Identity Crisis Promoted By “Social Networks”.

Plutocrats need to destroy any pretense We The People may have to create our own identity. The best way to do this is to impose on us identities plutocrats have pre-packaged. The arch example, most famous in all of humanity’s history, is “Roman Catholic Orthodoxy“, which is 2,000 years old, and still around, playing with little children as if they were all sorts of toys, after giving birth to a profusion of just as genocidal sub sects, most tucked inside Islam and Protestantism…

Genocide is the friend and servant of plutocracy and its handy theocrats. The Bible, old or new, and its desert variant, the Qur’an, are full of genocidal paradigms to show the naive masses which way to go… to the slaughterhouse..

There is so much identity politics, a form of tribalism, that it’s not amusing anymore. When Martin Luther King and company marched against racism, they marched against tribalism. Racism is a particular form of contrived, engineered tribalism. Contrived and fake? As when green eyed, blonde, white skin US “blacks” tell you they are “black”, although they look more Nordic than any of Trump’s three sons. Or when one sees strident pseudo-progressives of 2019 being more right wing fanatics than even the worst McCarthyists of the 1950s, and those fascists are real serious, calling themselves “antifa”, while serving the established order better that the worst Trumpist, the amusement fades away…

None of this is an accident: we live in the age of ideas ready to wear, as prepared by corporations which are well considered by the establishment, or have even been instituted by the establishment as self-financed world class spy agencies (as the GAFAM are, and the galaxy of government supported successful startups around them too).

Tribalism is bad, in its present form, not just because of its effects, but in how it originates and why. Tribalism is well known to be a gateway to war. But, in modern form especially, it is chosen for its intellectual fascism, and maybe even what one could call hormonal fascism. If a young German soldier in 1914 wanted to conquer Europe, it was not so much his choice, as the choice of the imprinting the German school system had imposed on him, forcing him to behave as a fascist, racist brute, ready to follow the most inhuman orders.

When people are not themselves, but just one, the same, always, fitting in little definitions prepared by the oligarchy, we are not just treated as little robots, but humanity itself is robbed from the diversity of perception which makes it human.

However, what we see nowadays is a much more subtle form of imprinting. The “likes” system of “social networks” is crucial: by “liking” the US (Internet) providers of fake tribalism find out which pre-packaged tribe one could fit in, and then foster that fake tribe with ever more suggestions. Although the US CIA, Saudi SIA and Pakistani ISI invented rabid Islamism as a worldwide phenomenon, the social networks have been following similar methods, on a grander scale [1]. 

What’s the interest in grouping up people in little mental tribes? Mental packaging… Yes one can sell products to those packages. More generally, the interest at the level of the Deep State, in particular of the Deep State of the US empire, is that minds then become predictable species. For plutocracy in general, it’s even more wonderful: by fostering simplistic mental speciation through artificial tribalism, We The People becomes stupid. And why is sheep easy to control? Because it’s stupid.

There is also identity everything: identifying is popular, because it provides with systems of thought and emotion, packaged and ready for consumption, open and serve, no debate necessary: insult the Prophet, they say, and I want to kill you. That way, even the biggest decisions, one does not have to make.

Identity comes, through French, from the Latin identitatem which means of “the sameness“[2]

Similarly, the more significant the individual, the more important the ideas, and important ideas are different ideas. We are an idea civilization, and all too many ideas recently have been low quality, relative to what’s at stake (the planet). 

To have difference, mental differences, fruitful mental creativity, we need to have authenticity. Authenticity: the contents of the thing in question correspond to the facts and are not fictitious: they are trustworthy, reliable, really as presented. However, nowadays, we live in the world of inauthenticity… Representative “democracy” being the number one exhibit. Fake progressivism feeding the worst and most egregious tribalism is an example. But so is a fake economy (watch the GAFAM, which were pretty much engineered by the US Deep State, to “dominate” (Zuck’s prefered word), as they themselves put it, the world)…

And even more inauthentic is a financial system which lies when it pretends to be fair, or even to be wise in a satanic way (how wise was it to fund fracking?) There is even fake sexual identity. Fake sex, as in males who pretend they are biological females, when it’s presently impossible to make it so technically, like fake news, fake nature and fake thinking, should be discouraged. 

On this, more soon…

Why so much lying? Because it became possible to do so. In Merovingian and Carolingian times, propaganda was difficult: this was before printing. Printing enabled propaganda, thus became tightly controlled by the states. To compensate, atheism was punished by death [1]. Some states (the Ottoman empire) outlawed printing for centuries. Now we are so much long after the invention of printing by the few, for the few, we can do it ourselves. But of course, someone has to read the best thinking, and this is why the Social Networks are organized the way they are: to make sure higher thinking doesn’t get to the lower masses, and that they can be “influenced” by “influencers” who are little more than pornography in action.

None of this is new: Roman identity, by 100 CE had been reduced to craving for “panem et circenses” (bread and circuses), the contemporary Juvenal pointed out. Once well engaged, this stupidification of the masses proved irreversible: by the Sixth Century, in Constantinople, We The People felt smothered by the imperial system of Justinian. However, the Nika riots, originally a tribal clash between the “greens” and the “blues” sport supporters, proved unable to graduate from the circus they originated from in a timely manner: Roman conscience, even consciousness, had been made tribal silly, by centuries of Roman mental fascism, starting with circenses, and culminating in the instauration of legally murderous “Roman Catholic Orthodoxy”. Ancient Romans would not have recognized, or believed this could happen to the Roman Republic…

Nietzsche thought no price was too high to own oneself. The herd, though, thinks exactly the opposite: no price is too high to pay for the privilege of belonging to the herd.

But new ideas never come from the herd, and this is precisely why the herd finds itself so comfortable, and hate new ideas passionately, reinforcing the herd that way.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] According to many in the Bin Laden family, and a just published book by said family, Osama himself was brainwashed by those wishing to engineer Islam as a weapon to foster the sinister aims of the US Deep State (after Algeria against France, earlier, Afghanistan against France, again, and the USSR).

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[2] The attitude to atheism was more relaxed in the high Middle Ages. Cracking down on atheism had an effect similar to what has long been going on in Islam: various sects hurl “atheism” at each other, and then try to kill each other. Dolet was executed for atheism in Paris, and, within a few years, Protestants and Catholics were trying to kill each other, in seven consecutive wars and one massacre…

 

If Israel Is The Elected People Why Vote Again? (Thus,) Does the Biblical God Want To Kill The Jews?

Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm asks in the New York Times: “Did Israel Just Stop Trying to Be a Democracy”?

I generally do not comment much on Israel. My reasons are deep, tenebrous, far inside the vigorous flames of the circles of hell at the center of my philosophical system, sustaining the whole thing, just as the sun-like molten iron heart of Earth supports the heavenly biosphere… Just as the Dark Side supports the Enlightenment, as the Yin and Yang define each other…

But, as the New York Times itself decides to show some guts, so must I… I will not be outdone by commoners! (A very extended version of my published comment is below; it was approved by just 2 people, whereas comments in the Israel Uber Alles style, were approved by more than 100… Serious Jews are into introspection…)

Satrapies (subordinated plutocracies) were small in the West immense in the east. In any case, the Achaemenid (“Persian”) empire was extremely multiethnic… And extremely advanced: news came from all over the empire to Persepolis in one week with an efficient road network, and a pony express… (The real extent of the empire was even greater than that, going all the way to Ethiopia, and Oman was part of it…)

Dr, Boehm writes:”Last week, Israel’s government pushed through Parliament a new law calling Israel the “nation-state of the Jewish people.” That statement may sound like a truism — and in some respects it is one — but the implications of it officially being made are monumental.

In 1948, the Declaration of Independence, the text that marks the founding of Israel, created a Jewish state that would ensure “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” Since then, the question of how Israel could be both Jewish and democratic has been the object of fierce controversy.

The effort to guarantee equal rights for non-Jews has at times seemed like trying to square a circle. Last week, Israel gave up on even trying.

… implicit nod to Palestinian self-determination was driven by an overriding concern for Jewish interests, not Arab rights. In May 1948, there were about 600,000 Jews and some 1.2 million Arabs living within Palestine’s borders. With Jews in the minority, the Jewishness of a democratic Israel could only be ensured if Palestinians had a chance at self-determination. In other words, Israel’s foundational twin pledge (to be both Jewish and democratic) was hypocritical…

The system’s original contradictions are now being laid bare. Of the more than 8.2 million people living in Israel’s recognized borders today, roughly 73 percent are Jewish and 22 percent are Arab. But of the 11.8 million people who live in Israel and the West Bank, roughly 56 percent are Jewish and 40 percent are Arab. And as the prospect of a viable two-state solution has receded, so has Israel’s promise that it would provide full equality to non-Jews.

In keeping with this evolution, last week’s nation-state law says that, “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”

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This picture symbolizes the problem. The two mosques visible (gold Dome of the Rock, etc.) were built on TOP of the Jewish Temple. OK, it may be better than latrines. But when we read that Muhammad, after his death, flew to Jerusalem on a winged horse… a heady mix of Judaism and Hellenism (remember Pegasus?)… one finds itself confronted to a fable for little children having turned lethal, for real… The Star of David is nearly two millennia older than Islam….

The theory that ethnicity commands citizenship was made most famous by the Nazis. However tribalism above anything else is one of the oldest, most primitive, and deleterious, not to say savage, lethal and criminal, ideologies. All great empires triumphed, because they rejected it, wholesale. This is what made them great. For example, the Achaemenid empire, which extended from Greece to India and Ethiopia to Central Asia, was extremely multiethnic. The Greco-Roman empire was extremely multiethnic (and so is its descendant empire, “The West”). China and India were multiethnic.

Multiethnicity is not the end all, be all: it doesn’t prevent intellectual fascism, nor, of course, the political type of fascism, as the Persians obdurately demonstrated in the last three millennia…. However, it is conducive to it…

A multiethnic empire is forced to admit that there are higher principles than origins and appearances.

Those higher principles are well-known: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

These principles are secular, they don’t depend upon the common superstition that the tribe at hand was chosen by “god” to be tops! Or the elected people”, or even the definition of “man” (as happened in many tribes).

The “Elected People” theory backfired spectacularly in the confrontation between the Jews and their mental offspring. First in the Fourth Century, Roman emperor Theodosius I legislated that the Christians were the Elected People, and “heretics” (“those who made a choice”) were to be burned. Finally the “Elected People” theory, reinforced by the Christo-Darwinist mindset led to apply the “selection of the fittest” to Judaism: the Nazis insisted that they were the “Elected People”, elected by their own will, not a “god” scared of shrimps and hogs who insisted on sexual mutilations…

The irony, then, is that the Jewish god is of an inferior sort, scared of hogs and shrimps. Hence the Jewish god favors superstition heavily: doesn’t it favor its “elected people”?  Actually it’s no favor to believe in all the stupidities in the Bible: it makes those who believe in them incredibly dumb. One may argue that they are made dumb on details. No. They are made dumb on the principle that dumbness has to be the ultimate ruler.

Thus, paradoxically, the Jewish god, who defines Israel, is its worse enemy. How did that occur? The vicious tribal fascism and exterminationism found in the Bible was a great help in the dog eat dog world which followed the simultaneous collapse of all the civilizations of the Middle Earth around 1117 BCE and, or, from the “conspiracy of the Sea People” (Pharaoh dixit)… Although versions of desiccated Egypt survived, and Greece would revive, mightier than ever, within three centuries.

The vicious exterminationism found in the Bible provided a justification for the methods Israel had to use, simply to exist. Before the Muslims crow:’We told you so!’, let me point out the original, literal version of Islam has exactly the same problem… And just as with Israel, that was the key to its early success. It’s no coincidence, but causation: in the grander scheme of thing, Islam is just a variant of Judaism, endowed with a similar ultra-violence (the Qur’an quotes approvingly Lot in the Bible on how to treat homosexuals:”with a rain of stones”; the Bible is the constant context of all of Islam, the “Messenger of god” Muhammad’s fundamental theme being that Jews and Christians didn’t abide correctly by the unvarnished Bible).

All this ultra-violence and ultra-discrimination? All the way to the ovens.

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So why am I (nevertheless) pro-Israel? (But one should push my patience too far…) It’s not just a question of the enemy of my enemy being my friend. (Moreover, it’s not clear who is friend, who is enemy!) It’s not just a question of historical justice: Judaism is more than twice older than Islam. When the Islamists established mosques on top of THE temple of the Jews, they were symbolically put their feet on Israel’s face.

The Roman emperor Hadrian had kicked the Jews out of Jerusalem after the second Judaic War (135 CE). However, the decision, applauded by the fanatical Saint Augustine after 400 CE, didn’t have to be definitive: Roman emperor Julian had ordered the reconstruction of the Great Temple in 362 CE. Julian in the surviving Fragment of a Letter to a (Pagan) Priest: “I myself…intended to restore it [the Jerusalem Temple], in honor of the god whose name has been associated with it.” (Works, vol. 2., pp. 297–339.) Sixth-century historian Lydus quotes him, “I raise with the utmost zeal the Temple of the Highest God.”

Some may scoff:’Who cares about a Roman emperor?’ Well, our present regimes are descendants from Rome… As our law is, in its fundamental nature, Roman (extended to women and children). Moreover, morality (the mores) is entangled with law: what we consider legal is moral, and reciprocally.

In the best of possible world, the Middle East would free itself from the Biblical god: Arabic speaking peoples would harness the know-how of the Hebrew speaking people… But the complexity arises when one realizes that (some, many) Israelis, or, at least, Israeli companies, are so smart, precisely because their lives depend upon their smarts. The Dark Side, violence requires, enables and invigorates, higher mental functions. Such is the darkest of the dark.

Abominable are the flowers of infamy, yet beautifully mighty!

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Conclusion? Tribalists are worse than fascists, or racists: they are followers of principles which reduce mental diversity, thus intelligence. Hence, in the end, tribalists are those whom much higher principles, which they are busy denying, subjugate. Israel may thrive right now by going solo in the world of decency and common sense. But solo is solo, and that’s dangerous, as all dead solo climbers, my friends, can testify.

Patrice Ayme

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Note: The NYT decided the following comment was to be lauded (and it was approved by 100 times more readers than mine!). I reproduce it as it is, complete with its atrocious orthography (the New York Times has to live according to its picks:

pirranha299

PhiladelphiaJuly 26

Times Pick

Why is Israel, a country the relative size of a postage stamp, the Worlds one and only Jewish state always singled out for opprobrium no matter what it does.  The Arabs have 28 plus countries. Is it too much to ask that they can have a law that makes it official that its a Jewish State? Can’t Jews have one little state of their own?

Israel is a Democracy..This law does not change that.  It has a vibrant press, minority represention in its democratically elected legislature, and an independent judicial system that acts as check on the executive and legislative branches. As is typical, If Israel is not perfect the anti-Semites and Anti-zionists will take one element they disagree with and conglate it to portray all of Israel as “a Nazi state” and demonize it as a threat to World peace. Of course they say nothing when the true dictatorships demonize Israel, point out Israel’s flaws as existential threats to “their Palestinian brothers” while ignoring  their own brethrens terrorism, racism, and militirism.

Israel as the only Jewish State will always be outvoted by the far more numerous Arab and Muslim States. The author cites ” Israel’s right wing government” in a pejorative sense. If it can be categorized that way it’s because the People democratically voted it in. If it fails it can be voted out. Thats democracy.

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The answer to this sort of logic is that we have seen it before, with Sparta. There was only one Spartan state. Sparta enslaved another city-state: Messene, to its west, a unique case in Greece. It didn’t finish well for Sparta… Although Sparta was an independent state for more than a millenium (longer than Israel), it ultimately disappeared. Athens didn’t: in the middle Middle Ages, Paris was considered to be the “imperial translation” of Athens: many of the best principles of Athens were taken over by Paris, a rebirth of Athens. Sparta though was dead, and stayed dead… Except if Israel takes itself as the new Sparta? Well, Sparta didn’t have the equivalent of Orthodox Jews: they would have been put to death immediately…

 

Pinker Than Pink: Pinker Paid For Seeing World Through Rose Colored Glasses

Steven Pinker is a famous Harvard psychology professor (and before that he was head of neurosciences at MIT), one more of these celebrity professors buttressing the very wealthy elite, with lenifying discourses to put us all asleep. Unsurprisingly, Pinker is great friend with plutocrat Bill Gates, who is not just wealthy and control not only Microsoft and his huge Gates Foundation, but was also, among other things, a close adviser for Midas-touch Obama and his ilk (at some point the Gates were put in charge of much of education by Obama, just in case the Gates’ glorious influence was not great enough).

Influence is power, and major plutocrats’ influence extends far beyond their apparent financial power, as they are constantly “advising” elected politicians. (I wrote “advising”, to sound middle-of-the-road. But I meant “bribing”, and the middle ground is the road to hell!)

Harvard and other plutocratic universities are full of these celebrities with agendas serving the truth of the elite, and even the mood which makes us feel good about the rule of the elite… whereas Bill Gates added in the New York Times, Trump has created a bad mood: “There haven’t been that many anti-elitists, anti-internationalists elected president. But we have one now”. Famous examples of intellectual serving the plutocracy are Huntington, Ferguson, and the galaxy of economists who mis-advised president Yeltsin deliberately in the 1990s (with the aim of turning Russia into a plutocracy, and profiting from it, as they did; the enraged, enraging and most cynical uber-plutocrat Putin came out of that process).

Before lengthy quotes of Gates, to cut to the chase, let me paste my comment, which Bill Gates had the courtesy to put on his site (“Gates Notes”)… Yes, in exchange I will bend over, backwards, being nice in turn, in a cute example of micro-corruption…

“We can grab that whole world, and shove it!” “Really, Master, I love you!” Gates and Pinker love-in…

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Viewing The World Through Rose Colored Glasses Is Pinker’s Business Model:

That human lives have gotten better, is Steven Pinker’s big sing-song, his core marketing tool. Yet, that the lives of human beings got better, according to some parameters, is obvious. In the biggest scheme of things, progress is actually why, and how, humanity evolved!

Bill Gates proclaims Pinker’s books “the best of all times”. However, “progress”, progress towards heavens, progress towards hell, and often both at the same time, are a given. Humanity is the progress species, mixing will, technology, and evolutionary biology in a relentless drive towards ever more progress, however of a mixed bag progress may be.

For example, Nazism was a spectacular, horrendous regression in many ways, but then Nazism passed excellent laws in ecology and animal welfare, which Germany kept and the world adopted; even more disturbing, those laws served as cover for their malevolence, so goodness can cover-up the worst! So one can’t just make a list of the good stuff, as Pinker does. One has to evaluate the values and compare them. The present world is violating the MOST major values. And increasingly so. And increasingly so. This is what people are, rightly, getting ever angrier about (see below: Pinker and Gates are clueless about it, of course…)

Gates flaunts Pinker’s “meticulosity“. Yet, it is only mildly interesting to have some of these parameters of optimism in “meticulous” detail. Meticulosity is actually often a covering-up mechanism. All the time spent splitting hair is as much time not envisioning, let alone worrying about, the really big problems. Being obsessively meticulous in the details enables to focus on the insignificant. Steven Pinker misses the big picture, because he is too busy scrutinizing the bark of a tree with pink colored glasses to contemplate the dying forest beyond, let alone smell the raging inferno coming his way! This is why plutocrats love him so much!

For example Pinker makes a big deal that the probability of dying from lightning is 1/37 of what it was a century ago. Yeah, well, what about the probability of dying from pollution now? It’s obviously many times, dozens of times, greater now, and it affects every body: death by lightning was always rare (although, as an alpinist I was in great lightning danger many times, and saw strikes from a few meters away).

While brandishing silly facts, Pinker loves broad generalizations. He claims that “intellectuals hate progress”. That’s a typical over-generalization: some intellectuals do hate progress, all too many do. But all intellectuals? No. Not at all. After all, thinking is greatly motivated by progress, with many individuals. Much of the time, people think because they want to improve matters.

What is the point of singing the obvious progress on some parameters from every rooftop? All the more as everything indicates that a geological sized catastrophe is looming. On the face of it, we are engaged in a combination of the greatest human population explosion ever, and the greatest mass extinction in at least 65 million years, accompanied by the greatest climate shock ever. What could go wrong? Pinker can’t figure it out. He is clueless.

Bill Gates is not any better, as he says in the New York Times (“The Mind Meld Of Bill Gates And Steven Pinker“): “I was stunned by Pinker’s “Better Angels” because I was coming around to the same view: That “things getting better” is the greatest story that no one knows.”

I guess, indeed, that the few thousands plutocrats who rule the world, that’s, indeed, no one… (A human being, in full is much more than greed and the unquenchable thirst of power…)

Considering the extremely dismal perspective (and we didn’t consider the headache Artificial Intelligence is starting to bring) Pinker’s singing from rooftops looks like a distraction. It is distraction, like a bird singing about life, when a force 5 hurricane looms on the horizon.

No doubt Pinker’s song of optimism and “meticulosity” pleases the powers that be. Indeed Pinker tells the elite it, the plutocracy, has made an excellent gift to all of us, the rest of humanity, with all this progress it provided us with… a progress which is burying the biosphere under a tsunami of pollution… 

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What Gates and Pinker don’t want to hear, but Hannah Arendt wanted us to hear: Optimism kills, all too often, while pessimism, properly managed, saves lives:

Yet Pinker is dismissive of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s pessimism. This is beyond bizarre: Nietzsche was frighteningly correct about the abominable mentality, militaristic, hyper-nationalistic and racist, which was seizing Germany, and warned about it in the most strident way. Nietzsche saw the anti-Judaism, he saw the furious militarism, the insane nationalism, and the inferiority of the gross German mind at the time, ever more base (Einstein and others had similar critiques later).

If Germany had listened to Nietzsche instead of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Hitler, the massive regression of the 1914-1945 war would not have happened. In other words, no enough pessimism can lead to Nazism and its ilk.

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Steal a pizza, life in prison! Progress? Progress according to Pinker!

Anybody who thinks a bit can only be alarmed by the peril the biosphere finds itself in… all the more as remedies are not obvious. Pinker lauds the decrease of violent crime in the US “from 1992 to 2015”. It doesn’t dawn on him that the mass incarceration campaign under Clinton, arguably the world greatest, this side of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, has something to do with it. It’s clear that, if one imprison for life someone who steal a pizza slice, violent crime will go down.

Another price for this sort of “progress” will be paid, though. All what Pinker sees is that Harvard is getting safer. And he, and the plutocratic class doesn’t understand that the dozens of millions of American whose employment has degraded would logically deduce that the US, and the world, is heading in the wrong direction: isn’t Harvard getting better? Isn’t the finances of the elite Pinker swims in, getting ever wealthier?

(Not surprisingly, the Chinese population, which has seen real, tremendous progress, is very optimistic, polls show… Yet, China could explode, because dictating to the masses in the age of intelligence is not smart…)

The elite tells us we live in the best of all possible worlds, and Pinker adds that it’s getting ever better. When Voltaire sneered, correctly, about this, making fun with professor “Pangloss”, an early version of Pinker, Voltaire’s friend, king Louis XV, replied:”After me, the deluge!”.

Well, clearly, a flood is coming for real. Prior to the hurricane which ravaged Houston, sea level had gone up six inches. Over a year, a single year: six inches!

Yes, birds should sing, that’s nice, so let Pinker sing, that’s nice. But it’s not really intelligent to feel that’s the best that can be done, as Bill Gates pretends it is. 

So Pinker cozied up with Gates in Seattle. Gates’ personal wealth is more than 90 billion dollars, and he controls at least 30 billion dollars through his Foundation. Gates is all in love with Pinker, let’s read him a bit, for fun:

“Optimist prime

My new favorite book of all time. By Bill Gates,  January 26, 2018

For years, I’ve been saying Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature was the best book I’d read in a decade. If I could recommend just one book for anyone to pick up, that was it. Pinker uses meticulous research to argue that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. I’d never seen such a clear explanation of progress.

I’m going to stop talking up Better Angels so much, because Pinker has managed to top himself. His new book, Enlightenment Now, is even better.”

Why to change something that worked so well? Gates wants to prove we have the best of all possible progresses (no doubt because his mother was a director of IBM, which launched Gates…):

“Enlightenment Now takes the approach he uses in Better Angels to track violence throughout history and applies it to 15 different measures of progress (like quality of life, knowledge, and safety). The result is a holistic picture of how and why the world is getting better. It’s like Better Angels on steroids…

It opens with an argument in favor of returning to the ideals of the Enlightenment—an era when reason, science, and humanism were touted as the highest virtues.”

Here are five of my favorite facts from the book that show how the world is improving:

• You’re 37 times less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than you were at the turn of the century—and that’s not because there are fewer thunderstorms today. It’s because we have better weather prediction capabilities, improved safety education, and more people living in cities.
• Time spent doing laundry fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to an hour and a half in 2014.This might sound trivial in the grand scheme of progress. But the rise of the washing machine has improved quality of life by freeing up time for people—mostly women—to enjoy other pursuits. That time represents nearly half a day every week that could be used for everything from binge-watching Ozark or reading a book to starting a new business.

• You’re way less likely to die on the job. Every year, 5,000 people die from occupational accidents in the U.S. But in 1929—when our population was less than two-fifths the size it is today—20,000 people died on the job. People back then viewed deadly workplace accidents as part of the cost of doing business. Today, we know better, and we’ve engineered ways to build things without putting nearly as many lives at risk.

• The global average IQ score is rising by about 3 IQ points every decade. Kids’ brains are developing more fully thanks to improved nutrition and a cleaner environment. Pinker also credits more analytical thinking in and out of the classroom. Think about how many symbols you interpret every time you check your phone’s home screen or look at a subway map. Our world today encourages abstract thought from a young age, and it’s making us smarter.

• War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations.

Gates really believes war is illegal… While the USA has systematically refused, for decades, to be part of the International Court Of Justice, precisely set-up to make war illegal…

That “war is illegal” is an amusing notion, oft seen in history. We will see how long that will last, now that the North Korean cannibalistic dictator owns at least SIXTY NUCLEAR BOMBS…(If Russian and China kept on supporting North Korea if and when the West has to defang it, nuclear war will spread, and the world population will collapse even faster than the Jewish population in Europe from 1941 to 1945… The latter case was a decrease of ⅔, proportionally meaning nearly six billion dead now.)

That the creation of the United Nations was progress is not doubtful (the idea was initially proposed in France in 1916, and then ephemerally adopted by the US, before the US rejected it, and France and Britain tried to implement it as the SDN, in a vain attempt to block the return of German racist fascism; didn’t work… World War Two happened, 100 million people died, about 5% of the world population, and the USA, with few losses, while coming into command and control of 90% of the planet, in 1945, became immensely rich, and ever since led the world, even giving half of Europe to Stalin on the way, just because Europe was best, divided,..).

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To Explain Doom & Gloom, Consider That Inequality Is Insufferable to Primates: (Something Steven Pinker & Bill Gates don’t seem to be aware of!)

Bill Gates asks: “Pinker also tackles the disconnect between actual progress and the perception of progress—something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. People all over the world are living longer, healthier, and happier lives, so why do so many think things are getting worse? Why do we gloss over positive news stories and fixate on the negative ones? He does a good job explaining why we’re drawn to pessimism and how that instinct influences our approach to the world, although I wish he went more in-depth about the psychology (especially since he’s a psychologist by training).”

The glib, yet fundamental answer is that really bad stuff kills you, while really good stuff doesn’t. The more subtle answer to this is simple: inequality, inequity, have been skyrocketing. Primates can’t stand inequality and unfairness. This was demonstrated in the laboratory, even with new world primates as simple as Marmosets.

If they have to choose between eating and screaming their anger about injustice, Marmosets will often go for the latter, and attack the scientists setting up unfair experiments!

Elephants have five billion neurons in their frontal cortex. They too, hate injustice, and they don’t forget it. They can exact vengeance years later.

Why do intelligent animals combat inequity? Because intelligent social animals survive from their intelligence, most of which is culturally induced. For cultural intelligence to be as high as possible, all brains work in parallel, and not with just one on top, dictating its truth!  

Thus evolution has made sure that we are not inclined to intellectual fascism (following mechanically the author of unique thought). We get sad, angry, infuriated and gloomy when we are forced to comply to think as the leader. All the more that the fascist instinct induces us to do that, only in times of combat (then following the leader, acting as one, is crucial). So our deep psychobiology assumes we are at war, or in combat, when we are forced to think as one.

Rebellion and revolution is how evolution into Homo Sapiens and civilization were created. Over millions of years, plenty of times to turn advantage into most human instincts, and all the more human, that no other species has it. We are professional revolutionaries, and those who want to put us to sleep, are the enemies of what made our species what it is.

***

Pinker Flaunts Jewish Smarts, While Exhibiting Holocaust Conducive Stupidity:

Steven Pinker, is a shining blue eyed self-declared Jew, flaunts the GENETIC “intelligence” of Jews: “Jews make up 50% of the 200 top intellectuals, 40% of the Nobel Laureates…”

By dismissing the pessimism which led Nietzsche to give his strident warnings, Steven Pinker dismisses what could have saved the six million Jews who were assassinated by the Nazis. Interestingly, Pinker really seems to believe in the genetic superiority of Jews… So Pinker concedes to the Nazis, and other racists, the fundamental idea of the Nazis, and other racists: namely that there are genetic differences between population with STRIKING consequences in matter of intelligence. Using fancy phrases like “highly endogamous” (namely inbreeding) doesn’t make Pinker’s racism any less outrageous

(Pinker defines himself as Semitic, although he has blue eyes, just as piercing and blue as those of Adolf Hitler (couldn’t resist…) meaning his ancestors mixed it up with European stock… Violating the “highly endogamous” concept which is how he explains Jewish intelligence. Actually many European Jews, we know from historiography, were originally Catholics who converted to Judaism, as this was legal in the Frankish empire (and got the pesky Catholic church, with its anti-intellectual bias, off their backs). That works particularly well for Ashkenazi Jews who, it is known, moved into Eastern Europe from Germany, as testified by the fact Yiddish evolved from German…)

The evidence is then that Steven Pinker is not that smart, just playing one on TV. As a psychologist he doesn’t realize that tribal effects make it easier to raise, or lower, intelligence. Hence the colossal difference of IQ between Ashkenazi Jews and Australian aborigines. And then tribal effect explain why discoveries such as mass = energy are attributed to a Jew (Einstein) instead of the one who really established it (Jules Henri Poincaré; who divulged E = mcc publicly in 1899, at the Sorbonne, in physics journal in 1900, and in all generality, 1905… and also Poincaré discovered gravitational waves, relativistic version).

Calling Jews smarter and being very optimistic, the way Pinker is, while flaunting his Jewish status, is bizarre. a provocation bordering on the macabre: the population of Jews was around 17 millions in 1930. Now it’s 11 millions. How is that, for smarts? They were so smart, they didn’t see Nazism coming, They were so smart, much of the herd got eaten, and now they taunt the lions (Hadiths have orders, supposedly from God, to kill all Jews; antelopes taunting predators are a common view on the savannah…).

And the collapse, this holocaust, is not all the work of the Nazis, they got some help, and not just from the Vichy putschists, and other Jew haters around Europe: as Hannah Arendt pounded, Jewish leadership collaborated crucially too much with the Nazis. In particular, Pinker flaunts the “59% of 50 top grossing movie producers who are Jewish” could have heated up US public opinion (and German public opinion!) in the 1930s. That was a major intellectual failure, and a failure to see the problems, the huge problems, incoming.

We don’t need a power obsequious, racist optimistic mentality a la Pinker around. Only the plutocracy needs it. So Mr. Pinker will keep on doing well for himself, and the Gates of the world, especially the Gates of Hell, will keep on applauding…

Patrice Aymé     

 

Fake Reputation, Fake Society, Fake Economy, Fake Truth, Real Power, Real Stupidity

Today’s society is pervaded by luminaries with millions of “followers”. Selena Gomez (never heard of her) has nearly 150 million followers, followed by a famous tax evader who kicks a ball for a living, making him popular with young losers, etc. The buns of Kim Kardashian make the top five. Some will sneer that it’s not surprising that dummies are so popular with dummies. However, it turns out many “followers”, and perhaps most, in all too many cases, have been purchased.

The New York Times (we are friends again since it apparently lifted its censorship of your truly, having changed “leader”) made an extensive inquiry, in just one small corner of the web. The NYT purchased 25,000 followers (for $225!) from a company called Devumi, and then using those, proceeded to uncover much more. 

“The Follower Factory: Everyone wants to be popular online.

Some even pay for it.

Inside social media’s black market. By Nicholas Confessore, Gabriel J.x. Dance, Richard Harris And Mark Hansen. Jan. 27, 2018

Celebrities, athletes, pundits and politicians have millions of fake followers.

The Times reviewed business and court records showing that Devumi has more than 200,000 customers, including reality television stars, professional athletes, comedians, TED speakers, pastors and models. In most cases, the records show, they purchased their own followers. In others, their employees, agents, public relations companies, family members or friends did the buying. For just pennies each — sometimes even less — Devumi offers Twitter followers, views on YouTube, plays on SoundCloud, the music-hosting site, and endorsements on LinkedIn, the professional-networking site.”

One has to be reminded, at this point that the five richest so-called “public” (so-called public, in Americanese) companies in the universe are all into “social media” (where they do pretty much what they want, including no paying taxes at all, quite often!) Actually the fakery, the lies, the inequity is so pervasive, it looks hard to see where to start. Contemplate the one below: 

I am the cat, you are the birdie tweeting around. Twitter queen Martha Lane-Fox, British Lord and Plutocrat, in her office. Fake people, Real potentates. I Made It. Why Didn’t You, Loser? Ms. Lane Fox, a British e-commerce pioneer, member of Parliament and Twitter board member, blamed a “rogue employee” for a series of follower purchases spanning more than a year. She declined to name the person, adds the New York Times. The lady may be a Lord, but she is also a tramp.

The More Powerful The Tech Monopolies, The Greater Obama’s Plausible future Income Stream used to look:

One has to be reminded that Trump’s predecessor did all he could to make those companies ever more powerful, at the cost, not just of decency and democracy, but innovation itself. Killing innovation is the royal road to plutocracy, fascism, war. But let’s read more of the Times:

“At a time when Facebook, Twitter and Google are grappling with an epidemic of political manipulation and fake news, Devumi’s fake followers also serve as phantom foot soldiers in political battles online. Devumi’s customers include both avid supporters and fervent critics of President Trump, and both liberal cable pundits and a reporter at the alt-right bastion Breitbart. Randy Bryce, an ironworker seeking to unseat Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, [Paul Ryan is the head of Congress, no less!] purchased Devumi followers in 2015, when he was a blogger and labor activist…

Devumi’s products serve politicians and governments overseas, too. An editor at China’s state-run news agency, Xinhua, paid Devumi for hundreds of thousands of followers and retweets on Twitter, which the country’s government has banned but sees as a forum for issuing propaganda abroad. An adviser to Ecuador’s president, Lenín Moreno, bought tens of thousands of followers and retweets for Mr. Moreno’s campaign accounts during last year’s elections.

“Social media is a virtual world that is filled with half bots, half real people,” said Rami Essaid, the founder of Distil Networks, a cybersecurity company that specializes in eradicating bot networks. “You can’t take any tweet at face value. And not everything is what it seems.”

High follower counts are also critical for so-called influencers, a budding market of amateur tastemakers and YouTube stars where advertisers now lavish billions of dollars a year on sponsorship deals. The more people influencers reach, the more money they make. According to data collected by Captiv8, a company that connects influencers to brands, an influencer with 100,000 followers might earn an average of $2,000 for a promotional tweet, while an influencer with a million followers might earn $20,000.”

Quick mathematics, which the New York Times didn’t make shows this: a million followers will cost: $225 x 40 = $9,000. Yet, it earns $20,000. Thus purchasing followers enables one to make more than 100% profits. None of this is surprising: the mood was set by Obama’s 2007-2008 campaign (on which I worked and helped considerably behind the scenes; I would certainly not redo exactly what I did then, BTW). Obama, when talking about his campaign never talks about ideas he promoted then (turns out there were none to be put in practice), but how he beat up the opposition by using Internet followers games. He is not even aware that he reduced politics to a celebrity game (with him Obama as celebrity central), instead of an elaboration of ideas. That has helped setting up a disastrous mood that popularity is more important than essence.

“Genuine fame often translates into genuine social media influence, as fans follow and like their favorite movie stars, celebrity chefs and models. But shortcuts are also available: On sites like Social Envy and DIYLikes.com, it takes little more than a credit-card number to buy a huge following on almost any social media platform. Most of these sites offer what they describe as “active” or “organic” followers, never quite stating whether real people are behind them. Once purchased, the followers can be a powerful tool.”

But it gets worse.

***

The Truth Is What Shall Make Plutocrats Wealthier:

Follower counts have started to become part of the system the social media monopolies are using to determine who they “recommend”. One expects no less from people without a college education, except from a deluge of dollars coming their way.

“You see a higher follower count, or a higher retweet count, and you assume this person is important, or this tweet was well received,” said Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz, a company that makes search engine optimization software. “As a result, you might be more likely to amplify it, to share it or to follow that person.”

Twitter and Facebook can be similarly influenced. “Social platforms are trying to recommend stuff — and they say, ‘Is the stuff we are recommending popular?’” said Julian Tempelsman, the co-founder of Smyte, a security firm that helps companies combat online abuse, bots and fraud. “Follower counts are one of the factors social media platforms use.”

A mood of fakery and theft has settled over civilization. Indeed, critters monetarize their follower counts, and certainly, even more so, their power.

“While some said they believed Devumi was supplying real potential fans or customers, others acknowledged that they knew or suspected they were getting fake accounts. Several said they regretted their purchases. “It’s fraud,” said James Cracknell, a British rower and Olympic gold medalist who bought 50,000 followers from Devumi. “People who judge by how many likes or how many followers, it’s not a healthy thing…”

A Twitter account belonging to Paul Hollywood, the celebrity baker, was deleted after The Times emailed him with questions. Mr. Hollywood then sent a reply: “Account does not exist…”

Ms. Ireland has over a million followers on Twitter, which she often uses to promote companies with whom she has endorsement deals. The Wisconsin-based American Family Insurance, for example, said that the former model was one of its most influential Twitter “brand ambassadors,” celebrities who are paid to help promote products.

But in January last year, Ms. Ireland had only about 160,000 followers. The next month, an employee at the branding agency she owns, Sterling/Winters, spent about $2,000 for 300,000 more followers, according to Devumi records. The employee later made more purchases…”

Lane Fox is a spectacular example of how plutocracy works nowadays. Born and raised into and attending Oxford U. (in drama and politics, of course), she got on the “.com bubble“, became very rich that way (her company was bought for nearly a billion; we don’t know who slept with whom… I knew once a pretty pushy young lady, without much education (I use to climb with her), she met the right guys and made millions at the time). Lane Fox was made a member of the “most excellent” Order of the British Empire, and a member of the House of Lord, where she sits as a baroness with a fancy title. This is most excellent, and most rotten by the same token. We The People will erroneously scoff: such people “lead” the world, into the abyss.

Says the New York Times: “Martha Lane Fox, a businesswoman and member of Britain’s House of Lords, blamed a rogue employee for at least seven Devumi purchases made using Ms. Lane Fox’s email address. The biggest — 25,000 followers — was made days after she became a Twitter board member in April 2016.”

They would kill you with their own kitchen knife, with their DNA, and only their DNA, all over, and blame “rogue employees”. But how uncouth of me: I forgot, those celebrities own the world, we are all their employees… when we are lucky (otherwise we would be homeless…)

***

Influenced By 14 Years Old:

The New York Times observes: “More than a hundred self-described influencers — whose market value is even more directly linked to their follower counts on social media — have purchased Twitter followers from Devumi. Justin Blau, a popular Las Vegas-based D.J. who performs as 3LAU, acquired 50,000 followers and thousands of retweets. In an email, Mr. Blau said a former member of his management team bought them without his approval.

At least five Devumi influencer customers are also contractors for HelloSociety, an influencer agency owned by The New York Times Company.

Influencers need not be well known to rake in endorsement money. According to a recent profile in the British tabloid The Sun, two young siblings, Arabella and Jaadin Daho, earn a combined $100,000 a year as influencers, working with brands such as Amazon, Disney, Louis Vuitton and Nintendo. Arabella, who is 14, tweets under the name Amazing Arabella.

But her Twitter account — and her brother’s — are boosted by thousands of retweets purchased by their mother and manager, Shadia Daho, according to Devumi records. Ms. Daho did not respond to repeated attempts to reach her.”

***

None Of This Is Legal, So Why Do They Rule Over US?

New York Attorney General woke up, after the publication of the preceding, online, by the NYT. “Impersonation and deception are illegal under New York law,” Mr. Schneiderman wrote on Twitter. “We’re opening an investigation into Devumi and its apparent sale of bots using stolen identities.”

The problem of truth is fundamental. Without truth on the basic facts, one can’t think correctly. The problem of robotic accounts is simple to solve: there is existing law, as Mr. Schneiderman noticed. More generally a star system should be used. It should be multidimensional. One dimension for plausible veracity, another for significance. And probably more.

“Plausible veracity” is different from “truth”. “Truth” is whn one has elimianted the alternatives. “Plausible veracity” is when no blatantly false fake facts are used.

For example my highly significant (were they true wisdom) have high plausible veracity: I genuinely search and destroy inaccurate facts. Indeed, although I generally compose my history essays from memory, I check particular facts when I use them crucially. For example, although I know pretty well the story of the siege of Vercingetorix by Caesar at Alesia, should i write an essay on this, I would check the troop number (I think Caesar had around 50,000 soldiers, and the Gauls at least 4 times that; if I wrote an essay, i would check the latest numbers, and exert judgment whether they are reliable or not).

***

Should “Truth” Be Privately Determined By Plutocrats And Their Servants?

A crucial point missed about big social networks is that they have become “public utilities“. They are not owned just by themselves, but, de facto, by the public. Actually, if not for the public, they would be content empty. Ideally, We The People would be owners of these “social networks”, as we already own all their content.

To police “social media”, it has been suggested that “social media”, which, at this point, are private companies, not “public utilities” in the legal sense, would do it themselves. In particular, that they would evaluate truth. As we saw above, that’s not what they do. Mark Z, founder of Facebook, is a guy whose ultimate philosophy, one year was “eat what he killed”. So Mark spent a year educating himself by killing rabbits, chicken, pigs, and carrying the corpses in a car’s trunk with an elated restaurant owner driving around Silicon Valley (my spouse interviewed said elated and grateful restaurant owner).

Those individuals, those multi billionaires, those plutocrats can’t do it: all the education they have is dollars and how to make dirty deals, all the way to presidential level, to gather more dollars, influence, powers, and no taxes to pay, while posing as lovers of man (“philanthropists”). Some have little education aside from computer program tinkering (Gates and Zuckenberg left in second year college at Harvard; Bezos completed college, but not the late Steve Jobs). That makes these one-track minds particularly apt to misunderstand the notion of plausibility and a general appreciation for human culture. 

Truth, or, more exactly, plausible veracity, like justice, should be a matter judged by We The People, or its representative institutions… Once those who have it have been given plentiful opportunity to expose it. An example: California & France decided to vaccinate forcefully! (Ah, but the argument can be made, that the government of We The People has been captured by plutocrats. As observed. So we can’t let, as is already happening, Plutos decide of the truth. That’s not a valid retort, as plutocracy, already happening, is not democracy, indeed, that’s precisely the point! “We The Satanists, We The Plutocrats” is not “We The People“!)

We need a department of truth, or ministry of truth… but not as G. Orwell envisioned it. As I just said, this is already happening, and it will happen more if “social networks“, right now led by plutocrats, without “public utility mandate“, are encouraged, as they presently are, to exert censorship (nude female chest will get you in trouble in Saudi Arabia, and Facebook; thus face book is, at least partly so, Saudi Arabia, even though Zuckenberg had a “Bar Mitzvah”, a sort of Jewish enthronement, when he was 13…!) 

Technology has always evolved, ever more complex. Thus laws have evolved, ever more complex. Having a “department of Justice” was fiction, 5,000 years ago. Now no country goes without. But justice without truth is impossible. Just as having the proper moods, while being immersed in lies, is also impossible. Justice is mandatory, truth should be recommended. Justice is mandatory, truth should be recommended. Either are too important, too vital, without We The People oversight…

To try to fight off Russian propaganda (which is very sophisticated, have a look at “RT”), Ukraine created a “ministry of information policy”.

*** 

And what of foxy lady Lane Fox?

Here is a few more details,  thanks to Wikipedia, of how .com celebrity can be leveraged:

Lane Fox was appointed Commander of The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2013 New Year Honours for “services to the digital economy and charity”.[23] In February 2013 she was assessed as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom by Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4.[24] In the same month it was announced that she was to be created a life peer in the House of Lords as a crossbencher.[25]

On 25 March 2013, she was raised to the peerage as Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho, of Soho in the City of Westminster[26] and was introduced in the House of Lords the next day…

Now foxy Fox rules over Tweeter. As a director, she makes more than $200,000 a year. Not bad for meeting only a necessary three times a year (I guess first class travel from the House of Lords is paid too!) This sort of foxes owe their elevation to the ruling elite, they will serve it, tooth, claw and nail. And their souls are all devoted to the powers that be. That’s why they get rewarded so well.

Remember Obama’s Nobel peace prize? Obama went on to start a full new nukes program, and inventing “signature strikes”, in which, if people gathered somewhere, and Obama took the fancy of doing so, he would kill them all, by pressing a button. Once Obama’s soul had been bought with the Nobel Peace Prize, he would do whatever it took, to pay back his debt. Say what you want, he is no ingrate… Say what you want too, but we all now pay the moral price: the truth is Obama has made these into times of deliberate murder, and all avert their eyes, from sheer Political Correctness (Obama, having brown skin was viewed as PC, on this ground alone, by hundreds of millions, even with yours truly included, and this is the truth… Just as it is the truth that dozens of millions are starting to realize they were had, just as we were had by Hillary Clinton whose latest revealed extravaganza was to protect a harasser of women…)

This world society where fake people, fake appreciation, fake ideas, fake news, fake truths, really rule is clearly heading towards real imbecility, not just real inequality. Just when intelligence is in need of a quantum jump, to avoid an all too deplorable outcome…

The truth of the elite is the truth which serves the elite. Contemplating any alternative, is to lie to oneself.

Patrice Aymé

Judaism, Fanaticism, Empire, And Self-Destruction

Our Civilization Is Not Just “Judeo-Christian”, Far From It, Yet All Too Many Think It Is:

Judaism contained the initial versions of Abrahamism. 2,000 years ago it gave birth to Christianism (in its many versions) and later Christianism was adopted as “Orthodox Catholicism” by Roman emperors as a metaphysical version of, and indomitable support for, their secular fascism.

Many scholars have argued that Christianism was the straw which broke the back of the Roman state. (Although it seems likely to me that Christianism gave an excuse to a much deeper rot, which, in turn, caused the altruism of Christianism.)

13 centuries ago, Meccan Arabs rejected their 365 gods polytheism around the goddess Moon, and adopted instead a hard-core desert version of Abrahamism, Islamism. Some go around, claiming that our civilization is “Judeo-Christian”, although neither Jews nor Christians invented the alphabet (Egypt, Sumer, Phoenicia did), nor basic mathematics (Egyptians, Greeks, Indians did), nor basic physics or engineering nor the idea of fairness embodied by the law (Babylonians did), nor basic state organization (Egypt, Sumer, Achaemenids), nor welfare (imperial Rome).

This cult of “Judeo-Christianism”, however mistaken, precisely because it’s so mistaken, has to be addressed.

Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, Largest (Herod’s) Version. Destroyed in 70 CE. King Solomon Built Part of It, A Millennium Earlier. Solomon was married to the daughter of Pharaoh. Only a 488 meters long retaining wall is left today, while Christians and Muslims built churches and mosques on top of the emplacement, in an apparent demonstration of whom owned what, the old fashion (jungle) way!

***

Paleologue O asks me in Aeon: “I would be interested to hear more about how the intolerance of the Jews led to the Judean Wars and their subsequent dispersal. What’s your thesis?”

Answer: More exactly it was the intolerance of some Jewish faction leaders, especially Simon bar Giora. Although the revolt started in part for tax reason, Simon instigated the war, if I remember well, with the surprise massacre of more than 600 Roman legionaries.

Simon was captured alive, although he fought to the bitter end. He was brought to Rome and executed by very public whipping (the leader of the Zealots, John of Gischala was condemned to life imprisonment). The first approach to the period is to read the (huge) entire work of the historian Josephus, adoptive son of emperor Vespasian. Josephus had been elected general by the Jewish People, but, after much valorous fighting, was besieged and had to surrender to (then) general Vespasian and his son, general Titus.

In general, the attitude of the Jews made little sense, except if one believed, as many Jews did, that they had a deal with god. Under Rome, the Jews could practice their religion, and even apply some of their most abusive theocratic laws: witness Saint Paul, a Jew named Saul who committed the (fatal) sin of having visited the Jewish temple in Jerusalem with a bodyguard who was not a Jew.

Saul had persecuted the Christians (supposedly) before becoming one himself. Saul’s work on behalf of the Gentiles infuriated Jewish theocrats.

So Saul was condemned to death, and arrested by the authorities. He was imprisoned 2 years by the Roman governor of Judea. As Saul was also an important Roman citizen (a prosecutor), he successfully asked to be judged in Rome, and not by the order of the High Jewish Priests, the Sanhedrin. Paul disappeared in Rome around 67 CE or 68 CE (executed by order of the evil Jews, said some Christians, or the evil Nero, said others, if he was not exfiltrated to Spain say still others…)

Meanwhile, by 66 CE, fanatical Jewish factions, the “Zealots” and “Sicari” took control of Jerusalem (full of hatred for each others, not just the Greco-Romans). When other Jews tried to flee the city they were crucified (with as many as 500 crucifixions in one day!)

In general, Abrahamism stinks, as the founding legend, Abraham, was ready to execute his son, just because his boss asked him to. (Imagine Google, aka God ask you to kill someone dearest to you?) Whereas I say that when a God asks for the death of one’s child, or any child, He should be told: F U! That’s a question of basic morality. If a god doesn’t deserve respect, it should get it.

One can compare how Celts, Punics and Jews reacted to the rise of civilization (in its Greco-Roman version). The former two laid low superstitiously speaking: they stopped pretending that they had better metaphysics than the Roman Republic (the Saxons would do the same after being beaten into submission by Charlemagne for 30 years).

After the Romans defeated (some of) them, Celts and Punics condemned their own religions, they said OK to Rome, and they helped build a constructive empire (defeated “Gaul” was the most important and powerful province of Rome after the First Century, and the relationship of Italy and Gaul got inverted, pacifically; soon enough, Carthage was again one of the Greco-Roman empire’s greatest cities).

Whereas some Jewish factions in Jerusalem opted to resist fanatically and murderously the Greco-Roman empire. Not all Jews did so, thus Judaism survived the eradication of the fanatics (differently from the Samaritans who fought as one, later, so only 3,000 are left, now…) Those vicious factions were based in Jerusalem, but not present among the dozens of thousands of Jews in Alexandria. After the second Jewish war, in 132-135 CE, the Jews were dispersed out of Israel, rebaptized “Palestina” on the occasion, so here we are…

***

Paleologue replied: “Thanks for the Cliff Notes version. I hadn’t realized they’d started off by killing 600 Roman soldiers. A fatal tactical blunder. Obviously the Zealots didn’t have a proper diplomatic corps, to put their case in more reasonable terms. Had they followed the advice of some in-house Gandhi figure, to suggest the non-violent way, they might have met with greater success. (They certainly couldn’t have done any worse.)

I do have a nice copy of Josephus sitting around. But it’s so heavy I have so far put off reading it. I do have kind of a long reading list already. Maybe I should bump it up a hundred places.”

Not just that, but an entire Roman legion, Legio XII Fulminata, was sent to re-establish order, and then, after evacuating Jerusalem, fell into an ambush. This time more than 6,000 Roman soldiers died, shocking the entire empire.

Reading Josephus is a must. One of the greatest classics ever, which even the crazed-out Christian monks found valuable enough to save. The Zealots, Sicari and others were into hatred and killing (as they showed by killing each other). Being out there to kill humans en masse is one of the most instinctive, if not the most sacred, mass behavior of humans. Because, without it, humanity would not exist anymore than it would, without love. Yeah, right, it’s crazy. But even more crazy to ignore it.

***

One thing is clear to me; those who claim to love Judaism should decrease their fanaticism, and tribal exaltation:

(Besides, it’s hypocritical as the inertness of American Jews demonstrated, when confronting Nazism: it’s the French Republic, which is not Jewish, but laic, which stood in the way of Nazism, not the Jews; as Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil pointed out, making lots of PC enemies in the process… Life among intellectuals would be devoid of spice without PC, Perfect Cretins…)

In particular, genital mutilation, a hallmark of Jews shouldn’t not have to be tolerated when visited on males more than it should be when visited on females. (Yes, there are good arguments for both; but good arguments can be found for anything, whatsoever, if one changes one’s parameters to crazy enough…)

Jewish fanaticism backfired many times in history. (Christian fanaticism was, mostly, done away with, and mostly an imperial tool, anyway; but Christians never claimed to have been given a piece of land by their own private god… Only the all too secular Charlemagne gave land to the Pope…)

Now the Jews claim they own the land of Israel. They have a good historical case, but moderation is key. Punics, Celts, the Franks, and all sorts of Germans and the Saxons saw the light, when confronted to higher civilization, and, after fighting it, learned the mistakes of their ways, and embraced it. (By 950 CE, the Saxons had become the pillar of the Franco-Roman empire, while Western Francia disintegrated in 63 political authorities…) 

The problem with, and the force of, Judaism is tribalism. Tribalism without a higher cause is just racism. Some will say the god of the tribe is enough of a higher cause. Not so. The tribal god himself needs a higher, universal cause: this is why Catholicism became universal (Catholic means universal). This is also why Islamism became universal (it has universal pretense, although it’s to call for the killing all sorts of people)

Now, pleasing the empire is more important than ever. Because the empire, and its enemies, have never been more powerful. A mistake or two, and billions of people could end up dead.

Thus those who cultivate tribalism and exclusion, as if they were delicate flowers of the greatest value, tickle the dragon. The thermonuclear dragon. Let us remind them their gods are of the highest immorality.

Patrice Ayme’

Globalocracy, Obama, Trump, High Water

A week ago today, Trump was sure to lose, the globalocrats were saying from every roof. A week ago today, the plutocracy owned media was red-hot hysterical against Trump, a lonely guy, while Hollywood was surrounding Clinton, singing, praising, celebrating her, insulting him. Bruce Springsteen made a long speech before a concert, psychoanalyzing Trump, telling us what a pervert egoistic psychopath he was (I am sure horny Bruce is trying to be invited at the White House now).

A week ago, the establishments, from dumb academia to corrupt Main Stream Media, were sure that my year old prediction that Trump would beat Clinton was assuredly madness. Intellectually corrupt Krugman was filling up pages of crooked polls supposed to demonstrate Clinton’s intrinsic superiority and manifest destiny (as if how well one polled had anything to do with ideas, and was of any bearing! But that is what one expects from dumb people grasping at straws). 

A week later, the fascist corporations which profited so much from Obama’s rule are down 10% on the stock market. The aghast Googles, Booked Faces, Bad Apples, Tax Cheating, Ruthless Amazons, & their captive or captured media, Corrupt Electrifying Generals, Micro Softs in the head, etc. They had a good deal with the Deep State: pay no tax, then expand on the empire worldwide, using corrupt justice and corrupt political leaders, worldwide…Trump was very clear he was not going to persist with that deal, thus joining Snowden, Wikileaks and yours truly. (At least, so he spoke, trying to seduce those who wanted to be persuaded!)

Having Discovered The Wall Already Exists, Trump Concedes that “a fence will be enough in some places”. Existing Wall Between USA and Mexico. Notice there is also a formidable fence. And two patrolling roads.

Idiots will bemoan the collapse of corrupt technological monopolies doubling as spy agencies. The opposite is true. Those giant fascist corporate monopolies of the global corruptocracy have ruined technology and the Patent System, in particular.

Obama gave a press conference. Obama was subdued, meditative. Trump’s election has made him much more reflective. One could say: philosophical. Politics is practical philosophy. In substance Obama said: People have spoken D T will be the next president. That’s how democracy works. It takes a while for people to reconcile themselves with that new reality. We differ on a  whole bunch of issues so I am concerned, yet the office of the president changes the office holder, including his/her mood.

Obama praised Trump for his connection with the American People. He said that Trump saw some things others had not seen, and created a movement. Indeed, he did: the post-election analysis is out, and the results are shattering. Compared to Romney, Trump gained 8% on Hispanics (so Clinton touring with a would-be murderess once promoted by Trump, did not turn out as well as expected, surprise, surprise…)

One thing I disagreed with was Obama drinking from a styrofoam cup. What about one of these nice White House embossed ceramic, re-usable cups? Styrofoam, and no-use plastic things are going to be outlawed. Show us the way, Barry!

Obama legitimately said that his was the most ethical administration. Yes. And well, no: Obama did not control to lobbying mood. High level officials left his administration early, to go out and earn multi-million dollars incomes. The way out of that is to outlaw lobbying for years after leaving government (Trump has suggested a lobbying block of five years; I would make it ten years against income, five, free of charge).  

On the globalocracy, Obama said correct things. Finally. But he was not very clear that globalocracy should never, ever, contradict local democracy (except when it is a war authorization, as the French Republic got from the United Nations before striking in Libya to save Benghazi.

By the way, on Syria, Obama said the situation was now a mess, and there is nothing obvious one can do. Right. That’s why Assad, and his closest entourage, should have struck down, when France was ready to go it alone with the USA. Nothing wrong about the two top military powers of the West striking together a rogue, mass murdering dictator. Rogue, mass murdering dictators should always be struck. First, because of the danger of contagion through example. 

My idea was just to replace him with some other Alawite general. On Libya, the ball was dropped. Now it has to be picked up again. An empire has to be extended.

Obama was asked what he thought of Trump, after talking to him one on one for 90 minutes; he called Trump “pragmatic”. Trump will need pragmatism to sail the Acqua Alta. Here is a picture of Venice, November 2016:

Flooding, Worldwide, Is Accelerating. As Expected. Trump Has Already Made Noises That Renewables Are An Economic Asset of the USA.

I think that the interdiction of being elected more than twice in a row is correct, but somebody like Obama should be able to run again, sometimes in the future. So an advice to Obama: get your loud mouth, smart ass wife in politics. She would make a good president, sometimes in the future, come to think of it.  

Trump spent 90 minutes talking one on one with Obama. In a tight schedule, the meeting was supposed to last only 15 minutes. None of this is demanded by the US Constitution. And some transitions, even modern ones, have been extremely nasty, complete with ripped phones. Trump talking about Obama:“I told him I will look at his suggestions, and out of respect, I will do that.” Trump said he also looked forward meeting with Obama many times in the future, apparently to profit from this well of wisdom.

Meanwhile Trump was interviewed, and was boringly reasonable all over. Yes, the Wall with Mexico could just be a fence in some places. On hundreds of miles, the present wall is just deadly desert. A Wall would save hundreds of lives a year.

Trump is forced by law to accept a presidential salary. So he will take a one dollar a year salary. (instead of 400 K). He also says:”there is so much to do, we will not be big on vacations.” Trump is also digging in about terms limits for politicians, in a full confrontation with the Republican held Senate.

Trump was given a security briefing, a while ago, with top generals. He listened. Then he asked:”Do you know what a continuous pour is?” Nobody did. Finally a top general confessed his ignorance. So Trump explained what it was. Superficial message: I know stuff, too. The Economist was dismissive of Trump, saying he knew nothing. I think that it is rather the editors at The Economist who know nothing outside of what their masters tell them. Actually Trump may be the best prepared president. Ever. After all, he is a 70 year old builder of great buildings, and a business empire. When Obama got to power, he was smart, but all too young and inexperienced.

(And please don’t tell me JFK was experienced. Yes, he was a great war hero, and that made him experienced. And a Senator, and a scion of plutocrat, worth billions. However, as Allen Dulles pointed out:”That little Kennedy, he thought he was god.” Hint: nothing that a few bullets from several directions could not cure… JFK had uncautiously fired Dulles from his own creation, the CIA… But now the CIA has created the Daily Kos, which feeds the sick minds of the little protesters in the streets, and the situation has got worse…)

So what is a continuous pour? When building a great building, the foundation, a giant concrete pool, meters thick, has to be poured in one flow. So concrete trucks line up, sometimes for many city blocks in the case of a giant skyscraper (like Trump Tower). Then the pour is effected, in a matter of hours, truck after truck, with up to 16 trucks dumping concrete simultaneously. In California, the world’s largest pours have seen more than 40,000 tons poured over 24 hours (giant towers in California have also the world’s deepest foundations, around 80 meters, out of respect for giant quakes).

Obama did not know about continuous pour. That is why he waited the end of his doomed presidency for a constant pour of executive orders. A president who wants really to change things will have to engaged in a continuous pour. Trump is perfectly aware of it, that was his secret message. (BTW, FDR did the mother of all continous pour; his transition from Hoover was full of hatred. FDR cruised on a yacht, for weeks, full of contempt for the lame duck president…)

Meanwhile, the super Moon, in combination with global warming, flooded Miami Beach. Trump is getting flooded, even immersed, by reality. Right away. Expect him to love it: that man loves to fight. The Wall he will have to build is the one with the ocean.

Patrice Ayme’

Golden Rule Reassessed

The so-called “Golden Rule” is never to do to others what one would not like others to do to oneself. Or variation thereof. It implicitly, and naively, assumes people don’t like to suffer, or to inflict pain and extermination onto everybody. It also assumes that right and wrong are sharply defined, like night and day (that is literally the root of the religion known as Manichaeism) Thus the Golden Rule is inapplicable: history, Christianism, Islamism are full of people, or even a “God” who is a glutton for pain, punishment, suffering, even when applied to oneself, not just others.

Buddhism is different that way. It just as naively assumes that people want to avoid suffering at all cost. But if we did this, it’s not clear we could exist. Life is full of pains, and that’s alright, because that’s how we pay for it. Actually the best way would be to absorb a deadly dose of barbiturates, and be done, Marilyn Monroe style.

Thus, fundamentally, Buddhism is so irrelevant, as to be inhuman (whereas Christianism and Islamism are all too human!) Pain and suffering are intrinsically human. Pain and suffering are regulators of the human species. Regulation by pain and suffering is not a necessary consequence of the animal condition. Pain and suffering do not necessarily regulate all species. They do not regulate marmots. When marmots come out of hibernation, the head marmot considers her folk, and how many have died over winter. She wants a group of between 15 and 21 individuals. Say three have died: she asks her consort to make her three little ones. Then she turns on a pheromone to turn him off. 

Humans Are Not Marmots. Agent Of Evolution Such as Human Beings Are Made For Deception, And Destruction, Not Contraception

The dominant female cannot bear more than two to four babies. If she is unable to replenish the colony, all by herself, she makes it so that her consort impregnates another female. Thus marmots are made for the Golden Rule: they regulate their population in a very gentle, specific way. Humans do not regulate their population through fancy birth control, but through mayhem, pain, suffering, deprivation, famine.

Reciprocal perversity, not just reciprocal altruism, is then intrinsic to the human species: this . Higher wisdom consists not in denying reality,  but in circumnavigating it, for the best. We have so much technology, nowadays, the fanciest moral principles can be brought to bear.     

Take an example. The cases of Mr. Assange (an Australian citizen) and Mr. Snowden (an US citizen). Assange and Snowden are the two most prominent whistle-blowers in the world (lanceurs d’alerte, alarm launchers, literally, in French).

Julian Assange revealed that US military forces, using an attack helicopter, had killed journalists, and then fired again and again, on would-be rescuers. One would think that US authorities, were they compatible with the Golden Rule as traditionally interpreted, and the Jesus god Obama talks about all the time, would have tanked Assange for this revelation. After all, a democracy should have armed forces beyond any suspicion. (The military forces of the UK, the US and France went through the Second World War without extremely blatant, shocking war crimes committed, although the Americans were ruthless, the French somewhat vengeful, and both the French and British suffered striking war crimes from Nazi forces in May-June 1940). 

Instead of lauding Assange, the Washington government has gone all out to capture Assange, and had an ex-CIA agent accusing him of unclear activities. The same violent treatment was extended to Edward Snowden, who had the presence of mind to escape to Russia (making Putin a force for the good!) Snowden’s crime was to reveal that the so-called “social networks” and “search engines” of the USA were actually spy networks searching for miscreants. That, in turn, brought many questions, including how much of world public opinion is fabricated deliberately by the US “Deep State”.

Philosophically, it means the Obama administration had it all wrong. At least all wrong, if, and only if, democracy is what it wants to preserve. In democracy, or justice, and democracy is about justice for all, as all, information is the prime ingredient. A really democratic state will never, ever pursue information providers. Whistle-blowers are among the saints of democracy. 

Assange and Snowden made precious gifts to US democracy. In answer, Obama offered We The People a poisoned dish: serving rabid nationalism the frantic fever of blind vengeance, forgetting that revealing crimes against democracy should be rewarded, not punished.

None of this is an accident, it’s a system, white as the driven snow, same as a polar bear on a rampage, and for the same reason. Ask the average democratic voters: they will telly you Hillary Clinton is more “Golden Rule” than her friend and rival, Donald Trump. As Bill Moyers put it, in his essay, “Anatomy of the Deep State“:

“Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory.”

Take another example: tolerance. Many feel, rightly, that the Golden Rule should include tolerance. Tolerance is necessary to be nice to others. Tolerance goes beyond just being nice to others. It’s about being nice to oneself, be it only by becoming smarter.

Tolerance is, fundamentally, a neurobiological problem. Any brain is a set of neuroglial networks. Any seriously new idea, or new emotion, is a threat against one, or several elements of that set. To welcome the threat requires a deliberate effort. One needs to train oneself to such mental gymnastics, deconstructing, fusioning and rebuilding. Mind. Tolerance is necessary for adopting superior ideas, and feelings, discarding inferior ones.

How does one train for tolerance? One should not be proud of being a citizen of some predigested, mass mental system. Instead one should be ashamed. Instead of following the herd, bleating altogether, one should shout from rooftops: “I am a citizen of the mind“.

The Golden Rule is thus, in part, necessarily, just from the inclusion of tolerance, about building a better mind. And tolerance is not easy to foster (as shown by the local interdiction of “burkini” on some beaches in France. See #tolerance). Tolerance for intolerance is not tolerance, but, potentially, its exact opposite:collaborating with mental fascism. We can see that the traditional Golden Rule is not easy to apply.

The real Golden Rule of humanity is that deeper thinking always works best, in the long run. For all that is the most worth it.  

Patrice Ayme’

Russian Jet Downed By Islamizing Turkey

Big wars have started for much less. What we know is this: a Sukhoi 24 Swing Wing Tactical Bomber, a work horse of the Russian Air Force, in service for decades, was shot down by Turkish F16s. Putin, rightly, called it “a stab in the back“. Except, as we will see, Turkey is pursuing an imperial dream, and hoping to get leverage from NATO to do so. Both of those dreams are nightmares which make the Islamist State a walk in the park, in comparison. And Obama’s Islamist wet dream is much to blame, as I will explain

The Captain and the Navigator ejected safely, but Pro-Turkey anti-Assad rebels fired on the parachuting crew, killing one of them. The latter fact is a direct violation of the Geneva Convention:  attacking people parachuting from an aircraft in distress is a war crime under Protocol I in addition to the 1949 Geneva Conventions. They also fired on a rescuing Russian helicopter, killing one Russian marine.

According to a document leaked by Wikileaks, the Turkish government admitted that the plane was over a saillant of Turkish territory, for only 17 (seventeen) seconds, just around the time it takes for a full yawn.

The Russian who survived got the top prize as a navigator, a few years back. As well as denying Ankara’s assertions that the plane was in Turkey’s airspace, navigator Murakhtin, who says he knows the mission area “like the back of my hand,” also refuted Turkish officials’ claims that the pilots were warned repeatedly.

Clearly A Deliberate Aggression Of NATO Backed Turkey

“In actual fact, there were no warnings at all. Neither through the radio, nor visually, so we did not at any point adjust our course. You need to understand the difference in speed between a tactical bomber like a Su-24, and that of the F16. If they wanted to warn us, they could have sat on our wing,” said Murakhtin, who is currently recuperating at Russia’s air base in Latakia, northern Syria. This is indeed correct. The F16 is much faster and maneuverable. The Turks shot down a Russian plane, which indisputably fell in Syria, because they wanted to shoot down a Russian plane.

The consequence is that now Putin is going to bring all sorts of deadly missiles and planes to cover Russian tactical bombing. Some Russian anti-aircraft missiles can go 400 kilometers, at Mach 4. For a little while, France flew its bombers without armed escort, but that would have to change if the Russians get really trigger happy, Turkish style (except the Turks really indented harm, obviously).

The Russian navigator made an astounding admission: “As it was, the missile hit the back of our plane out of nowhere. We didn’t even have time to make an evasive maneuver.”

It brings questions on Russian MAWS (Missile Warning Systems). These are generally connected to various counter-measures, such as taking evasive action, ejecting flares, or flashing lasers at the incoming missile.

More generally, NATO may ponder its association with Turkey. Having Turkey drag NATO into a conflict with Russia is a NO-NO. Turkey Islamizing government has been playing a very complicated game. In particular by using Islamist tricks to support a fighting force of 10,000 “Turkmen” whom it has tried to Islamize, using the Muslim Brotherhood. The idea has been to block the Kurds, whom Turkey also directly bombs.

On February 21, 2015, Turkey launched an invasion of Syria by 500 men supported by tanks and warplanes, to open the mausoleum of the medieval warlord Shah Suleiman, the grandfather of the first Uthmanid emperor Osman Gazi ben Ertugruo. They removed the remains of this man who died 779 years ago, and brought them back to safe ground.

This curious foray may sound pretty crazy, but there is a general method to it. Neo-Ottoman fantasies are taking a growing grip on Turkish leaders’ imaginations. They see the Arab Spring as an opportunity to rebuild the region as an empire with Istanbul as capital, no less. And now they have won elections, giving them 5 years to pursue Islamization, their way.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu wants to build a born-again Ottoman Empire, in which Istanbul would “reintegrate the Balkan region, Middle East and Caucasus”. Hey, if Russia can try to do it, so can Ankara.

Turkey’s religious-right government has imposed an Islamist leadership on the insurgents fighting Bashar al-Assad, using as elsewhere in the region, a cooperation with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Those who were so much against European empire may some day discover reality: nature abhors a vacuum. Taking Europe out, brings back Turkey. Europe spent a millennium fighting Turkmen in the Middle East. A combined assault led mostly by Russians, Greeks, French and British (and let’s not forget the Australians at Gallipoli), in the last 300 years, succeeded to push Turkmen back to Anatolia (which they invaded less than 1,000 years ago).

However the Turkmen’s mentality exterminated or ejected millions of Greeks, Armenians and Kurds in the last century. So Turkish imperial fascist ways have stayed strong.

The Muslim Brotherhood resisted the secularising, Arab-nationalist Ba’ath, starting in 1963. Later it capitalized on protests provoked by high prices and housing shortages. This set off a cycle of violence which ended in the regime of Assad father ’s destroying the Brotherhood in a 1980 carnage with a city annihilated and more than 25,000 dead.

Liberals are aghast that the Muslim Brotherhood has hijacked their revolution. The truth is that Islam is a deep network, not just underground, but neurologically: a war religion perceived as a religion of peace, it has got all its bases covered.

For the West, the ongoing war is becoming increasingly a moment of truth. In 2009, United States’ president Obama went to Cairo to sing the praises of Islam. He thought that was smart, modern, In truth, that was a return to the Middle Ages.

More specifically, Obama’s told his aides that there are tensions between the Muslim and the West which root in colonialism. Sorry, Bambi, the roots are much deeper than that. The roots themselves are as deep as the word “Europe”. Because that word got used by the Franks to symbolize their resistance to the Islamist invasions.

Obama also said that he knows from his personal experience that the West and the Islam are not separate worlds because they share things such as love of God and family. Except God does not exist, and families always exist, so Obama was just agitating his tongue. He may as well have evoked the Moon.

Ever since the USA and Europe have put their faith in the “moderate jihadist”, a unicorn-like beast spitting fire, great killer of unbelievers, idolaters, apostates, pagans, other Muslims, Yazidis, and all enemies of God, yet respectable enough, admired by Obama, and a lover of families.

Now, it seems that this intriguing chase of the impossible presents some disagreements, such as Jihadists in our midst, killing the “idolaters” of music and cafes. The West must choose between going on, enunciating non-sense about Islam’s goodness, or reluctantly accept Bashar al-Assad’s brutally secularist regime as the less bad of a set of options which are all bad. But an increasingly insanely aggressive, Islamizing Turkey is potentially a much worse problem than Assad.

Speaking of encroaching insanity, Putin has been trying to amend his ways. He should be encouraged to do so. Meta-policy consists in encouraging the good moods.

When Obama went to Cairo to encourage Islam, he made the immense moral and strategic mistake of encouraging “Islam” (When talking about Algebra, no need to thank Islam; actually a Greco-Indian invention). Encouraging Islam just encourages war, because war is what the Qur’an is mostly about (read it!) So now Obama has got what his mood led to: more Islam, that is, more war. He compounded this when he refused to punish Assad personally for mass gas attacks. So now Assad is all what secularists have to work with (besides the Kurds). Putin agrees. No choice. Simply the West should try to protect secular rebels… who have to buy oil from… the Islamist State. War is complicated, always.

But the war we have, ultimately, is one between the mood leading to secular, direct democracy and its enemy, Islam, an objective ally of tyranny (read the Qur’an!) and plutocracy. That God Obama loves and respects so much, plans to destroy all of humanity (read the Qur’an, especially the latter Suras). What is more satanic?

Patrice Ayme’

Annex 1; Obama in Cairo: …”a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles…” How can one put a state (the USA) explicitly founded as secular, in the same category as a superstition (Islam)? Obama also deliberately hijacked the famous Washington-Adams declaration on the secularism of the USA, which I have quoted many times, well before 2009. Obama selectively sampled it, like a disk jockey from hell, cutting out the secular part, to make it sound pro-Muslim. So now Obama has got the Islamist State which, he says, is not a State of Islam, but the work of Satan: Commander-in-Chief of the Truly Faithful? The mood of theocracy spreading got (re)launched in the West, by the USA, during McCarthyism, and has made Western leaders mushy in the mind. But then you can call Obama a McCarthyist, and that’s great fun.

Annex 2: Lawmakers from the Kremlin-friendly A Just Russia party introduced a bill calling for a maximum punishment of five years in jail for those who deny that the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turkey in 1915 was a genocide. (France recognizes formally the Armenian Genocide, since 2001, but, differently from the Jewish Genocide, denial is not punished by law.)

Islam: Lies & War Above Peace

More than 99% of known religions are, by the standards of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, not just evil, but illegal. And that includes Catholicism as practiced in, say, France, in 1700 CE.

The Islamist State has an ideology, and its name is Literal Islam, the one and only (anybody else is an apostate and Allâh ordered to kill them). John Oliver about the fuc*ing giant ass*olery which masquerades as something honorable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUzNcu0fhJw

The “Enlightenment”, mostly a French centric invention, consisted in asserting the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and destroy whatever was in the way of those rights, to impose them universally. When the French Republic declared war to the Nazi Reich (and to Hitler’s ally, the USSR), on September 3, 1939, it was more of the same. It was precisely to destroy ideologies which industrially violated the Rights of Man, while claiming to be for peace, freeing minorities, fighting an unfair treaty which had freed Eastern Europe, saving the pure races from bastardization, rescuing civilization, fighting “plutocrats” and all the grossest lies the Nazis could possibly imagine. As we will see below, the ideology known as Islam rests on a similar dynamic of the grossest lies.

Islamophilia Kills

[ISIS declared that going to concerts or bars was “idolatry”, and that’s punished by death, according to the Qur’an, the message of Allah.]

The going was tough for France in 1940, and not just because of unusual left field attack planned by a couple of Nazi generals. That was recoverable, but not the attitude of the USA then. Indeed the USA, at the time did not hesitate to violate its mother, France, to advance American business (also known, aka, as plutocrats). So the USA helped, de facto, in more ways than one, the Nazis, by operating the same bait and switch as in World War One. Germany ended with 10% of its population killed, the European Jews got nearly annihilated, etc.

France would not have been occupied in 1940, if only the USA had barked (because the French Air Force has the means of counter-attack). But, instead of barking, Roosevelt recognized Vichy, a subsidiary of Hitler, as the legitimate French State (it was not).

Fortunately, the present American leadership has learned from the history of infamy to which Roosevelt and his accomplices brought so much. President Hollande proclaimed yesterday the USA and France to be “sisters”, and the U.S. Secretary of State, basking in front of the Red White And Blue U.S. embassy in Paris, proclaimed that the USA and France were “the same family”. Whereas Roosevelt disliked France intensely (after all, he was a plutocrat from a long lineage of plutocrats), Obama loves France (discreetly).

Islamophiles claim that “Islam is a religion of peace”. They also claim Islam respects other religions. Both statements indicate they have not read the Qur’an. They are sheer propaganda, but an extremely old, crafty and interlocked propaganda, set during the bloody decades when  Islam, and its various strifes and hatreds got established.

One call to violence in a religious text is enough to make the religion in question violent. Roughly 10% of the 80,000 words Qur’an are sheer calls to violence: please consult my “Violence in the Holy Qur’an” which consists of violent quotes from the Qur’an. They cannot be explained away.

One call to murder in a religion’s most sacred text, especially to murder of the obviously innocent, is enough, in my own sacred book of humanity, to make such a religion a call to holocaust.

In the New Testament, Jesus calls, in a few places, to murder “unbelievers”. There are not many of these quotes. Indeed, one is enough. Then, in the name of the Bible, “believers” could go out and kill millions of “unbelievers” (millions of those were Europeans). In the Qur’an, there are probably hundreds of calls to murder of entire categories of people. When ISIS struck in Paris, it said it had killed “idolaters” (one of the categories the Qur’an marks for murder.

So how come people who are often viewed as intelligent proclaim that “Islam is a religion of peace”? Because Islam says so. (Hitler said he was protecting minorities: hundreds of millions, not just Germans, but also Americans, believed him.)

Islam says it is a religion of peace, and this lie has elements of truth in it: surely, when you are dead, you are at peace.

What happened was this: the revelations of the “recitation” (= Qur’an) happened to Muhammad over a number of years. During those years the so-called “Messenger” was attacking caravans he was raiding, Jews whom he wanted to annihilate, and making war to Mecca who viewed Muhammad stridently revised Judeo-Christianism a threat to the holy city’s thriving religious business, led by the goddess Moon and 365 lesser deities, plus the same old meteorite Muslims turn around to this day (so Muslims are actually reproducing the acts of 2,000 year old, pre-Islamist IDOLATRY, ironically enough for people who want to kill all idolaters: why don’t they start with themselves?… Ah, but, yes, of course, I forgot, that’s the exact idea of suicide attacks…)

Muhammad won an important battle against Mecca, where he was born, from the leading family.

So Muhammad had to tame mighty Mecca, lest the city go in a total war mode. And, instead Muhammad had to make sure Mecca would accept to lose a few battles graciously. Thus Muhammad was accommodating, and made gentle statements, such as:’you can have your religion, I can have mine’. Muslim scholars interpret this as Muhammad being under duress.

Here comes the all important concept of taqiyya, or lying when in fear: it’s OK to do so. (It’s also OK to lie to reconcile a couple, or to get a woman in bed.).

Taqiyya appears in Sura 3:28:

“Let not the believers take the unbelievers for friends; and whoever does this, shall have nothing to do with Allâh in any matter; unless you do this to protect yourselves from the unbelievers.  Thus Allâh cautions you to have reverence only for him. To Allâh is destiny.”

[My translation.]

Regarding 3:28, Ibn Kathir writes, “… believers who in some areas or times fear for their safety from the disbelievers… are allowed to show friendship to the disbelievers outwardly, but never inwardly.” Ibn Kafthir quotes Muhammad‘s companion, Abu Ad-Darda’, who said “we smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them,” and Al-Hasan who said that “dissimulation (Tuqyah) is acceptable till the Day of Resurrection.”

How can you have peace when you are supposed to religiously lie to “Non-believers”?

So what of that Islam is peace BS? How do we know that Islamist scholars who believe in the Qur’an, all of the Qur’an and nothing but the Qur’an, know that it is BS? Especially once completed by the much worse Hadith?

A common defense of Islam is to say that, like the Bible, there is everything, including the kitchen sink, in the text, so one cannot single out one or two bad elements. Out of just 80,000 words, the argument is obviously ridiculous: I publish as many words in barely more than a month, and I don’t include the kitchen sink.

As I said, there are more than 10,000 words in the worst verses of the Qur’an, many of them, lethal orders to kill. In this age, when the rage against plutocrats and their obsequious servants is so high, the orders to kill miscreants can only make a sacred text very tempting.

I claim the orders to kill miscreants, unbelievers. “idolaters” (ISIS word of the week), pagans, apostates supersede the “religion of peace” aspect.

Why? Because Muhammad feared for his life from Mecca and his own tribe, when he made this call: it’s straightforward taqiyya. Moreover, there is a general metaprinciple that a later verse takes precedence over an earlier verse. When Muhammad was dictator of Mecca (not expecting to die at the early age of 61), he issued the orders of “God” (namely himself), right and left, and for no good reason whatsoever (at least by then 15 centuries old Roman law standards).

Hopefully the holy alliance of France with the USA (“sister” country, said president Hollande… Actually, daughter) and rogue, but repenting Russia, will stamp out the Islamist State within months.

No pity should be shown, and heavy, relentless bombing used. Special Forces should be sent, in vast quantities. The three countries have plenty of them. A deal should be made with some of Saddam Hussein’s old officers, presently in ISIS.

In May 1940, France fought the unholy alliance of Hitler, Stalin and their friends, financiers, technologists and enablers, American plutocrats, not so discreetly supported by the American Congress and the White House.

This time Putin is no Stalin (I must admit with a reluctant smile) and president Obama is no (plutocratic and French backstabber) Roosevelt. Who said there could not be progress.?

A unique occasion is offering itself to get rid forever of Literal Islamism, as we got rid of Literal Christianism during the Enlightenment. Let’s outlaw the former, as we did the latter. Ferocity for the better is in order. Let’s go. This is how to recover an Islam we can live with, a seriously improved version of the one the Persian Caliphate knew, in the age of the House of Wisdom.

Patrice Ayme’

Religion: Delusion Serves Tribalization

[The following was censored by an American philosophy site. Why? It “exacerbates things”.]

In culturally advanced countries, such as the USA, religious believers with a modicum of general culture and awareness, know very well that, when they embrace a superstition, a so-called religion, they fancy something that is not the truth.

So what is going on? Why do they outwardly believe in something, that they truly do not believe in?

(For the purpose of this essay, I will override the joke that the difference between the USA and yogurt, is that yogurt has live culture.)

Thus believers know that they do not believe in the truth, they just have “faith” that they will get away with it. In advanced countries, believers have seen enough TV, and videos, to know this.

So why do they embrace something that they do not believe in, deep down inside? If you ask them, they will say because so did their parents, or that it’s a “tradition”.

Thus the motivation of believers is essentially tribal: I believe what my tribe believes, however absurd (and the more absurd, the more well defined it is). Religion is not just tribalism, it’s in-your-face tribalism. No wonder the so-called Islamist State behaves just the same. They heed the example generously provided by the USA (or, more exactly the leading, opinion making circles, of the USA; thus: are Islamists Americanists in heavy disguise?)

This is evidenced by the situation in Israel. Weirdly dressed people, often coming from overseas, namely the USA, have decided to occupy the land of others, and, if one observes this, they brandish racism, or even dark allusions to Nazism.

Tribalists always call critiques unduly offensive, or even racist and disrespectful of their religion (it is a sin, precisely because religion is tribal, and thus, attacking religion is attacking the tribe).

This, religion being a deliberate lie masking a tribal purpose, is why the god delusion has deflated in Europe: Europeans, deep inside, know that the old religions were essentially tribal excuses to go to war manipulated by elites for their own profit (see Israel again for a live example). And Europeans have had enough of wars.

(By the way, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine killed at least 4,500 people, it was announced today.)

The rejection of religion by Europeans was helped by the SS motto: “Gott Mit Uns” (God With Us). Nazism evoked “Gott” a lot, and Biblical semantics (superior race versus “Elected People”, “Lebensraum”, the vital space to the east, as in the Bible, in parallel with “Promised Land”, without counting the many god-organized genocides of the Bible, etc…)

It dawned on Europeans that the old elites walloped in faith. With the enthusiasm of various predatory beasts, walloping in gore. This is not meant to be an insult, by the way. It’s a description: predators rub themselves in the smell of decaying flesh of their prey to disguise their true nature, and make it easier to approach the next meal.

Thus Christianism did with love. Love was rubbed all over it, but the purpose was just the opposite: Christianism killed millions…. Yet, it did not even originate European style welfare, nationalization, and socialism (the Franks did that).

If, as I asserted, believers have made a conscious decision to believe in lies, what does that tell us? That here are people whose meta-ethics is lying.

Do we want to encourage this? Do we even want to tolerate this? Should this be viewed as a deviant psychological behavior? This is what somebody such as Dawkins believe. I do not like Dawkins on genes, but I approve him on that.

One cannot have faith, a faith one knows is a lie, a faith that lies should rule the minds, and it is of no consequence.

We encourage meta-lying by not calling, at least among intellectuals, the God Delusion for what it is. Not just a delusion, but a tribalization. The delusion of tribalization.

It is not a question of telling a child dying of cancer that god does not exist, and will not take care of her. I am ready, and I certainly will lie, in such a case, as I comfort a child, and not just a child, with such lies… And maybe they are not lies, gods know…

By the way, Christians ought to stop holding the Solstice hostage. The Winter Solstice feasts, complete with cut conifers, lights, decorations and gift giving, are known to be older than Christianism by more than five centuries.

An exasperated Imperator Augustus passed a law to limit the “Saturnials”, as the Romans called the solstice feasts, to less than three weeks.

In a debate among intellectuals, the connection between gods’ delusion and tribalization ought not to be censored.

That such a connection is censored in American “philosophical” sites is telling.

Primitives go to war. Those who claim to be primitive enough to persuade themselves that they are primitive, will also go to war, because, once they have persuaded themselves that they are primitive, they are free to act like the primitives they have persuaded themselves they are. When Bush invaded Iraq, in 2003, monolithic war thinking ruled all over. USA media systematically censored all my comments (although the New York Times editorial board was reading them for themselves, as they communicated with me).

Religionism is tribalism by another name. Tribes are the primitive war units. However, war fabricates history.

Europe is anxious to forget war. But the feeling is not reciprocal. The American leadership, by making sure that the population does not forget religion, thus tribalism, makes sure that most of the military budget of the planet originates in the USA.

Thus religion is at the core of the military-industrial complex. They are both strong in the USA, because they are related.

The USA was also spectacularly in denial about the poisoning of the biosphere by CO2. That, too, is related to religion: after all, why to worry? God is omnipotent, remember? And no need to do anything about a violent society, violent police, and the might of plutocrats: God is in charge.

Religion does not just organize tribalism, it can make it conservative, that is, in a few hands. Don’t ask why American universities censor agnosticism, ask why they should censor those who want a society less defined by the few, who make them rich.

Time to “exacerbate things“?

Patrice Ayme’