Philosophy Is The Love Of Wisdom, But What Is Love And What Is Wisdom?

PHILOSOPHY: BRAIN ROOTED IN SELF-INTERESTED GREATER SMARTS:

Love is fundamentally gearing the mind towards appreciating and helping others, fellow souls, infants, births of intelligence and consciousness, the species, life…. And wisdom also means the same, in the end, the promotion of life. Thus philosophy can be viewed as the square of love, and the square of intelligence. In practice, deep down inside, love and intelligence are pretty much the same: they promote life. And life is happiness! I point this out, because most Twentieth Century philosophies with great impact have been in denial (Heideggerism/Nazism), or unappreciative (existentialism/absurdism), or exploitative (capitalism/Marxism) of life… Thus most dominant philosophies of the Twentieth Century have been fundamentally anti-philosophical, because fundamentally antagonistic, or alien, to love and wisdom. 

Indeed, searching for wisdom started with bacteria searching for sweets, billions of years ago. That was the birth of intelligence; it took billions of years thereafter to evolve brains. Wisdom is thus about finding how nature works and finding strategies to make it work in a more self-serving way, at the cost of increased logical complexity fighting the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Wisdom searches for how to become smarter at promoting life.

This search for ever more elaborated strategies is engineered by ever more sophisticated mental networks. What wisdom is originally for in particular excludes at its roots philosophies like Heidegger’s or Nazism, which defined being and time with a count down to death: such ideologies don’t promote life, but its exact opposite, death. Bacteria’s earliest form of intelligence searched for sweets, not death. Actually it also searches to avoid death.

Similarly, when Nietzsche claimed intelligence is all about concentrating the will in loving fate, amor fati, the eternal return of the same, this suffering soul, half blind and soon to go insane, misses the point that intelligence appeared to find sweets, and improve life. Now, of course, Nietzsche had to embrace fate, considering his dreadful diseases. Otherwise he would have had to embrace opium (if he could afford it) and death. Amor fati is often a good strategy

Intelligence didn’t appear for more of the same, but better strategies of the similar drive to make life tastier. Life is not an eternal return of the same, but an evolution towards ever smarter self-sustainability, and ever increased complexity (as Lamarck pointed out in 1800 CE).

Bacteria never imagined themselves as little Sisyphuses, always doing the same thing for no improvement, and no enjoyment. More sugar was an improvement, a very sustainable improvement, as it could be repeated all the time, activating reward circuitry indefinitively. Camus didn’t need to order bacteria to be happy. Nor do bacteria need Camus to go away from poison.

The roots of wisdom are very pragmatic, and intelligence makes models of nature to outsmart it by creating newer and in a sense better nature. 

Wisdom’s roots may not be noble: it is smart to acknowledge this… but the towering heights of complexity and subtlety they sustain are. And as those complications blow in the winds of contingency they reach beyond themselves where no nature was there before.

California Western Monarchs, migrating butterflies, in love… and how much wisdom do you need to migrate?

Patrice Ayme

Putin A Tool? Double Machiavellianism Festering In Russia

Putin is a virus, and its vaccine is called Ukraine. To get rid of Putin, and foster democracy, one had to encourage him to attack Ukraine. What better to fight a tyrant than full war with a powerful democracy? Nothing else would do, the tyrant was too well installed, with towering popularity. So his internal enemies had to convince Putin that invading Ukraine would be a walk in the park, shooting off Nazis. 

How that popularity was won is itself a measure of how evil Russia became. In 2014, Putin wanted to invade Crimea. His two most powerful collaborators, Shoigu, minister of defense and a personal friend, a native of poor and isolated Tuva, in the mountains of Siberia, and Gerasimov, the commander in chief of the Russian army, apostle of hybrid warfare  

Who had an interest in getting rid of Putin? Putin’s kleptocracy has stolen Russia, to invest the stolen wealth in the West, overpaying while purchasing Western oligarchs’ properties, making all oligarchs happier. What was stolen by Russian oligarchs made Western oligarchs even wealthier..So Western oligarchs loved Putin and its wealth-transferring-to-the West oligarchy. Now, of course, the Western oligarchs are frustrated as Putin’s unraveling is threatening to dismantle the entire exploitation contraption.

Distinct lack of enthusiasm in some French and German circles of power has everything to do with the fact Franco-Germania organized much of its economy around Putin. It was not just getting gas from Putin; the French Total oil giant provided the Putin Reich with vast and ultra expensive installations similar to those provided to Qatar, to put on méthanier boats liquefied Siberian gas heading to Asia. These boats are some of the largest in the world, and pack several times the explosive power of Hiroshima.  

European ecologists and the likes of Merkel, were financed, or controlled, from the Kremlin. At least so say retired heads of French secret services. So the ecologists were anti-nuclear, and even anti-Western European gas (France has one century of gas reserves; so the ecologists, pushed by the Kremlin, had France pass a law outlawing the extraction of gas… in France. If the gas was provided by the Kremlin tyrant, that was fine).

So the only remaining hypothesis is that elements inside the FSB misled Putin about Ukraine, in the hope of having Putin destroy his regime there. Instead, it’s Russia which may end up destroyed. 

This is not the sole mechanism at work there. In the 1990s, Western advisers (Harvard, etc.) persuaded Yeltsin that Russia needed to be led to prosperity by an oligarchy. As the oligarchy was bound to steal Russia and make it stupid, the very origin of the Putin regime may not lay just in Alexander Nevsky’s sick ideology of ruling inside with brutality by allying oneself with evil (the Mongol invaders). 

The war may look insane, and it is. But it developed because of deep manipulations from very dark minds… who may have hoped that this sort of madness would develop as the intricate mess it has become… precisely because it could be exploited. The FSB may have incited Putin to commit a terrible mistake, so that he could be brought down. And the West certainly long collaborated with Putin, inciting him subtly to become ever worse. 

Now the ongoing existence of the largest land empire, by far, is being called into question, and democracies themselves can’t let Putin win. Anything at all. 

If Putin is a tool, does that mean that there are even more evil forces out there? Indeed! The cause of an evil is, in a sense always a greater evil. And causes work best when unexplained, undetected, and unexpected. This is why it is important to understand Machiavellianism, the art of making people do something while believing that there are doing the opposite. 

Patrice Ayme

P/S 1: The first part of the essay above was censored by the Wall Street Journal, which delayed its publication by several days (the italic part was allowed in another comment; in the italic I carefully avoided the notion of Western oligarchy, which may be a banning offense according to the obsequious lemmings). So the WSJ’s readers were made blissfully unaware that:

1. Putin could have been manipulated into invading Ukraine
2. That the plutocratic universities (Harvard, etc.) and other influencers (US and European politicians) were instrumental and perhaps primordial in setting up the Russian mess which later brought up Putin. The same sort of enabling-disabling, bait and switch was used prior and during WWI and WWII. The US power circles are very good at it, their institutions, traditions and mentalities having trained with American natives for centuries. For example, claim that “black lives matter” while making sure that, under the pretext of freedom, blacks live in terrible conditions (bad education, bad housing, bad health care, bad food, sugar billionaires being subsidized, etc…) All this the very dark deep state organizes with mental terror….Don’t say this, don’t think that, etc. And that is enforced by the media, an example being the preceding comment which the WSJ banned. That was after a very interesting article on:

Putin, Isolated and Distrustful, Leans on Handful of Hard-Line Advisers

Russia’s president built a power structure designed to deliver him the information he wants to hear, feeding into his miscalculations on the Ukraine war

MOSCOW—Russian troops were losing the battle for Lyman, a small city in eastern Ukraine, in late September when a call came in for the commanding officer on the front line, over an encrypted line from Moscow.

It was Vladimir Putin, ordering them not to retreat.

The president seemed to have limited understanding of the reality of the situation, according to current and former U.S. and European officials and a former senior Russian intelligence officer briefed on the exchange. His poorly equipped front-line troops were being encircled by a Ukrainian advance backed by artillery provided by the West. Mr. Putin rebuffed his own generals’ commands and told the troops to hold firm, they said.

The Ukrainian ambushes continued, and on Oct. 1, Russian soldiers hastily withdrew, leaving behind dozens of dead bodies and supplies of artillery to restock Ukraine’s weapons caches. 

Mr. Putin expected the war in Ukraine to be swift, popular and triumphant. For months, he struggled to come to terms with what instead became a costly quagmire, and found himself isolated and distrustful at the pinnacle of a power structure designed to reinforce his belligerent worldview and shelter him from discouraging news…

And now for one of Putin’s war planes going down in flames: a SU 25…

PS 2: Tyrant Vladimir Putin also indirectly attacked Russian oligarchs on December 22, 2022, along lines similar to those I drew above (and in many of my essays prior). Putin stated that Russians who drain Russia’s money from abroad and do not have a connection with Russia “represent a danger” to Russia.Putin claimed that while the majority of Russian businessmen are patriots, there are some who are not. Putin had nationalized many non-compliant oligarchs from a similat logic 20 years ago.

Nothing To Do, But Think To You: Ordinary Thinking Is Criminal In Extraordinary Times

On Silly Current Events: Breaking the bridge, honoring the ordinary…

A French woman named Annie Ernaux got the Nobel in literature, the 16th French writer to be honored that way. Meanwhile the Putin bridge between Putin occupied Crimea and the North Caucasus was partly destroyed by the Ukrainians. 

Ernaux wrote autobiographical books.  “Shame” is a memoir by Annie Ernaux beginning in 1952, when Ms. Ernaux was 12 years old, growing up above her parents’ cafe in Normandy. “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon,” we learn in Ms. Ernaux’s first sentence. The mom got threatened with a scythe. Weapons are best, when trying to kill people. Except I don’t really believe her father really tried to kill her mother. Tried to scare her, and injure her, at least psychologically, yes. Real murder attempt? No, not really. Yes, I didn’t read the book, I have better things to read than the nobelizable French novelists, qui se prennent la tête, comme on dit, in their degenerated Franco-French frankly decaying two cents psychology.. 

Killing, of course, is a major activity, which writes not just history, but reality. So it’s quite important to think about it, and I don’t want to demean killing at all, and I thank Vlad the Mad for reminding us all of this.. 

It is of course crucial to analyze why people want to kill people. Analyzing why Putin wants to kill Ukraine and grab its warm corpse is capital. 

However, few French people kill French people, outside of war. So Ernaux’s little fable about her horrendous childhood at the hands of he rbig bad dad is unlikely as an event really charged with meaning. She made it up… As she made up many facts about Israel and Palestine… (See below.)

When did the French kill a lot of French? World War Two! First collaborators killed many, dozens of thousands of French people, in the name of Nazism. Then, in 1940-1945, many French people were killed by other French people (several dozen of thousands collaborators of the Nazis were executed in 1944-45). I would even say, rightly so.

Now some anarchists and nihilists would argue that one should not forget the millions of French people who died on the battlefield in 1914-1945… ordered there by the state. Well, yes and no: civilization was under attack by fascism, and if people in the French Republic had not fought back, they would have been killed anyway. The example is French Indochina: the Japanese forces (supposedly liberating according to Japanese propaganda) killed two million there. Similarly in Ukraine Stalin killed up to six million defenseless civilians in the 1930s, just because he didn’t like Ukrainian peasants… The Nazis did pretty much the same in occupied Poland, kill millions of civilians.   

In normal times normal French people do not try to kill normal French people and very few succeed to do so…. outside of Ms Annie Ernaux’s ravaged and ravaging mind… Autofiction is an autoimmune disease of French litterature… I have a problem with a book the main theme of which is that.

It is the momentary, violent aberration — the brief glimpse of a scythe in the hand of the father, her mother’s sobs — and not years of ordinariness that leaves its mark, and Ernaux ponders for years afterward. Yes, indeed, events mark. And yes, indeed, it was not really the attempted killing but the shame it left behind. And yes, because she is so ordinary, Ernaux received a scar for life from something that she interpreted as an attempt on her mother’s life… And probably was not. At least, so she claims.

But is all that important, and not just much ado about nothing? Ernauz smells bad as a honest thinker. She glorifies in writing at age 22:”Je vengerais ma race!” . (I will avenge my race!) So she glorifies in that emotion, but never explains what she was after. But then she starts hating for real: same emotion, same love and admiration for that emotion… “I will avenge my race!” is, of course, Hitler’s fundamental emotion, what brought motion out of Hitler (since Hitler didn’t really know where he came from, his maternal grandfather being potentially a Jewish homeowner, Hitler had to make up a race for himself… Apparently what ms Ernaux also does… Tout pour faire un monde, tout pour plaire au monde…) 

Let me be very clear: through countless actions, Ernaux seems to hate Jews and Israelis. There is the race thing in common with Hitler. Worthy of a Nobel?

***

In my early life, major events, strong experiences were rather routine. Beautiful landscapes, unique settings, just in my first six years… “Auto-bateau” (Auto-Ship) to designate African ferries. 

I found myself, or my loved ones in life threatening situations, playing with yellow scorpions in the Sahara, while two years old, always in the Sahara nearly dying of heat stroke (having been left in a car), and then in a plane which caught fire in the African sky (just on one side; emergency landing). Later my sister nearly died of pneumonia, she was put under oxygen. And in Ivory Coast sudden towering waves scared me. OK, that was just in the first five years.

However, throughout I knew only love as a child, and everybody loved everybody. Even the natives in the desert were very friendly, and had deep positive multi-year relations with some, including an Algerian named Belaid. One complete unknown saved my mom and me from his big camel in the middle of the desert, by providing us with directions and water.

Now the same area of central Sahara is ravaged by rabid Islamists (they may even have good reasons to be rabid!)   

Why one would give the Nobel for such fiction or then such familial sociopathy, is not a mystery: “higher” French intellectual circles have long been fascinated by deviancy and madness: they believe only that way can one reach new understanding. Outrageous and actually criminal pedophile authors were feted by presidents, billionaire plutocrats cutting down the primordial African forest got special government financial rescues, from presidents, socialist or liberal, because  they wrote…

***

Not that sulfurous life shall be condemned. Just the opposite. Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a MD who loved the Nazis because they hated the Jews, and also because Nazis had a strong anarchist drift… It amused him. Céline is most famous, and one must admit he had an eventful life, and knew how to write originally. Combat against, then wounded by German fascism at an early age “made him hate anything bellicose” (so he wrote… not really true). Then Céline experienced colonial Africa in Cameroon… Not the best place for calm and tranquility, even by African standards… Céline was condemned for collaboration with the Nazis… then that was rescinded, because of his wounded veteran status. 

Many other famous French authors were deranged: Foucault was hunting down a lover with a knife, througout Paris as a young man from prestigious Ulm… later he was to become an exemplary humanist, posing just in the right way. But then others were remarkable and ended tortured and assassinated by the Nazis… In general, the Nazis targeted for extermination intellectuals of the real sort. In particular French and Polish intellectuals, and many Nazis got way with it. 

***

Ernaux is the pioneer of France’s “autofiction” genre, which gives narrative form to real-life experience…. Generally it has to do with torrid sex. Hence the admiration of the French intellectual class, in its declining degeneracy, for rapists. The most famous French talking head, PPDA, was a notorious rapist. Finally pursued after his retirement, he got away with the crimes being too old for prosecution. However, the French Supreme Court just realized this was not quite right. The point is, the rapist was admired, projecting his raping values, for the entire French society to admire… and thus emulate… 

Statutes of limitation, not prosecuting if the alleged criminal acts are too old, should not apply to  mentalities. The state should prosecute in famous cases. 

Many people have written to me about “the Nazis in Ukraine, led by chief Nazi Z”. When one asks those people where they get their data from it turns out its is from paid Kremlin propagandists… many of them are youngish women… Eva Bartlett is an example. She writes pieces for Putin tyranny-controlled RT’s website. She should be arrested, tried as a nuclear fascist agent. Such Nuclear Nazi agents should be disconnected to protect naive imbeciles full of resentment, lovers of war crimes, to be sabotaging the moral effort! 

Typical of the vulgar, who are addicted and incapable of anything but decontextualized thinking, Annie Ernaux embraces the simplistic approach to Israel. In 2018, she signed a letter alongside about 80 other posers expressing outrage at the holding of the Israel France cross-cultural season by the Israeli and French governments. The letter claimed that the season helped to “whitewash” the image of the State of Israel.

“It is a moral obligation for any person of conscience to refuse the normalization of relations with the State of Israel,” read the letter.

She called for the release of Georges Abdallah, who co-founded the Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Factions in 1980 and was sentenced to life in prison for the 1982 assassinations of US military attaché Lt.-Col. Charles R. Ray and Israeli diplomat Yaakov Bar-Simantov. She describes Ray and Bar-Simantov as “active Mossad and CIA agents” and Abdallah as “committed to the Palestinian people and against colonization.”

 

Ernaux called Israel an “apartheid state“, while ignoring Palestinian violence

In 2021 Ernaux signed a letter titled “A letter against apartheid” which listed attacks on Arabs and Palestinians and Israeli strikes on Gaza, without mentioning any of the riots led by some Israeli Arabs or the over 4,000 rockets fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel in the preceding days.

 

“To frame this as a war between two equal sides is false and misleading. Israel is the colonizing power. Palestine is colonized. This is not a conflict: this is apartheid,” read the letter Ernaux signed. Like shopping and sex, ordinary thinking can’t rise to extraordinary circumstances. The fact is, the legal ancestor of today’s legal system, Rome, unlawfully threw the Jews out of Israel. Yes, that was a while ago, so it requires subtle thinking and open communications. By comparison, the Czar conned the Ukraininas in 1654 CE, and then a century later, conquered the remaining free part of Ukraine. Ukraine then endured abuse such as the interdiction of Ukrainian language, culture and self rule…

 

So what does Ernaux write about? Ordinariness…Autofiction…

Ordinariness, however well described, is still ordinary. Sex and shopping go only that far. 

Autofiction is no automobile.It’s Putin, master of the art.

 

Instead of more ordinariness, autofiction, sex and shopping, what we need are people writing about civilization, its topmost values and how to defend them.

 

These are the most extraordinary times: a sixth mass extinction, humanity colonizing space! Extraordinary opportunities, extraordinary dangers. Yes, we need to understand ourselves better, and surely Ms. Ernaux helps that way. It was known, before the 2022 Nobel got given, that it would be given to a French writer. The Swedish Nobel Commitee had decided we needed a whiff of French je ne sais quoi. Parisians desperately want to achieve some sort of mental superiority, so maybe they get it trying so hard in their beautiful, yet somewhat hellish city: nothing to do, but think to you. And yes, there are no cosmic French thinkers these days (except perhaps one), so Ernaux is as good as it gets…

But that last point is an admission of cosmic failure.

Wake up, noble clowns! 

Patrice Ayme

***

P/S: The Peace Prize was attributed to an Ukrainian organization (very good), but also to a Bielorussian (in prison) and “Memorial” a Russian organization banned by Putin. Some high political authorities in Ukraine didn’t agree with rewarding anyone Russian, and there is indeed a propaganda risk 

 

Putin’s Crimea invasion bridge broken by social nationalist freedom loving Ukrainians, 10/8/2022…

IF YOU WANT PEACE, PREPARE FOR NUCLEAR WAR

SI VIS PACEM, PARA BELLUM NUCLEI

Any concession to tyrant Putin will make his bellicose drive worse. Appeasement will only tell him that he has got to be right, he is winning, and he is on the right path. We have seen that movie with Hitler. The drama with the Sudetenland in 1938 has much in common with the drama in the Donbas, including a dictator screaming that minorities were in mortal danger, and sham referenda: Hitler had been elected in part on the promise of protecting what he claimed were abused German minorities. 

Thus Pangermanism wanted to annex the Sudeten to Germany. However, Hitler was not so ridiculous as to pretend that the Sudeten inhabitants were victims of a genocide at the hands of the Czechs. He proposed an annexation referendum, overseen by the German army, though. The Czeks refused, France mobilized, so Hitler proposed a peace conference, at Munich, during which a piece of Czechoslovakia was given to Germany.

Putin’s discourse about a (completely imaginary) “genocide”in the Donbas is worse than Hitler’s raging statements about the Sudeten. A first attempt to propose a referendum of the Sudeten about annexation overseen by the German army was blocked by a war threat from France [1].   Hitler was given land at Munich in 1938… To appease him. 

That appeasement was not just a weakness, it gained time, the way France and the UK looked at it at the time (they were wrong). France and the UK did not have the USA with them, and Britain had basically no army (same as in 1914). The US was neither diplomatically, nor economically, nor politically or militarily with its parents, France and Britain. Roosevelt had named pro-fascist ambassadors to the UK and Germany, and hordes of US plutocrats were making the fascists regimes prosperous, well invested and fueled [2]. 

For many years, the New York Times, and other US media, did their best to ignore Hitler’s exactions, even while the German dictator was notoriously killing millions of minorities, and occupied democracies.

While Hitler was momentarily appeased, Britain was frantically equipping itself with a huge state of the art air force. France and the UK felt that time worked in their favor, militarily, because of their great empires.

Hitler invaded Austria in March, a day before a planned referendum on annexation by Germany (similar to Putin and his sham referenda).  After weakening Czechoslovakia militarily, grabbing its defense lines, Hitler invaded the rest. When getting ready to invade Poland, Hitler allied himself with the Kremlin (to add to his alliances with Italy, Japan and Spain). This time, France and the UK declared war.

The NYT, and pseudo-progressives paid by Putin, are at it again with the Kremlin nuclear tyrant: “If [giving part of Ukraine to Putin] happens, a territorial settlement will be reached and the global rules-based international order will be re-established”… bleats hopefully Mr. Brooks (who censored my comment contradicting his wish to give much of Ukraine to Putin) 

Appeasing a dictator who, because of his dreams of glory, threatened to extinguish humanity, is criminal nonsense. Putin is obsessed with taking Ukraine. Any negotiated settlement will just give him time to re-arm and return with greater force and greater threats. Feed Putin, like a bear, or a tiger, he will come back. The only way to end the threat is to eliminate Putin. If not eliminated, he will come back. 

***

Hitler had to keep on attacking, lest the German army and Volk turned against him: too many things, including democracy and the economy, had turned sour in Germany (same with Russia today). The exact parallel is true in Russia today: war powers protect a dictator. Given any piece of Ukraine, Putin will come for more, including the Baltic and Poland

The New York Times did its best to ignore Hitler’s exactions, even while the German dictator was notoriously killing millions of minorities, and occupied democracies.

The NYT is at it again with the nuclear tyrant; the NYT, and many other media, propose appeasement with Putin: “If [giving part of Ukraine to Putin] happens, a territorial settlement will be reached and the global rules-based international order will be re-established.” This is criminal nonsense. It’s akin to appeasing a rapist who threatened to kill the victim and onlookers, by proposing to him to rape the victim just a bit, to reestablish order. Putin is obsessed with taking Ukraine. Any negotiated settlement will just give him time to re-arm and return with greater force and greater threats. He will come back. The only way to end the threat is to eliminate Putin. If not eliminated, he will come back. 

***

We have an extremely similar situation now with what happened with Hilter and his fascist allies in 1937-1940. However, many have learned this history, and thus opted to act differently. This is why 27 European countries, including traditional neutrals such as Sweden and Switzerland are sending weapons to Ukraine. (Sweden and Switzerland helped Nazism for many years, often crucially), France is not taking orders from Biden, and yet, has switched to war production of many of its most sophisticated weapons, after sending 25% of its mobile high precision CAESAR guns to Ukraine.

The easiest way out of Nazism occurred in 1937 when the German High Command, led by General Beck, prepared a coup against Hitler. Stupidly, they searched for help in the Uk and US. The German army asked the US and UK to stand officially against Hitler (thus supporting France, Hitler’s dedicated enemy). The German army leaders would then make a coup, arguing to the German Volk that Hitler was an existential threat to Germany. 

 The best course for peace is then, as horrible as it may sound, to prepare for nuclear war. There is simply no alternative. Any concession to Putin is a concession to a group of criminals who threatened this week to “use strategic nuclear weapons against the West for their occupation of Ukraine“.

If the Russian army realizes Russia faces annihilation, it will make a coup.

If the West is ready to fight a nuclear exchange, the Russian army will find itself in the situation that German generals naively looked for in 1937: having a good excuse for a coup. So the West has to get ready, and has to scramble into world war mass production, especially of anti-missile systems [3] (which do exist; but recently the US had just one, around Washington, while France had eleven, and sent one to Romania to protect a major Franco-American base there…) 

Some will object that nuclear war is unthinkable, that I am thinking the unthinkable. But so did Putin, and for more than a decade. The strategy of going nuclear in a conventional conflict is called by Putin’s valets: “escalate to de-escalate“. There is little doubt that nuclear weapons should be unlawful. Only a few should be left, under UN supervision, in case a comet comes our way, or some rogue criminal organization develops weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, etc.), and needs to be taken out. An example of such a gang of criminals is the Putin gang. The UN has established that war crimes were committed, including rape, torture and execution of children as young as 4. Putin’s lovers, of which there are many throughout the West, have also to answer these crimes, which they approve of, by denying they happened, similarly to the most fanatical Nazis in 1945.

Their reasons are vile: we know Putin spent at least half a billion on infliuencers, worldwide. Those influencers using Kremlin propaganda should be jailed and prosecuted (in this order: this is the greatest war, we have to switch to military law and traitors to civilizations should be soped, that is, arrested.)

So we have a criminal gang, armed to the teeth with the world’s biggest arsenal of nukes. But nukes cost a lot of money to keep functioning as anticipated, and we have to rely upon the hope that there a re semi-decent individuals in the Russian military whose sadomasochism is not so high that they will try to destroy civilization. Meanwhile, scrambling for anti-missile systems, potential evacuation of cities, and reactivation of old Western nukes should be the order of the day.

As the old French saying has it:

“A la guerre, comme à la guerre”…

In war, as in war. 

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] The Czechs announced on 28 September 1938 that they rejected Hitler’s proposal of an annexation referendum (the  Godesberg Memorandum). France ordered the mobilization of 600,000 men. The Royal Navy was also mobilized the same day.

Hitler feared a war against Czechoslovakia, Britain and France. He agreed to Chamberlain’s proposal for a further meeting the next day, now at Munich, between four heads of government, Chamberlain for Britain, Hitler for Germany, Prime Minister Daladier for France and Mussolini for Italy, with no Czech (!!!) or Soviet participation. On 1 October, a pact was signed which provided for possession of the Sudeten Province to be transferred to Germany, with Britain and France guaranteeing the new borders of Czechoslovakia. On 1 October, German troops marched into the Sudetenland, which was immediately incorporated into Germany. Some 115,000 Sudeten Czechs and 30,000 Sudeten Germans, fled to what was left of Czechoslovakia. By 1 March 1939, the number of refugees,  including Social Democrats, Communists and Jews, was reported by the Institute for Refugee Assistance to stand at 150,000

***

[2]… to replace his friend the historian Dodd who thought war against Hitler was necessary. Throughout the war, US president FDR looked more interested in weakening France and Britain, and instrumentalized various fascists, Hirohito, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco and Stalin to do so. Warning: this is nearly 100% in contradiction with the official version of history… But that version is wrong, and that’s demonstrated in many of my essays, detail after detail… 

***

[3] Western anti-missile systems do exist; but recently the US had just one (built in cooperation with Norway), around Washington DC, while France had eleven, and sent one to Romania to protect a major Franco-American base there…

 

France pursued a series of nuclear tests from 1966 through 1996 at Mururoa Atoll, French Polynesia. This photograph is from the 914-kiloton Licorne (Unicorn) test, July 3, 1970. Fangataufa is permanently uninhabited. It is classified as a Common Military Zone. The zone includes the lagoon areas enclosed by the atoll and by baselines linking the closest points emerging from the reef on both sides of the channel. Entry is prohibited without authorization. A standard strategic missile on a French SSBM submarine carries a higher destructive power than the bomb above (as it can spread 20% more power over a much larger area with ten warheads. The same SSBM can carry 16 such missiles. The US SSBM can carry even more missiles. Together, France, Uk, and US have 22 such submarines…

Dumas Family Illustrates Color Blindness In France… And The Napoleons and Nazis Who Hated It.

Anybody obsessing about race and color in the first order is a racist (which makes much of the US old mental system racist, as it obsesses about race and color, to this day, and in official census and questionaires). Whereas worrying about those who obsess about race and color is not racist, but prudent. Racists and the color obsessed have obsessive systems of thoughts and emotions, which are reflected all over their mental systems.

Hence the admiration for Napoleon, a systemic, strident racist and enslaver, is an admiration for a racist and enslaver mentality… which shows up clearly in Napoleon’s obsessive fascism. Admiring Napoleon has united the most dangerous sort of scoundrels, worldwide. Admiring Napoleon is actually a form of racism. Several French generals of African ancestry opposed the forerunner of Hitler. Here is a portrait of one of Napoleon’s enemies, général Alexandre Dumas. 

French republican général Alexandre Dumas; Attributed tо Louis Gauffier/ Portrait d’un chasseur dans un paysage, dit portrait d’Alexandre Dumas père/ cm 34/huile sur papier marouflé sur carton/ 32,5 x 25 cm/ (c) Bayonne, Musée Bonnat-Helleu / Cliché A. Vaquero

Napoleon, a Corsican aristocrat, or let’s say hereditary bandit, was thus cut off from a completely different mental tissue than the best minds of the French Revolution, of which there were hundreds, if not thousands. Napoleon was felt, early on, to be a danger for the Republic, and the Revolution, and thus the glory seeking Corsican was encouraged to embark in his Egypt expedition: the French Republic’s leadership hoped he would die there (Napoleon went, in the hope of defeating the Ottomans, spreading the Revolution there, becoming a new Alexander; but he discovered that Islamists had no affinity for the concept of Republic, and besides he couldn’t get to the ammunition in Saint Jean D’Acre, which he besieged in vain, and UK admiral Nelson defeated the French fleet).

A post mortem painting of general Dumas.

The French Revolution and Republic had top generals who were of African descent, such as the father of Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie, represented above in a Nineteenth Century painting (it’s actually inspired by the physionomy of his son, the author of the “3 Mousquetaires” and “Reine Margot”, who immortalized D’Artagnan, head of king’s Musketeers)… For what Dumas the general really looked like, see the sculpture below (which was melted by the Nazis…)

Thomas Alexandre Dumas, of his true name Thomas Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie, was father of the famous novelist Alexandre Dumas père, whose son, Dumas Fils, was himself a famous writer and author of La Dame aux camélias. These three generations of Dumas have something which sets French civilization away from, and above, racist, color obsessed culture. In France the Dumas trio is famous and was memorialized in an entire city square in Paris…I was exposed to French culture for decades… 

But one day I came across some US writing informing me that Dumas was “black”. I had seen pictures of Dumas and I had not noticed, for decades, that he looked a bit African in some ways! But the US are all about “color” to this day, and many a US citizen has a keen eye for race. However, curiously, while the whites are white and the blacks are black (even when they look mostly white), the Asians are Asian (not “yellow” as they used to be… Some Asians are whiter than white, indeed…), and the RedSkins, well, now are proudly “indigenous”…

The Nazis went out of their way to destroy the memories of the Dumas family. They melted his statue! There are fewer things which the Nazis hated more than descendants of French, or French-like Senegalese with partial African ancestry. They found thousands in Germany and sterilized all of them. (A French-Senagalese military regiment was also assassinated by Rommel’s 7th Panzer division in 1940… To its eternal shame…)

Dumas was not the only man of mixed African parentage to have gained great prominence in Eighteenth Century France. Another son of a nobleman and a freed black woman from Guadeloupe became one of the most renowned fencers—and violinists—of the 18th century. Taking the title Chevalier de Saint-Georges, he went to a prestigious school, he had the patronage of Marie-Antoinette and served in the king’s honor guard. When the American founding father John Adams visited Paris in 1779 he wrote that this “mulatto man is the most accomplished man in Europe in riding, shooting, fencing, dancing, music.”

Raising spectacularly through the ranks, on merit alone, as his father died within days of him entering the army, Thomas Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie, became general in chief of a major French army by age 32.

His mother, Marie-Cessette Dumas (1714–1786) was enslaved in Saint Domingue (now Haiti). His father was a French noble from Normandy, who “bought from a certain Monsieur de Mirribielle a negress named Cesette at an exorbitant price…” Several official documents describe her as pure “African”, “negress”, namely born in Africa, and then transported to Saint Domingue (and explicitly not of mixed race). It’s not clear when she died [1].

Thomas Alexandre Dumas was one of several famous French officers of color. Napoleon famously mistreated another, Toussaint Louverture….

A statue of General Dumas was erected in Place Malesherbes (now Place du Général Catroux) in Paris in Autumn 1912 after a long fundraising campaign spearheaded by Anatole France and Sarah Bernhardt. It stood in Place Malesherbes for thirty years, alongside statues of Alexandre Dumas’s descendants Alexandre Dumas, père (erected 1883) and Alexandre Dumas fils (erected 1906), as well as of Sarah Bernhardt. Offended by this triumph of African ancestry over racism in general, and Austrian troops in particular, the deranged Nazis, challenged by the indomitable warrior spirit of this half African, destroyed it in the winter of 1941–1942. The statue below is more faithful to the appearance of general Dumas than the painting above:

 

Tom Reiss, in his (Pulitzer Prize-winning) biography of Thomas Alexandre Dumas, The Black Count, writes that “[Dumas] was a consummate warrior and a man of great conviction and moral courage. He was renowned for his strength, his swordsmanship, his bravery, and his knack for pulling victory out of the toughest situations. But he was known, too, for his profane back talk and his problems with authority. He was a soldiers’ general, feared by the enemy and loved by his men, a hero in a world that did not use the term lightly.”  

Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was a man of African descent leading European troops as a top general officer. He was the first person of color in the French military to become brigadier general, divisional general, and general-in-chief of a French army with 53,000 soldiers. His military career started under King Louis XVI.

Born in Saint-Domingue, Thomas-Alexandre was the son of Marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman, and of Marie-Cessette DUMAS, a slave of African descent. He was born into slavery because of his mother’s status, but his father took him to France in 1776, spent lavishly on him, and had him educated. At some point the father, destitute, sold the son, and later repurchsed him!

Slavery had been illegal in metropolitan France since 656 CE (re-affirmed in 1315 CE, under Louis X, son of Philippe Le Bel) and thus any slave would be freed de facto by being in France (or anywhere in Western Europe, where Bathilde’s law applied, as most Western European regime’s were descendants of the Frankish/Carolingian/Roman empire…)

His father helped him enter the French military. Dumas took his mother’s name, because his father didn’t want the family name soiled by a low officer’s commission. Dumas Senior rose through the ranks, starting in 1786… in the Queen’s dragoons… Under Lafayette, he helped to kill insurgents… and was later exonerated by a revolutionary tribunal when he explained that to kill those 50 insurgents had saved 2,000…

***

General Dumas made few political statements, but those he made suggest deeply felt republican beliefs. One month after the French National Convention abolished slavery in the colonies (4 February 1794), Dumas sent a message to troops under his command, and that was the entire Army of the Alps, fighting Italy’s Austrian occupiers and collaborating Italians, who had been trying to invade France in the name of plutocracy:

“Your comrade, a soldier and General-in-Chief … was born in a climate and among men for whom liberty also had charms, and who fought for it first. Sincere lover of liberty and equality, convinced that all free men are equals, he will be proud to march out before you, to aid you in your efforts, and the coalition of tyrants will learn that they are loathed equally by men of all colors.” 

At that point Dumas was higher in the military hierarchy than Napoleon (who had just been promoted to general from captain, for his exploit of defeating the British in the siege of Toulon). Dumas led the 53,000 soldiers of the army of the Alps to victory, in the battles of Petit Saint Bernard and Mont Cenis. Dumas’ soldiers used revolutionary ice crampons to go up ice cliffs during combat. 

General Dumas joined the Army of Italy in Milan in November 1796, serving under the orders of commander-in-chief Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon was a political navigator, but also a bandit: tension between the two generals began as Dumas resisted Napoleon’s rapacious policy of allowing French troops to expropriate local property. 

In December 1796, Dumas was in charge of a division besieging Austrian troops at the city of Mantua. By Christmas he intercepted a spy carrying a message to the Austrian commander with important tactical information. On 16 January 1797, Dumas and his division halted an Austrian attempt to break out of the besieged city and prevented Austrian reinforcements from reaching Mantua. The French were thereby able to maintain the siege until French reinforcements could arrive, leading to the city’s capitulation on 2 February 1797. 

General Dumas was then forced by Napoleon’s hostility below his rank…. Under General Masséna in February 1797, Dumas helped French troops push the Austrians northward, capturing thousands. It was in this period that Austrian troops began calling him the der schwarze Teufel (“Black Devil”, or Diable Noir in French). 

In late February 1797, Dumas transferred to a division commanded by General Joubert, who requested Dumas for his republicanism (in contrast to Napoleon’s dictatorial tendencies). Under Joubert, Dumas led a small force that defeated several enemy positions along the Adige River. Dumas’s achievement in this period came on 23 March, when the general drove back a squadron of Austrian troops at a bridge over the Eisack River in Clausen (today Klausen, or Chiusa, Italy). For this the French began referring to him as “the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol” (after a hero who saved ancient Rome). Napoleon called Dumas by this, and rewarded him by making him cavalry commander of French troops in the Tyrol; he also sent Dumas a pair of pistols. Dumas spent much of 1797 as military governor, administering Treviso province, north of Venice. 

The expedition to Egypt was partly conceived by the Republic’s government in the secret hope that Napoleon would die there, but he didn’t. During the return debacle, Dumas was made prisoner, and spent several years in captivity. When finally liberated, he couldn’t restart his military career, as Napoleon’s dictatorship was in its bloom. Dumas soon died of stomach cancer…

His son and grandson would become extremely successful writers, a most honored profession in France. None of the Dumas got promoted and extolled as “black” men, because the French mentality was, and is, and should be, that they were men, great and glorious men, and no appearance could spoil or even interfere in any way, with their essence.

In recent years, though, under US influence, skin color has been advocated as an important factor to consider in France… This is an exact example of racism: judging people on how they look, or where their families came from.

Whereas skin color was not a consideration for advancement or minority status in Rome…for however long Rome lasted… And Rome lasted a long time… In Tenth Century “Francia”, peasants and aristocrats still thought they were living in Rome… And, we actually have strident revolutionary songs and philosphies from the time, where humanity is affirmed, and the equality among people, fustigating the pretentions of plutocrats (evil-power) soon to call themselves “aristocrats (best-power). In these ancient protests of the Tenth Century, which were crushed with mass massacres by the self-declared aristocrats, we see social justice struggling… but color never appears.  

In a way, so far, color blindness has been a Roman (not Greek! [2]) tradition which thereafter lived, and still lives in France. In what became the USA, we know exactly when the decision of brandishing color was taken: at the end of the Seventeetn Century, racist, greedy judges decided that “color” meant people were “aliens” and thus couldn’t own property. So wealthy and not so wealthy people with some African origins were dispossed by the thieves who founded what became the American US judicial system.

It’s no coincidence that the Frankish/Roman empire is at the cultural root of both the British and American regimes. The traditions of the Franks/Romans were the best, or, at least, on crucial points, superior. Thus any deviation should be carefully studied in the present civilization. But that starts with realizing that, until modern time, the color of skin was not a factor.

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] Dumas in 1801, states “Marie-Cezette” will be in charge of General Dumas’s properties in Saint-Domingue. This evidence makes it unlikely that Marie-Cessette Dumas died earlier.

Thomas-Alexandre Dumas may have deliberately entered a false death date for his mom on the marriage certificate. He had a good reason to claim she was dead at the moment of his marriage in Villers-Cotterêts, France, in 1792. If she were living, he would have been required to consult her opinion on the marital union!

***

[2] The Greeks were much more racist than the Romans, and this is why they failed and the Romans succeeded. The Greeks expressed racism towards non Greeks, the Athenians expressed at some point racism against non-Athenians (stupid laws passed under Pericles, affecting his own son), and the Spartans were certainly racist against everybody (and Sparta died from this racism)

 

Wokism Is Fake, And That’s Why It’s Useful To The Establishment

“What is the point of university? It used to be, when Harvard was founded in 1636, “to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity”. But in recent years the university has taken on an altogether narrower character. Learning is no longer enough. Activism is demanded. Yale and Harvard have come to resemble the mythical Ouroboros, eating their own tails to satisfy an insatiable appetite for conformity…” Ayaan Hirsi Ali points out. She is a famous Islam critic, who had to flee her native Somalia, was elected Dutch MP, barely escaped assassination by enraged theologians, and is now a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Her latest book is Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights.

New and better Veritas comes from debate… which originally meant beating thoroughly. So one cannot throw a light, lux, let alone establish veritas without a modicum of mental violence. New and better truth is always an aggression against the established mental… let alone financial or economic… order. This is why, historically speaking, most of humanity’s top thinkers blossomed in only a few places and times… And yet found themselves to be the object of violence, often fatal, at a rate much greater than the average population.

New truth, better veritas, always contradict the established order, this is what deep and genuine novelty does to minds. 

Instead, plutocratic universities, aka legacies universities, teach the established order, and how to get inserted within. Enough money and effort is deployed by students and, or their families to attend elite universities, so as to ensure that students have the appropriate mentality of, and for, plutocratic insertion. Thus rebellion within is unlikely. Wokism has become a purity test of dedication to the fake truth of the established order. Exhibiting enough wokism demonstrates that one is eager, and one can display enough hypocrisy and polish, to rule the gullible masses… and thus join the master class.

Theories adverse to the established order are adverse to the plutocratic universities’ sponsors, thus will be discouraged by administrators and teaching staff. Whereas theories which make no sense or are deeply regressive are friends of the established order, and will be encouraged. 

This will go on until, and if, the established order is wiped out by a tsunami of veritas… or then total civilizational collapse… something easily engineered with nukes… Harvard did play an important role in establishing Yeltsin’s Russia… which then installed Vlad, modulo a genocidal war in Chechnya… It all fits together nicely.

Wokism is a mood of explaining all what matters most as mostly flowing from racial prejudice and discrimination… Thus hiding deeper causes. Wokism is greatly fake, but so has been the fight against the pollution crisis (in particular the CO2 crisis, aka acidifying global heating), or, for that matter, the taxation schemes which have only ensured ever greater global power and wealth inequality in the hands of the few… A fake and silly universe, such as wokism, will often hide another, much more dangerous, such as increasing feudalism. 

Ayaan Ali got married to historian Niall Ferguson in 2011. He divorced for the occasion his wealthy and powerful long time wife… They have two sons. Ferguson teaches at Harvard and gets $100,000 for one hour speeches to hedge funds… That’s what a book about the Rothschild will do to you, if well written in a way pleasing to the powers that be… Wokism does not like Ferguson for his ideas… And now Ferguson’s own life with Ali shows that Ferguson’s ideas did not emerge from racism… Thus disproving the fundamental thesis of wokism…

Beauty: Vive La Différence!

Beauty: Vive La Différence!

A table, simple objects on top, 

Commemorating love fate took away…

We think because we hurt,

Doesn’t matter what, it’s deep and touching,

Made all the difference.

A little glass container,

Small little roses in it: a touch of scarlet color,

Symbolizing how small, yet drastically everything,

That love was.

Volunteers are cleaning

 

A tall fat guy, sure of himself,

Orders to behead it all: this is old, let’s clear it!

He wants to throw away the innocent tiny flowers,

Which depict what used to mean so much!

No, please don’t,

See how pretty, the touch of color

Yes, dessicated, sure, precisely: they will last.

The big guy is sure of himself: no, too old,

Enough scatter brains,

I clean it, and irresistibly,

Down into a garbage pail,

Full of a terrible milky chemical liquid,

He throws them irreversibly, 

A killing of memories left after death.

Death squared.

 

Outrageous

Why can’t all humans enjoy,

Enjoin, and celebrate when hope 

Showing up as tiny, stubborn flowers,

Refuses to die? 

Why the need for Nemesis,

Destroying all in the way,

All that was dear?

 

Why not appreciate how important beauty is?

The brute stands, formidable: this is my job and I do it well,

Destroying hope and beauty,

As needed.

One feels like crying:

There is another sort of humanity there,

An anti-human humanity, and it’s deliberate.

 

Deserts left after beauty is gone,

Those, too, are neat.

Indeed, what’s neater and cleaner than death?

The evil side of humanity,

Puts order into things,

Whether necessary, or not.

 

In these desolate times

When maniacal tyrants 

Know best how many bombs,

Will get the job done, 

To impose themselves,

Maybe at the cost of everything else.

Appreciating beauty is a refuge,

For reason itself.

 

Venerating a few precious flowers

Dessicated or not, a touch of color, a love that was

A love we respect and commemorate

This we need

To remind us

That we humans,

Mostly live by hope,

And beauty

 

So what does a sense of beauty bring?

The difference which protects us,

From fury and nothingness,

Signifying Nothing,

Told by madmen

 

Beauty is what ignores and dominates all,

Luring us with the appreciation of difference,

Or how it all makes sense.

So children, ladies, and gentlemen,

Let’s drink beauty,

While we can,

Because we should,

Try to be human,

As well as we can.

Let love for beauty reign over us.

Patrice Ayme

Beauty makes difference attractive, hence is at the foundation of thinking, the human essence

No Faith, No Thought

Takeaways: Faith is the complete trust or confidence in someone or something. It is at the core of what is called thinking (present day AI is primitive in the sense that it does not have to use faith).

It is traditional to oppose reason based thinking, with “faith” (typically faith in the Abrahamist religion, which is supposed to be above any suspicion). However, that opposition is an illusion, and a strategic error in deploying the advancement of understanding: faith is used constantly, in minute but crucial ways, because we cannot verify everything, all the time. 

If using faith is ubiquitous in life, in minor and major ways, and everything in between, it, and the way it is created, should be examined thoroughly, just as the rest of life. There should be no exception, and even the gods should be examined. No exception for the faith of fanatics [1]. 

When we walk we walk, we take it on faith that we know how to walk. Opposing reason and faith is an example of obsolete thinking. As everything that is obsolete, it hinders the progress of Enlightenment. 

***

Too Much Faith In Some Elements Of Mathematics Can Hurt Mathematics:

Euclid’s elements are generally viewed as the model of what reason should be: everything is deduced from five set theoretical axioms and five geometric “postulates”.  At least, that’s what was believed for more than 20 centuries. Even Euclid’s elements were full of faith: it turned out that many crucial assumptions were missed among said axioms and postulates. When Hilbert reviewed Euclidean geometry, he posited twenty assumptions…then others intervened, such as the famous Polish mathematician Tarsky, who postulated other axioms for Euclidean geometry… which did other things Hilbert couldn’t do (going from second order to first order logic, etc.)…

So, in the end, the situation with the most basic geometry was revealed to be much more complicated than was assumed for 24 centuries… To phrase it differently, what was viewed as the archetype of reason, rested on faith to a surprising degree. 

That faith was far from innocuous, it had a fascist aspect: the obsession with Euclidean geometry. Indeed, why should one only do geometry on a plane? A century before Euclid, Greek mathematicians had thought about making geometry on a sphere, or a saddle: out of that came something very practical: the size of the Earth, and the sizes and distances of the Moon, and the Sun (basically proving the heliocentric theory, if one thought about it deeply)… All of which was done at the same time as Euclid, thanks to a Marseillais…

The faith in the perfection of Euclidean geometry had then, for similar reasons to the faith in whomever or whatever, the effect of depriving more worthy subjects.

Similar shortcomings were revealed in Set Theory, making Bertrand Russell famous… A modern pirouette is to use so-called “NAIVE Set Theory” and ignore subtleties like sets which are not elements of themselves…   

Basic arithmetic was deficient too: it turns out that traditional arithmetic assumed implicitly something called the Archimedean Axiom, the violation of which creates infinitesimal and infinite numbers (that’s called non-standard arithmetic). 

The reaction to all this, in the end, was more trust and less verification. Although mathematical logic kept on growing inside mysterious thickets, real mathematicians (if I dare to use the expression) decided to ride their faith in the rigor of mathematics until hell and high waters: instead of establishing the deepest foundations, mathematicians decided to explore the complexity of imaginable foundations. Category Theory became the powerful queen of math, developing a gigantic theoretical castle of theories floating up in the air. Never mind if CT is really true or not: all the proof we need is in the complication it handles with . In other words, LOGIC BECAME LOCAL.

Don’t expect all mathematicians to understand much of the preceding: their craft depends on believing their faith in mathematics is no faith, but megalomaniac certainty. 

***

Not all faiths are good all the time. Faith can be misused by plutocracy. An example is Abrahamism, whose basic foundation is a criminal folly that binds: if the boSS orders you to kill a child, even your child, you should obey, no question asked. So Abraham ties up is fully conscious son to execute him, because a god in his head told him so. It is impossible to make more vile, and thus it is an excellent foundation for a religion which killed at least dozens of millions of people directly, and much more indirectly, by being the mythology of plutocracy… Yet, misuse of the faith instinct does not mean that we can do without it:

***

Beauty is to some extent in the eye of the beholder, and so is greatly a matter of faith.

The FAITH INSTINCT Is Necessary For Thinking:

René Descartes sought to doubt the truth of all beliefs in order to determine which he could be certain were true. Descartes’ statement, “Cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am), in its fuller version reads: “dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum” (“I doubt therefore I think, I think therefore I exist”). What Descartes is talking about is the fact that thinking consists in adjudicating reality, and this requires first doubting all evidence presented. 

My example, as usual, is trail running: on a roaring basis, a torrent of information is presented to the visual system, with the question of branch vs root vs shadow vs ground depression vs ground prominence vs snake vs where to put foot next analyzed and debated in real time by various part of the brain, which do not even have time to synchronize and cohere. So doubt figures prominently all too often when trail running, and doubt is processed too fast for global consciousness, only local consciousness can process it, and generally too slowly to override automatic systems [2].

After we have doubted all relevant elements, we think, that is we decide what is real and what is not real. 

Thus, we certainly must have faith, faith in what we decided is true, if we want to think: not everything can be doubted 24/7 (Cartesian doubt is to be used parsimoniously).

Belief in a mind-independent reality is itself an act of faith…. But one well supported by facts…

Thinking without faith is like flying without air. Can’t be done, without redefining flying, or thinking first.

Nathalie Delima Graza: “or just like put your faith in parachute and trust in it.”

Faith is when we decide reality: experienced parachutists know that parachutes generally work… but they also know they do not always work, and that’s why they often wear another chute… Trust, but not fully. Cartesian doubt was to distrust everything 24/7… But it can’t be done! Hence the use of faith… Fisth is when we decide reality.

Bertrand Russel was superficially full of faith… against faith. Said he:

“All faiths do harm.” Here is Bertrand Russell in full: “All faiths do harm. We may define “faith” as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of “faith.” We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. And the substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions.”

— Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954), Ch. VII: Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?, p. 213

We may not speak of faith, but we practice it. Bertrand Russel was full of faith, and also, hot air: during World War One, he believed, he had faith, that Europe would be better off under the Kaiser’s fascist boot. British justice was unimpressed, and put him in prison for a very long time, for this ludicrous and war criminality promoting opinion… He later tried to redeem himself with anti-nuke, anti-Vietnam War positions…

Can anything be rescued from Russell’s statement above? Sure. Any faith where one “substitutes emotion for evidence” should be viewed with extreme suspicion. Not that it is always bad: emotion has a logic of its own.

My point is that, contrarily to what Russell asserts, most faiths have evidence. No evidence that Muhammad flew to Jerusalem on a winged horse… But that Muhammad’s religion, in some, amd many, ways is a good thing (for example it brought down the murder of girls, and improved the treatment of slave girls)…

By admitting that faith is not just good, but indispensable, and that most faiths have evidence to support themselves, that faith is just an indispensable abbreviation and determination of thought, we are far from giving succor to the fanatics and those who disrespect critical thinking. Verily, just the opposite. We deprive those with lethal and unjustifiable faith (such as faith in tyrant Putin)… of the argument that everybody has a sacred right to all and any faith… Instead we point out that faith has to be examined, like everything else, and actually more than anything else.

An example of unhinged faith is that HAARP technology and its ability “to accelerate cataclysms“. High Altitude Aurora Research Project could do no such thing. At best, create a little artificial aurora.

Hugo Chavez, an uneducated tropical tyrant, believed Northern Lights (Aurora) launched earthquakes… Because he was told so by other fools, not knowing the subtleties of Alaskan politics, among other things he didn’t know… (The Alaskan senior Senator wanted the government to spend in his state. HAAARP cost 300 millions, and then provided employment…)

Faiths have their uses: believing HAARP could launch nine Richter quakes, provides believers with the illusion that their complete lack of scientific knowledge and scientific common sense is an excellent thing, as it made them superior to Physics PhD…. And freed them from scientific reason in myriad ways…

Those who believe Putin is not a genocidal tyrant, but a worthy president also tend to believe that a Kremlin centered empire will provide them with glory, empire, or a general way to criticize “the West” without thinking too hard. 

Faith is actually what enables thinking to decide, saving energy, but most importantly, having decided reality, enables the brain to switch to implementation of the chosen strategy.

Faith in others is called trust. Culture and complex society can’t work without it.  

Faiths, and trusts, have to be examined and verified, not thrown under the bus.

The Enlightenment has to throw a light on all and any reason, emotional or nonlinear… Just proscribing some forms of reason, while subscribing to them secretly, as the occasionally eminently irrational Bertrand Russell did, is only hypocrisy… a form of thinking that should be consumed only in extreme moderation.

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] Va de retro, Islamophobia phobia.

[2]: Once, on a turning and slightly descending trail, I came across a large rattlesnake. I was going around 15 feet per second (perhaps 5 m/s). The decision to accelerate and jump over it was taken consciously (there was no other choice), but only by the part of my conscience which supervises running (the rest of me became horrified later).

alk we walk, we take it on faith that we know how to walk. Opposing reason and faith is an example of obsolete thinking As everything obsolete, it hinders further Enlightenment. 

Euclid’s elements are generally viewed as the model of what reason should be: everything is deduced from five set theoretical axioms and five geometric “postulates”.  At least, that’s what was believed for more than 20 centuries. Even Euclid’s elements were full of faith: it turned out that many crucial assumptions were missed among said axioms and postulates. When Hilbert reviewed Euclidean geometry, he posited twenty assumptions…then others came, such as the famous Polish mathematician Tarsky, and postulated other axioms for Euclidean geometry… which did other things Hilbert couldn’t do… So, in the end, the situation with the most basic geometry was much more complicated, and much more resting on faith than was assumed for 24 centuries. Similar shortcomings were revealed in Set Theory, making Bertrand Russell famous… A modern pirouette is to use so-called “NAIVE Set Theory” and ignore subtleties like sets which are not elements of themselves…   

Basic arithmetic was deficient too: it turns out that traditional arithmetic assumed implicitly something called the Archimedean Axiom, the violation of which creates infinitesimal and infinite numbers (that’s called non-standard arithmetic). 

The reaction to all this, in the end, was more trust and less verification. Although mathematical logic kept on growing inside mysterious thickets, real mathematicians (if I dare to use the expression) decide to ride faith until hell and high waters: Category Theory became queen of math, developing gigantic theoretical castle of theories floating up in the air. In other words, LOGIC BECAME LOCAL.

Don’t expect all mathematicians to understand much of the preceding: their craft depends on believing their faith in mathematics is no faith, but megalomaniac certainty. 

We certainly must have faith, if we want to think: not everything can be doubted 24/7 (Cartesian doubt to be used parsimoniously).

***

Belief in a mind-independent reality is itself an act of faith…. But one well supported by facts…

Thinking without faith is like flying without air. Can’t be done, without redefining flying, or thinking first.

Nathalie Delima Graza: “or just like put your faith in parachute and trust in it.”

Faith is when we decide reality: experienced parachutists know that parachutes generally work… but they also know they do not always work, and that’s why they often wear another chute… Trust, but not fully. Cartesian doubt was to distrust everything 24/7… But it can’t be done! Hence the use of faith… Fisth is when we decide reality.

Bertrand Russel was superficially full of faith… against faith. Said he:

“All faiths do harm.” Here is Bertrand Russell in full: “All faiths do harm. We may define “faith” as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of “faith.” We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. And the substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions.”

— Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954), Ch. VII: Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?, p. 213

We may not speak of faith, but we practice it. Bertrand Russel was full of faith, and also, hot air: during World War One, he believed, he had faith, that Europe would be better off under the Kaiser’s fascist boot. British justice was unimpressed, and put him in prison for a very long time, for this ludicrous and war criminality promoting opinion… He later tried to redeem himself with anti-nuke, anti-Vietnam War positions…

Can anything be rescued from Russell’s statement above? Sure. Faith where one “substitutes emotion for evidence” should be viewed with extreme suspicion. Not that it is always bad: emotion has a logic of its own.

My point is that, contrarily to what Russell asserts, most faiths have evidence. No evidence that Muhammad flew to Jerusalem on a winged horse… But that Muhammad’s religion, in some, amd many, ways is a good thing (for example it brought down the murder of girls, and improved the treatment of slave girls)…

By admitting that faith is not just good, but indispensable, and that most faiths have evidence to support themselves, that faith is just an indispensable abbreviation and determination of thought, we are far from giving succor to the fanatics and those who disrespect critical thinking. Verily, just the opposite. We deprive those with lethal and unjustifiable faith (such as faith in tyrant Putin)… of the argument that everybody has a sacred right to all and any faith… Instead we point out that faith has to be examined, like everything else, and actually more than anything else.

An example of unhinged faith is that HAARP technology and its ability “to accelerate cataclysms“. High Altitude Aurora Research Project could do no such thing. At best, create a little artificial aurora.

Hugo Chavez, an uneducated tropical tyrant, believed Northern Lights (Aurora) launched earthquakes… Because he was told so by other fools, not knowing the subtleties of Alaskan politics, among other things he didn’t know… (The Alaskan senior Senator wanted the government to spend in his state. HAAARP cost 300 millions, and then provided employment…)

Faiths have their uses: believing HAARP could launch nine Richter quakes, provides believers with the illusion that their complete lack of scientific knowledge and scientific common sense is an excellent thing, as it made them superior to Physics PhD…. And freed them from scientific reason in myriad ways…

Those who believe Putin is not a genocidal tyrant, but a worthy president also tend to believe that a Kremlin centered empire will provide them with glory, empire, or a general way to criticize “the West” without thinking too hard. 

Faith is actually what enables thinking to decide, saving energy, but most importantly, having decided reality, enables the brain to switch to implementation of the chosen strategy.

Faith in others is called trust. Culture and complex society can’t work without it.  

Faiths, and trusts, have to be examined and verified, not thrown under the bus.

The Enlightenment has to throw a light on all and any reason, emotional or nonlinear… Just proscribing some forms of reason, while subscribing to them secretly, as the occasionally eminently irrational Bertrand Russell did, is only hypocrisy… a form of thinking that should be consumed only in extreme moderation.

The faith instinct is so fundamental to thinking that Artificial Intelligence will become mature when it has to use it… to decide which axioms it will use next.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Va de retro, Islamophobia phobia.

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[2]: Consciousness is also local. See “Split Brains and Multiconsciousness“. Once, on a turning and slightly descending trail, I came across a large rattlesnake. I was going around 15 feet per second (perhaps 5 m/s). The decision to accelerate and jump over it was taken consciously (there was no other choice), but only by the part of my conscience which supervises running (the rest of me became horrified later).

… P/S: And what of the Quantum is all this? Well, you guessed it, the paradoxes of Quantum Mechnaics have to do with the localization of decision… And we saw it appear above already in a seemingly classical context. That means classical thinking already contains the Quantum in hiding….

MOODS DRIVE HISTORY. Why Sparta Attacked Athens. Putin’s “Fear” Of Chicken.

The ancient Athenian historian and military general Thucydides in his text History of the Peloponnesian War was astute enough to know of the importance of moods. He pointed out that the mood of fear in Sparta consecutive to the rise of Athens was the fundamental cause of Peloponnesian war… describing the engine of the terrible war which half-destroyed Athens, and nearly terminated her. Thucydides posited that “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”

That Spartan Fear Of Athens, Just Like Putin’s Fear Of Ukraine Was Disingenuous, It Was Fake News: 

What frightened the Spartans, they admitted, was the rising of “Long Walls” between Athens and her ports. Athens brandished their stealthy construction as a show of independence. The western wall connected the southwest of Athens to its port Piraeus and was about six kilometer long; the eastern wall continued from the south of the city to another port, Phaleron, which was about 5½ kilometer away. Between the two walls, a large triangle of land could be used for agriculture. The infrastructure was crucial for Athens’ survival as she imported much of her food.

For Sparta to be afraid of the Long Walls was deeply disingenuous: Sparta itself is protected by two enormous mountain ranges going up two kilometers into the sky, and had its own port. As a consequence of what Sparta was not invaded for nearly a millennium, or until it exhausted the patience of the Greeks (a couple of decades after its victory on Athens).

 

White House press secretary Jen Psaki, following Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, said that the responsibility for de-escalating the crisis over Ukraine lies with Russia, which she likened to a fox screaming from the roof of a chicken coop about fearing chickens.

“When a fox screams from the roof of a chicken coop that she is afraid of chickens, which is, in fact, what they do, this fear is not presented as a declaration of fact. And when you see President Putin screaming fear of Ukraine and Ukrainians, this should not be interpreted as a declaration of fact. We know who the fox is in this case,” she said at a briefing.

So, indeed, fear can be used as a pretext, a complete lie. Fear attracts sympathy: poor little Spartans, afraid of the Athenian Long Walls, frail, poor little Putin, afraid of big bad Ukrainians…

Thucydides

There was probably a fear: that Athens would stop supporting the Spartan oligarchy (Athens had helped Sparta repressed its own Helots, an enslaved, tortured, terrorized and occasionally hunted and murdered population in charge of feeding Spartans. Similarly the Russian oligarchy in Moscow is terrorized by the excess of democracy in Eastern Europe threatmening to spill over, and regrets its own Helots it used to have, throughout said Eastern Europe. 

Neither Sparta’s slave masters, nor the Moscovian slave drivers could admit what they were really afraid of: the demolition of their unfair power. 

So doing, by pointing out the importance of fear, Thucydides reaffirmed moods in historical analysis; Homer, a sort of history, is, of course, full of them, with delusional moods  and primitive emotions  moving a thousand ships…  (Achilles’ Honor, attaining eternity through fame, the transcendence of battle, Sparta’s debasement from the eloping queen, greed, thirst for violence)

Great, except Thucydides was greatly wrong (and probably deliberately so.. To deflect blame he personally shared). The Peloponnesian war was certainly propped by the mood of fear in Sparta. But not only. It was also propped by basic computations on the part of the Spartans, which proved right: although Sparta was a much smaller socio-economy than Athens, they obviously hoped to exploit glaring problems which Athens had. 

Hubris in Athens had to have played a role. And even more: the war between Sparta and Athens inaugurated a finance and divide method from “The King”… Achaemenid Persia. There is evidence Sparta had been thinking about it for a while.

EXCEPT ATHENS LOST THE WAR FROM HUBRIS:

The extent and depth of Athenian hubris early in the war is astounding. It soon resulted in catastrophic decisions. It was fed, in no small extent, by the violence of Athenian politics, and it’s anything-goes ways.  

1) Athens’ tactic of thinking it would be OK to withdraw the entire population behind the walls, while the Spartans ravaged Attica, exposed it to a pandemic; Pericles admitted he didn’t think about that, and was tried for it. 2) Athens massacred at least one island city-state of Spartan origin, just for not allying itself to Athens… just because it could, it argued at the time…. 3) Athens attacked gigantic and mighty Syracuse, just because it was a sure way to win the war. Except Syracuse crushed the Athenian army. 4) Competent admirals were executed after a victory for not recovering a few sailors due to a storm. 5) Athens didn’t quite believe Sparta could win at sea, and didn’t exert due caution, as pointed out by Alcibiades… resulting in the annihilation of the Athenian fleet.

The Spartans also had hubris: all they did was war and preparation for war, they observed, making them superior to the rest of the Greeks, who were only part-time warriors. Thus they could not lose a war. Well, neither could they win one for 30 years. And that was a warning of more of the same: indeed, by introducing professionalization, and even romanticization of war, plus a new art of battle, Thebes was able to destroy Sparta’s supremacy, forever… shortly thereafter.

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DEUS EX MACHINA: The Intervention Of Persia, Which Made Its Alliance With Sparta Official In 413 BCE. It is likely that many in Sparta had long been thinking about an alliance with Persia (remember the absence of the Spartas at Marathon… because they had a festival, they claimed ludicrously…) That had to be part of their computation in going to war with Athens. Indeed, when they complained about the Long Walls, they mentioned Persia non-stop.  That was as disingenuous as Putin, but also showed they were Persoa obsessed…

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CLOSED SOCIETIES BEING PERPETUAL LOSERS RESORT TO VIOLENCE: 

More deeply, Sparta was a closed society, hyper fascist, and hyper racist, not a vibrant, open, high tech society like Athens, which dwarfed Sparta. Athens was a tech innovator, and depended upon long range relationships and her navy to get grains. 

There was a general tug of war between racist oligarchy (the Spartan foundation of its socio-economy) and the total, direct democracy of Athens. The Spartan model represented the past, Athens the future, and it is still true today…

Athenian hubris, and the prospect of an alliance of fascist Sparta with fascist the Persia juggernaut, were part of what made war inevitable… In part because in Spartan eyes, Athens looked more vulnerable than it thought  itself to be.

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In contemporary political science there is a mass psychological mechanism called “Thucydides’ Trap”. This is a valid mechanism… Except it doesn’t fully apply to the situation which gave it its name, stricto sensu. 

We have seen above that, to understand the catastrophic loss of Athens in the 30 years Peloponnesian war, we have to consider the real fear hidden by the fake one, and add three mechanisms: hubris (applying to Athens), and what I call the Kaiser Trap, or Closed Society Trap, or Fascist Trap, and the Deus Ex Machina Trap.

To understand the great wars of the Twentieth Century, we need all these traps. They generally operate together. To them we have to add the likely theory of mind of those evolving in these traps. War becomes unavoidable when an adversary feels it has found a pathway to victory, navigating all the moods to its own advantage. Considering Athens’ hubris, overstating its own capabilities, from its own Reduced Instruction Collapsed mind,  considering the favor of Persia, Sparta thought it had a chance. It just had to fake fear, to attract sympathy. Fear faking. Same as Putin now.

Putin showed this recently with all his jeremiads about NATO. By giving an ultimatum which denied the sovereignty of several other members of the United Nations, Putin, paradoxically, made sure that many nations would have a very good reason to join NATO, thus… Putin achieved what he wanted, augmenting his own fear.

The Peloponnesian war was a disaster for Sparta, Athens, democracy, civilization, and even the liberation of women (Spartan women were the most liberated of all known civilizations at the time). The adverse consequences extend to this day. The fateful decision to attack Athens was taken by at most seven persons (five ephors and two kings…) This is what political fascism does: put a few in charge of civilization. Now we have just one scared little man in charge of frightening us with a world ultimatum. Great.

So far a sizable contingent of countries in the West have succeeded to disrupt Putin’s plausible paths to victory. A fascist imperialist killer autocrat confused, screaming how afraid he is of the chicken below. Excellent.

Patrice Ayme   

Origins Of PUTIN’s OUTRAGEOUS TYRANNICAL LIES And Why To Resist Them.

Putin claims that Moscow created Slavic civilization, thus the Kremlin owns it. Putin is cogent and historically detailed about this, and no doubt sufficiently so to use it as an argument to justify his greatest wish: reverse what he called the greatest tragedy of the Twentieth Century, the disappearance of a small fraction of the Kremlin’s empire. Yes, the greatest tragedy of the Twentieth Century was not the Holocaust, not World War One And Two, but, the liberation of nations subjugated by Moscow … Putin adressing Russia as its elected president in 2005 said:

“First and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory…. The epidemic of collapse has spilled over to Russia itself…”

So reconstituting the Russian empire at its fullest extent is Putin’s true aim. Never mind that Russia, as it is, is the world’s largest empire, 70% larger than China, itself an occupier… Naturally enough, as Putin started his career in the KGB, the Soviet Gestapo, and rose to its pinnacle… the Russian empire is never large enough. However, polls indicate that young Russians increasingly do not feel that reconstituting the genocidal USSR or fascist imperial Russia in its full glory, is worth undertaking as a primary objective. After all, the Russian economy is getting poorer (over the last decade or so, in nominal GDP… not in PPP), and it heavily depends upon exporting fossil fuels to Western Europe (the part of natural resources in the Russian economy is between a third and two-thirds, depending upon the exact metric one uses…)

Thus what Putin feels is that it is now or never to bring Kiev back under Moscow’s claw. Moreover, he needs a war to simmer just so, to justify his tyranny…

The articulation of Putin’s posture is that Moscow owns Kiev, and he deduces this by looking at history… his way. Putin goes into a lot of details, but they obscure the lay of the logical land. 

Reality is the opposite: Ukraine is much older than Putin’s “Moscovia”, and thus should not be owned by it. Ukraine was also founded in a highly cosmopolitan way (whereas Russia was axed on conquering savages with the most savage means… Peter the great would agree with this statement). Crimea was always central to Ukraine. Vladimir conquered Crimea and converted to Christianity there (Tenth Century). What follows is just a cursory treatment of history. I will expound another time how a Moscow based control of Ukraine, supposed to last two years by a 17C treaty… turned into four centuries… 

Rus princess Anne of Kiev, daughter of Yaroslav the Wise, Grand Prince of Kiev and Prince of Novgorod, and his second wife Ingegerd Olofsdotter of Sweden, married the twice-widowed king Henry I of France (19 May 1051 CE). One idea was to gain Ukrainian support against the (non-Francia part of the) Roman empire, another was to marry outside of the Frankish aristocracy. Their son King Philip I, was born in 1052. The name ‘Philip’ was rare in Francia prior to that time, and was likely inspired by Saint Philip who converted Scythia, an area identified with Kyivan Rus’ in the Middle Ages (somewhat accurate until its conquest by Rus Viking, Rus meaning eastern Sweden…). After her husband’s death, Anne ruled France. She spoke half a dozen languages and looked down on France in cultural matters. 

Anna’s signature in Cyrillic on royal charters from the 1060s is the only known example of a Capetian queen’s signature on parchment and the only known (pre-13th century) signature of a member of the Riurykide dynasty. It is the oldest extant example of Old Ukrainian handwriting. 

Moscow was created centuries after Ukraine became a major European power. The timber fort na Moskvě “on the Moscow river” was inherited by Daniel, the youngest son of Alexander Nevsky, in the 1260s. At the time the least valuable of his father’s possessions. Daniel was still a child, and the fort was governed by tiuns (deputies), appointed by Daniel’s paternal uncle, Yaroslav of Tver.

By 1304, Yury of Moscow contested with Mikhail of Tver for the throne of the principality of Vladimir. Ivan I eventually defeated Tver to become the sole collector of taxes for the Mongol rulers, making Moscow the capital of Vladimir-Suzdal. By paying high tribute, Ivan won an important concession from the Khan of the Golden Horde.

The growth of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania began to threaten the arrangement, and the Khan strengthened Moscow to counterbalance Lithuania, allowing it to become one of the most powerful cities in Russia, However, by 1380-1480, Moscow fought the Mongols.

Kiev resisted the Mongols and was destroyed by them, razed to the ground (1240 CE; for throwing out the bodies of Mongol ambassadors). Kiev became a part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania after the Battle at Blue Waters in 1362, when Algirdas, Grand Duke of Lithuania, beat a Golden Horde army. During the period between 1362 and 1471, the city was ruled by Lithuanian princes. Crimean Tatars attacked several times and in 1482 Kiev was destroyed again by Crimean Khan Meñli I Giray. 

Moscow grew initially from being an agent of the Mongols, adopting the ways of the invaders, and then, later, beating them at their own game… On one side, collaboration, then imitation, on the the other, the resistance of Kiev, to death, and subsequent revolts, starting a generation before Moscow… 

Putin plays with the ancient names of various jurisdictions to claim Ukraine never existed before “Moscovian Rus“, and came into being after Moscow… when in truth Ukraine is twice older than the Moscovian tyranny. The game of changing names can be played in all and any place in Europe.  

The truth about Moscow’s institutionalized spirit is that it loves militarized fascism. Why? Dictatorship was highly successful in making Moscow and its dependencies the planet’s largest land empire. Tyranny can be ruthless, which is best for colonization and replacing original natives by invaders. The price to be paid by this colonizing focus has been mental backwardness and looking at the world in a fascist way, through only a few ideas and emotions, enforced by a closed society, the exact opposite of what was supposed to be Athens’ civilizational model (Athens proclaimed itself an open society, 25 centuries ago, under the influence of Aspasia, the wife and philsopher pulling the strings of Pericles…). 

Open against closed societies, plus nukes: not a good mix. But we must resist, as the Moscow dictatorship and the twinged with evil bellicose mindset discarding humanities, which has been so profitable to the Russian empire, will keep asking for more, as they fail in most other ways. To stay open, enlightened societies have to fight their closed predatory neighbors, lest the dark side wins it all. This is more true than ever, now that spaceship Earth has become a big village.

Anne’s statue in Saint Vincent’s Monastery, in Senlis, near Paris, which she founded.

Patrice Ayme