Neptune’s Daughter, 1949) is not a light-hearted song of flirtation and seduction, but rape with the aid of drugs. (“Hey what’s in this drink?”)

But moving on. Al Jolson classics, not going to see him on classic movie channels anymore. Not in blackface at any rate.

And now that I think of it, there’s an old Bing Crosby movie “Dixie” (1943) which we’ve got to archive. It’s about the songwriter who composed the song Dixie. It has a scene where two actors have to invent blackface performance after blacking each other’s eyes in a fight. And though it’s set in the antebellum South it doesn’t have a word to say about the injustice of slavery.

OK, so we’ve had a lot of fun at the expense of the Social Justice Warriors and their crusade to remove all that is racist, sexist, whatever-ist from our culture. But now folks are getting irritated and are starting to get downright mad.

So what’s going on?

We have a history, and not all of it is pretty or in the best of taste. Otherwise good people held what we now consider objectionable attitudes and opinions.
Which leads to the question, are we going to hide that history? Put it in vaults you need special permission to enter? Erase it from the experience of our children and only let them learn about it in college?

Oh, that’s right. Safe spaces…

Well here’s what I think is happening. Colleges are turning out large numbers of people who assume they have the right to leadership roles in society.

Trouble is, there’s not enough of those roles to go around, creating what Russian-American author Peter Turchin calls “an overproduction of elites.”

As a result we have an overabundance of arrogant holier-than-thou busybodies looking for something, anything to justify telling you what attitudes to have, opinions to hold, and what to do with your time.

I think it could be just that simple.




 

[DougMacG]

Excerpt:

"Colleges are turning out large numbers of people who assume they have the right to leadership roles in society.

Trouble is, there’s not enough of those roles to go around, creating what Russian-American author Peter Turchin calls “an overproduction of elites.”

As a result we have an overabundance of arrogant holier-than-thou busybodies looking for something, anything to justify telling you what attitudes to have, opinions to hold, and what to do with your time."

(Doug) Grand slam home run!

Every college educated liberal can tell you the more "education" you have the more likely you are to be liberal.

I see that differently.  The more your life education comes from these institutions (instead of the real world), the more liberal you may tend to be.

Your topic also ties in with a discussion here on "coercive paternalism", the laws that follow the thinking that the elites know best.

I don't want to rule or be ruled, just live under a minimum  set of fair and justified rules - that apply to everyone.

[Crafty_Dog]

The Left

It’s not exactly news the political divide in our country is… pretty deep. And pretty acrimonious and growing more extreme. If you doubt that, try and imagine yourself only five years ago and ask yourself what you’d have thought if someone had told you one side would be fighting passionately for the right of parents to surgically mutilate their children – or worse, the power to take children away from one parent and give them to the other who wanted to mutilate them.

To some it seems like a dispute between two models of governance, and that’s at least partly correct. But though the left model is pretty well articulated: soul engineering, central control, top-down my-way-or-the-highway, the opposition on the right is not nearly as well defined.

Purely in terms of the oppositional dynamics what we have is a situation where the federal government has become so powerful to the point it has occurred to some that they must never let power change hands again, the danger the Founders feared.

And given no one is immune to the corrupting effects of power the question of which side is most dangerous. The answer is, the side which has been ascendant the longest of course. And today, that’s the Left. So…

What is the left?
-   That part of the political spectrum historically concerned with obtaining the support of the bottom half of society, ranging from the moderate left to full-on communism. (Note I said, “the side concerned with obtaining the support of” not “benefitting.”)
-   But like all social movements, the leadership is at the top end of society the aristocracy, either by birth or adoption. During revolutionary times it is comprised of ambitious middle classes, the so-called noveau riche and disaffected members of the upper class. (Stick a pin in that.)
-   The very bottom of society comprises: low-wage earners and the disabled,  but also the unemployable, the insane, and low-end criminals. Both victims of misfortune and those who’ve fallen to the bottom due to poor life choices. Leftists at the top of society cannot or will not recognize the difference.
-   The line that defines “bottom half” also runs through the middle class and high-wage working class. Whether the middle identify as left or right may be determined by whether they see government as either, 1) the guarantor they do not fall downwards, or 2) as an obstacle to working their way further upwards.
-   Today the left has lost the working class and now base themselves in a coalition of minorities – which they automatically characterize as part of the bottom half and lacking in “privilege” no matter how wealthy and influential they may be. Thus billionaires like Oprah can count themselves as unprivileged minorities with a straight face.
-   While rightists can generally describe the left accurately, leftists cannot describe the right and when attempting to describe right-wing views create a grotesque caricature at best. This has been confirmed by research, most notably in Moral Foundations theory.
-   While there is both a moderate left and a hard left as in every movement, the hard left is at present in control of the movement.
-   Note that EVERY movement has a tendency to become controlled by its most extreme elements. Because they are the ones ready to devote themselves heart and soul to the movement. The rest of us have lives. Passion is power.
-   Despite their professed concern for the poor and powerless they are elitist to the core and believe in rule by an enlightened ruling class rather than the rule of impartial laws.
-   They implicitly believe in the inferiority of minorities and the poor, believing them incapable of rising by their own efforts no matter what opportunities they are given.
-   The moderate left may be just as horrified by the crimes of communism as the right, but the difference is of degree, not basic principle. They are totalitarian by nature, by the very definition of the man who invented the term. “Tutto all'interno dello stato. Niente fuori dallo stato. Niente contro lo Stato”  “Everything within the state. Nothing outside the state. Nothing against the state.” – Benito Mussolini.
-   Though the Hard Left calls themselves “Progressives” they are anything but progressive, they revert to the oldest model of politics in history, the rule of the strong and (allegedly) wise.
-   They despise liberty, but feel compelled to pay lip service to it – for now.

The Leftist approach to what they call “social justice” is: hierarchical, top-down, one-size-fits-all, my-way-or-the-highway. When they see a problem their first instinct is not to approach it with private, voluntary means, but to pass laws and create new government offices.
-   Any suggestion that resources available to address social problems are finite and must be allocated intelligently is met with moral outrage.
-   Their default assumption is that ordinary people are helpless to support and take care of themselves without preferential legislation and massive subsidies. In time this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Leftist model of governance is failing catastrophically, due among other things to:
-   The increased complexity of government resulting from regulatory burdens that hamper production and growth.
-   The enlargement of government resulting in the withdrawal of more and more educated people from productive work in the private sector.
-   The diversion of wealth into patronage for supporters.
-   The chaos and waste of resources caused by attempts to “soul engineer” i.e. make people good according to their vision of the good via manipulation of language and censorship.
-   Attempts to increase upward social-economic mobility for some, which result in destroying the already established institutions that historically provided the means for the poor to rise. (See the history of City College of New York, “The Harvard of the Proletariat.”)
-   Ignoring human nature. Note defunding the police and the subsequent rise of crime in poorer neighborhoods.

They react to the failure of their model by doubling down on everything that causes it to fail and finding scapegoats to blame for the failure.

The left is utopian rather than pragmatic.

-   A lot of the injustice they see is just life.
-   The idea that “the perfect is the enemy of the good” and the corollary rule-of-thumb “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” are anathema to them. They favor change for the sake of change, confident it will always tend towards perfection -  as long as they direct it.
-   They are impatient with established rules and procedures and see them as institutionalized barriers to achieving The Good.
-   For them the end justifies the means. If the end is perfection, what wouldn’t be justified to achieve it?
-   For many years in many countries leftists have seen criminals as "primitive rebels" (as in the title of the book by Marxist historian Eric Hobsbaum) engaged in "social banditry."
-   Part of the utopian view is to see planning and purpose everywhere. So failure to achieve it is never due to bad decisions or even just bad luck, but of active villainy on someone’s part.
-   They are ferociously hostile towards religion. They seek to establish heaven on earth right now rather than in an afterlife or in the indefinite future.
-   Their ethics are strictly situational. They reject the notion of an action that is bad in and of itself rather than whether it serves their cause or not.
-   They maintain double standards for themselves and their opponents. Another word for which is “privilege,” the right to do that which is forbidden to others. And this is not hypocrisy! They see themselves as a separate and superior caste who must be judged by different standards than us peasants.
-   There is no end-point to their demands. They have no appreciation of diminishing marginal utility.
They do not argue for their position and against yours – they write the script for both sides of the argument, i.e. not against your position but what they say your position is. (Strawman.)
-   They do not appear to know what an argument is. (A set of propositions, one of which, the conclusion, is claimed to necessarily follow from the others.)
-   They rely on fallacies “the counterfeit of argument” to support their proposals, most often: Appeal to Pity and Ad Hominem.
-   They do not value free speech and the free play of ideas. Their reaction to any coherent contrary argument is to silence the arguer.
While claiming to be the “party of science” and to represent “the knowledge class” they believe and profess things directly contrary to what we know to be immutable scientific fact, such as their claim men can become women, get pregnant, etc.

They have to have enemies to excuse the failure of their model and rally their supporters with the strong social glue of grievance. Grievance which is fed by envy, “The only one of the seven deadly sins which brings the sinner no pleasure at all.”

-   The target of that grievance, the Enemy – is you. Anyone who doesn’t think like them. And we have arrived at a point at which why they think of you as the enemy is of no importance compared with the fact that they do.
-   They are not producing enough children to stay viable over generations, so they need yours to replenish their numbers via indoctrination. They have no respect for parental rights at all.
-   Moderate Democrats are in what amounts to an abusive relationship with the hard left. They will not let themselves see that the things that pass for normal on the hard left are nothing like normal, and are in fact quite insane.

The dilemma of the right, or the "non-left" in general.

-   They hate you, make no mistake about that. The level and kind of insult should make that plain to you. When they call you “Nazis” they are expressing a willingness to see you killed.
-   There is nothing you can say or do that will make them stop hating you. They need an enemy to hate to preserve the cohesion of their movement.
-   They say libertarian conservatives are racists, fascists, and Nazis. We know we are not.
-   They say conservatives are homophobes and this is more nuanced. There are those who don’t have anything against gays per se, but just don’t like them setting the agenda in education and entertainment. It feels too much like grooming.
-   They say conservatives want to return Black people to their status under (historically Democrat) Jim Crow. We know we want no such thing.
-   They say conservatives are transphobes. They’re more solid ground here, anyone who’ll volunteer to be castrated and surgically mutilated is pretty scary. And anyone who can talk kids into it is REALLY scary.

What all of this amounts to is othering conservatives, classical liberals, and moderate Democrats to the point they feel justified in assault, vandalism, and repression by means of organized rioting and politicized government agencies such as the DOJ and IRS.

It’s not going to get better in the foreseeable future.

Bottom line. To recapitulate they hate you. They can’t be persuaded not to hate you because they need someone to hate to give their movement cohesion.

If you belong to any of the groups they see as their client minorities, in essence their property, they hate you most of all and you are in the most danger from them.

You say, “Well I’ve got lots of friends who are leftists and I don’t feel they are dangerous to me.”

So do I, and I feel that way too about them. But – to quote Heinlein from his novel Methuselah’s Children. “I am not in danger from my neighbors and you are not in danger from yours, but I am in danger from your neighbors and you are in danger from mine.”

You need to make your plans and preparations accordingly.

Questions:

Q: What percentage of the Left is really Hard Left?
A: Don’t know for sure but some estimates have it that “Progressives” are around 14-16% of the voting age population.

Q: How dangerous are they really?
A: Every totalitarian movement coming to power needs a thug corps. We saw the summer of riots a few years ago which produced relatively few casualties but billions of dollars of property damage. We also saw their tactics evolving. We saw training maneuvers designed among other things to sort out the “tooth to tail ratio.” To find out who among their ranks can be street fighters, who can stand incarceration, etc.

Q: But aren’t they a decentralized movement with no central command structure?
A: In a word, bullshit. We saw a sophisticated logistical support and supply system involving busing rioters from outside. The fact we cannot identify their command hierarchy with certainty should worry you.

Q: How bad is it going to get?
A: No clue. The left power base is confined to major cities with dense populations. It might stay there and make the cities progressively more unlivable. It might become something like the Troubles in Ireland, or worse La Violencia in Columbia. (Look it up.) Or it could burn itself out in a hurry and leave a minor footnote in history. (Well it might!) It’s a big country and the bulk of it will possibly not even notice much. I’ve heard that from expats living in rural Chile during the late troubles.

Q: You talk about plans and preparations, what kind of plans and preparations do you mean?
A: Up to you and your own individual threat assessment. I myself plan to live out in the sticks where violence is unlikely to penetrate with adequate preparation for supply train interruptions while I watch the world burn – or smoke and fizzle as the case may be.

Q: Do you think it could become a civil war?
A: We’re already in what amounts to a cold civil war. Will it become hot and if so how hot? Dunno, and where would it be fought? It’s not like everybody is going to dress up in their cammies and tacticool gear and head out to the national parks to duke it out. (Although the idea of holmgang has some merit to it..) Although as unlikely as that sounds to anyone living amid the broad treeless fields of the Midwest farm belt, one might remember General Grivas and the Cypriot insurgency.

Q: Aren’t you just being alarmist? We’ve been through bad stuff before as a country and always got through it.
A: Yes we have, but I urge you to remember this irrefutable historical truth. All predictions of social collapse come true – eventually.


I will leave you with Steve's Four Rules of Power, distilled from observations of totalitarian movements contemporary and historical. Listen, remember, and see if this doesn’t explain a lot of otherwise crazy stuff.

Demonstrate your power over others by:
1) Making them constantly afraid of giving offense unintentionally.
2) Making them give up cherished customs, symbols, pastimes, relationships.
3) Making them pay lip service to ideas of breathtaking absurdity.
4) Making them do things that disgust and repel them.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.stephenwbrowne.com/2007/03/american-national-character-rocky-and-bullwinkle/?fbclid=IwAR0X7B4KPzfGLyd4PhjpfGFDUziZ84Oa4ZKJwxD8MA6kO9FwjfwDttmCSxk

[DougMacG]

https://www.stephenwbrowne.com/2007/03/american-national-character-rocky-and-bullwinkle/?fbclid=IwAR0X7B4KPzfGLyd4PhjpfGFDUziZ84Oa4ZKJwxD8MA6kO9FwjfwDttmCSxk

This is really good.  It must have been fun doing the research.  )

I never knew Rocky and Bullwinkle lived in Frostbite Falls Minnesota, and all the subtleties that made the show so clever.

Interesting point as another generation emerges: "Kids love word play, all children start to play with language soon after they begin to acquire it."

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.theatlasphere.com/columns/100712-browne-making-stories.php?fbclid=IwAR1-JV3KTJ8DP4iAe6RT0plOca1Mtc0S0DRwxpJkPYM1DlI5MU7Bu6uiFoo

[SWBrowne]

“I have a premonition that will not leave me: as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.”
-   Eric Hoffer

First of all, no I’m not Jewish. I suppose however that I’m a Zionist though I say that with some surprise as it never occurred to me to call myself such before now.

By Zionist I mean I support the right of Israel to exist, to have secure borders, to have the right to control immigration, to defend itself by all means recognized for any other state, and to retaliate against aggression by all means recognized for any other state.

Why? No seriously why? What business is it of mine?

Well for one, consider the alternative. The atrocities of Hamas are well known in sickening detail and cannot be denied because Hamas is documenting and boasting about them.

Still they are being denied, even justified by some of the vilest people one can imagine. That should be enough in and of itself.

Israel by contrast still attempts to minimize civilian casualties among a population that hates them. And one wonders why. They’re not going to affect public opinion that way.

It appears to have something to do with Jewish ethics. And here we come to an important reason.
Israel is part of Western Civilization, is in fact historically one of the twin roots of the West. The other being ancient Athens, with the emphasis on ancient.

Us anthropologists like to classify human organization in ascending levels according to how many people they can support: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states.

We tend to forget there’s a level above states – civilizations. A civilization is a group of nations with recognized commonalities of culture, law, etc. The definition gets vague around the edges but can often be practically defined as speakers of related language families.

Isolationists do not see a level above their country. A luxury only maintainable in big powerful states such as ours.

When we play the parlor game of “When did Western Civ begin?” it’s fun to argue, was it when the democratic party of Athens swore not to take revenge on the out of power oligarchs even for the murder of their families? Was it when the Romans put the Twelve Tablet of the law in the public forum for all to read?

Or was it when the Prophet Nathan told King David, “Thou art the man!”

One moral law for king and peasant alike, what a concept! One that is not shared by every culture, even today.

I believe Western Civ has evolved some basic assumptions that are worth keeping and worth spreading for the benefit of all mankind. Such as the rights of Man, equality under the law, the dignity and worth of the individual.

Our civilization is under attack, from without and within by an axis of enemies united for the sole purpose of opposing the West. Israel is one front in a multi-front attack on the West. I believe Ukraine is another, and I greatly fear the opening of another front, perhaps in Taiwan – or here.

But perhaps that’s a bit tin-foil hat conspiratorial for some of my readers. So here are some practical questions I like to ask.

Who is more likely to develop…?
-   A cure for cancer?
-   Significant life extension?
-   Clean cheap sources of energy?
-   Cheap practical desalination tech? (Oops, cross that one off. Already done.)

Seven million Israelis or 700 million Arab Islamists?

And that’s why I support Israel, for my own self-interest.