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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day – what ‘from the river to the sea’ actually means ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!’ chant the useful idiots at elite institutions and parades in the West. Who are these people? Atheists who support theocratic lunatics, democrats who endorse medieval tyrants, feminists who defend misogynists who parade with the desecrated corpses of women, gays who defend maniacs who would joyfully hang them or toss them off the roof of a tall building. They talk of a secular, democratic and socialist Palestine. As George Orwell observed: ‘One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.’ But the world has now seen what ‘from the river to the sea’ actually means. It is nothing less than a remake of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen.
– Walter E Block & Alan G Futerman, Wall Street Journal ($)
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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This enrages me even more than the rape and pillage of Israel. I could say what I really think but I’d be banned and probably end-up in jail.
This is an artifact of the entirely fallacious way we’ve gone about selecting, training, and educating our “elites” here in the West. From the moment they’re identified by “doing well on the tests”, they’re coddled and carefully isolated from reality. This leads to them developing a massive amount of what can only be termed “reality displacement” from the rarefied atmosphere they dwell in. They live inside the constructs of their own minds, more than they do the real world; cause and effect, consequence and accountability are alien to them.
It started with Benet and Wilson, here in the US. Benet came up with the tests, which even he acknowledged were of limited actual utility, and then the wannabe technocrats like Wilson used them to help create a class of what they expected to be nature’s aristocracy, the meritocrat. What they failed to comprehend is that if you want a meritocracy, then the people within it need to at least occasionally demonstrate some actual merit. Now and again, just to keep the con going…
Only a modern school-indoctrinated intellectual could talk themselves into believing that the side that kills civilians indiscriminately and rapes prisoners could be worth defending. The moral disconnect is right there; they’ve no actual experience of smelling burnt human flesh, nor do they grasp the reality of rape and slaughter. They’ve never had to clean up after criminals or sexual deviants, never seen the after-effects ringing down the decades of the victim’s lives. They don’t know; they don’t care. Not until reality slaps them hard in the face, personally.
These are the people we’ve put in charge, ennobled because they do well on the tests and in the increasingly disconnected classrooms of the Western world. They’re creatures of the ego, looking at the shadows on the walls of their internal caves and believing that those shadows are the reality, not the actual people making them. They can’t comprehend the fact that the things they imagine aren’t really real; if they should happen to run across mere intellectual evidence that they’re wrong, they ignore that evidence and march on, convinced of their rectitude and inability to err. They are perfect, you see, in their own minds. The fact that their perfection only exists there, and that we’ve encouraged them to believe this? Our own damn fault.
I don’t have a thing against scholarship and education; I honor actual intelligence. But, what I have to point out time and again is that what we’re calling “intelligent” and cultivating in our system, then elevating to power within it? That ain’t it. The Emperor ain’t wearing anything, anything at all.
When you have the people in “elite production facilities” like Harvard looking at what is going on in Israel today, and then taking the side of the Arab thugs and murderers? That’s a clear sign that our system isn’t working, and that fact is going to kill our civilization. If you lack the moral clarity and ability to see what is real, what is going on before your eyes? You’re worse than a fool, you’re one of today’s “intellectuals”.
Frankly, that’s coming to be a bit of an insult. I’d be offended were someone to tell me that I’m “one of them”, and I could easily be. I was on the track for it, but even forty or fifty years ago, you could see the rot setting in, the moral relativism and the inability to recognize reality when it ensues. As well, these creatures of the ego are completely unable to grasp cause and effect, incapable of working out likely consequences of their actions. Decriminalize “minor” offenses? Sounds good; let’s do it! It’s the right thing to do, the correct action!!!
Then, when the evidence is before you in the form of looted stores and massive criminality, the modern “intellectual” ignores the consequences of their actions, and doubles-down on them, like some idiot in a casino who’s sure that red just has to win, this time.
The biggest problem our civilization faces is that what Wilson and his ilk wrought isn’t working. The people they identified, indoctrinated, and then elevated to run it all aren’t actually capable people, nor are they moral ones. They’re intellectual giants, in academic terms, but in the real world, they’re functional morons and moral pygmies.
Actual examples abound: Consider, for example, Robert McNamara: A perfect example of the modern intellectual, elevated to successive positions of authority and power. Yet… The man’s name is a curse to those who worked for him, who dealt with the consequences of his actions. His ideas about putting the mentally deficient into the military in order to give them more “opportunity” led to some horrible consequences for all concerned, and while I question whether a bunch of those guys were really “stupid” because they didn’t “do well on the tests”, enough were actually what the can labeled them as, and never should have been inducted into the military. Doing so was a moral failure on many levels; it betrayed those supposed mental deficients by putting them in harm’s way when they were not equipped to deal with it, and it betrayed the men they were set beside as comrades, in that they not only had to deal with combat but with trying to cope with fellow soldiers who shouldn’t have even been there… And, McNamara still defended his ideas, decades after the consequences became clear.
Elite production. We’re doing it wrong. It don’ work, yo…
A good article from Allister Heath along the same lines in the Telegraph.
I subscribed to The Free Press 2 days before the slaughter. I have found their articles in the past week to be outstanding.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2023/10/12/england-australia-minute-silence-wembley-arch-israel-hamas/
Includes a photographic gallery of the “Wembley Arch” being lit up to mark tragedy and display solidarity in recent years. But not for Israel.
Mind you looking Wembley’s demography I think I can see, if obviously not agree with, where the moral cowards of the FA are coming from.
Kirk,
I cannot entirely agree with you here. A lot of those cheering for Hamas from their laptops are not “elites” in the sense you describe. They may be the product of “the elite’s” policies… What I see is a transference of a truly deranged form of “white guilt”. The Jews are “white” and the Arabs aren’t. BTW a lot of people do not see black and white in terms of colours** but in terms of a power structure. “Whitey” is always the baddy because they are percveived as being “in control”. Anybody else is allowed to do what the fuck they want and cannot be criticised because that would be “racist”. It is an absurd cultural shift. I have an idea here. Is freedom of expression a conserved quantity? It is tolerated to an extent but what is taboo shifts. OK, not a great idea because it certainly doesn’t really explain the “Drag Queens for Palestine” flags I’ve seen in Manchester. Yeah, try opening a gay bar in Gaza City. See how that turns out…
In a very real sense this raid by Hamas is like the looting in many US cities – just much worse. The likes of BLM are just Hamas-lite. Why are Hamas like they are. For decades now they give sweeties to their school kids whenever one of their numpties blows himself up in a Tel-Aviv kindergarten. Give BLM there a few years…
Do you remember many years ago, shortly after being released Nelson Mandela visited the USA and some newscaster reported him as being an “African American Leader”. Give Mandela his due he seemed bemused (he’d never even been to the USA and had spent 20-odd years in jail) but it is that sort of linguistic chicanery that leads to chicanery in thought and eventually sometimes horrific actions.
Kirk, basically, I think this is not just from the “elite”. It can self-start from the ground-up, from nowhere, like fashion. And yeah, for quite some time now the Palestinian “cause” has been fashionable.
*I really hate the way that word is used now. When I was a kid it meant the SAS and such-like…
**See Rachel Dolezal for this cranked to eleven.
A great piece of invective, very true and very pithy. Well spotted.
I think David Cole nailed this back in 2019
https://www.takimag.com/article/stop-with-the-golems-already/
@NickM,
Who do you believe drives “the culture”? Where do all these public figures in the media and politics come from? Where are they produced? Who selects them, and how?
This is a clear failure of our system, in that the people who’re now making their way into positions of power and authority are not, at all, sensible people. Case in point: Elon Musk. He’s not a product of the “elite production system”, and he is absolutely not typical of their sort. How many of the anointed elite could have done the things he’s done, and would they?
Look at NASA and the rest of the established aerospace industry; all fully staffed by vetted “expert authorities”, and how well have they done? Boeing doesn’t look likely to ever get their crap off the ground, let alone certified for man-rated space travel. Meanwhile… SpaceX? Hmm?
It’s the same across the board; everywhere we’ve implemented the “approved methodology” of test, educate, indoctrinate, promote to power…”, we’ve got failures galore.
System isn’t working, mostly because there’s no feedback into the production process for failure. By design; these creatures of the “meritocracy” go from failure to failure, never paying a price.
Who has been fired for anything? Anybody held accountable for 9/11? Jamie Gorelick, who could arguably be blamed for a bunch of things leading up to the FBI missing the conspiracy? She got put on the damn 9/11 Commission, where she no doubt shifted blame and concealed her actions from notice. You’ll note that nobody in the Commission ever questioned her presence on it…
It’s like that everywhere: Did we fire anyone for the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan? Did we fire any of those idiots at the EPA that managed to kill a few thousand miles of river in Colorado?
Nope. Not a bit of accountability, anywhere. Name me one figure fired over the lousy response to COVID, or the subterfuge over doing gain-of-function work in China? Anyone? Hell, they made Fauci a multi-millionaire.
Kirk,
I was arguing that not all of this comes from the top because it is now embedded in the ordinary folk. Otherwise I was generally agreeing with you.
Nick, I don’t know who or what sort of people you’re thinking of as “ordinary folk”, but everyone I know that I’d say were in that group are entirely appalled and disgusted by what has happened in Israel. None of them have the slightest empathy for the Arabs, to include some actual anti-Semites who are oddly protective of Israelis… “At least, they’re over there doing honest work in their own country, not being money men and lawyers over here…”
Which is a really odd way of looking at it, but… Peasant farmer types tend to empathize with other peasant farmers, no matter where they’re from.
The fish rots from the head down, and so too do cultures/civilizations. The average yeoman farmer of the Roman Republic wasn’t the problem that turned it all into Empire, that was the boni, the entitled elite like Crassus and Caesar. Same with us, only instead of world-conquering looting heroes, we get a bunch of effete little dorks bankrupting us running homeless programs and legal defense outfits for the indefensible criminal elements. Sad diminishment of things, I know… Probably why most men spend so much time thinking about Rome.
“Probably why most men spend so much time thinking about Rome.”
Absolutely spot-on. I was thinking of writing about that topic at some point.
People forget or ignore that this is Palestine, and is what any campaign for “Palestine free of Jewish control” means.
Please do. I was at a breakfast meetup a few weeks ago with nine other guys, and someone brought this up as a new meme. No one could figure out what it was about. No one had “thought about Rome” since . . . forever, really. Baffling.
Kirk,
I dunno where you live but here in the UK there is a lot of grass-roots support for Hamas and not just from muslims. It is not just the government. If I were to put up a “I stand with Israel” poster in my front window it would be bricked – at least. Of course some of this is just good old anti-semitism.
NickM, I’m in the US.
The UK, I can’t speak to. I’d suspect that at least a part of the reappearance of antisemitism among the Britons is probably at least partly due to them feeling that it’s OK, having seen the demonstration of it by the immigrant communities.
Then again, it’s a lot like the antisemitism I ran into from Eastern Europe… None of the people making anti-Jewish remarks could say exactly which Jew had touched them in the bad place, or even that they’d ever interacted with a Jew personally, in the first place; it was all stuff they’d just “picked up” from the surrounding culture. You would press them for details, specific examples of things that Jews had done, which they’d personally observed or experienced, and none of them could actually attest to having even met a Jew… It was all crap dating back generations, or hearsay.
Not at all convinced that is true, but I suppose it depends what you mean by “grass roots”
I just drove from a suburb into Minneapolis, Minnesota, and back. About 20 miles total.
Lost count of the Pali flags being carried in groups, being displayed in windows, on cars, etc. At least 50.
All in the same areas in which I routinely (and still) see BLM banners.
So, yes, it is grass-roots here at least, in Progressiveville.
(ETA: This is Minnesota. Most of the people holding these flags are white, not brown or black. Probably 25 flags just around the Dead Floyd Memorial Intersection alone.)
Perry, Kirk, bobby,
There is a lot of support because, maybe, there is a lot of enforced silence. I dunno how much of it is “real” or how much is people just being scared to say anything. Scared either of “hate speech” laws or the very real prospect of mob violence. Or “inciting” terrorism like Islamists need inciting. There is also a bizarre idea of “respect”. Even the King wanted to be “Defender of Faiths”. That sort of thing is a profound cognitive dissonance. A lot of the non-muslim support for Palestine comes from people who are ardently pro LGBTWTF+ causes. This doesn’t make any sense. Try opening a gay bar in Gaza. See what happens. Yet I have seen “Queers for Palestine” banners in Manchester. That is spectacular cognitive dissonance. I guess it comes from some demented hippy idea that we can all co-exist if we just accept differences and make compromises. Yeah, that might work with reasonable people. But people who go on an orgy of rape, pillage, sexual mutilation and killing at a MUSIC FESTIVAL FOR PEACE and gleefully record that on their phones are not reasonable people.
Or maybe it is because Palestinians are masters of victimology. They want to see dead Palestinian babies even more than dead Israeli ones. It serves their cause better. It is more exploitable.
Let’s face it. Israel now knows that the military wing of Hamas is one big Einsatzgruppe, just waiting to break out again.
Have you seen Hamas’ rule in Gaza? Well, that’s what “a Palestinian State” is. (Two state solution).That is what the whole world, including Biden and half the Israelis hope for.
“military wing of Hamas is one big Einsatzgruppe”… there is no such thing as “military wing”. Or Hammas. (Which won the las democratic elections in all of Arab Palestine in 2007.)
Just call them Arabs. Ok?
I want to tell about an incident that happened yesterday in Israel.
First some background. As you maybe know, there are two kinds of Arabs in Israel and Palestine. The first is “Israeli Arabs”. These are Arabs who stayed in Israel in 1948 (when Israel was established). They enjoy full Israeli citizenship, which includes political rights, welfare rights (social security, health services, etc.). Then there are “Palestinian” Arabs which live under the Palestinian authority and are not Israeli citizens. The Israeli Arabs are supposed to be loyal citizens.
One Israeli Arab, in an Israeli Arab town, was the owner of a bicycle shop. He donated 50 pairs of bicycles to the displaced Israelis, whose relatives were murdered, and whose villages were burned down near the Gaza border.
His Israeli Arab neighbors burned down his shop when they heard about it.