A Bridge Too Near

Science does not have a moral dimension. 
It is like a knife. 
If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer,
each will use it differently
--Wernher von Braun

___________________

[Note: "Circle Jerk III: The Frontier" coming soon.]

For the last few months we have been bombarded with emotional drivel about removing the statues of Confederate States of America heroes. (This being but one example of the copious multitudes of emotional drivel on the media tap that RAW chose to look at.)

But the opening football game of the ACC college season in Atlanta, GA, brought the matter into its technicolor hypocrisy for Ranger. Specifically, it was the location.

Why, you ask?

The game was held in the Mercedes Benz Stadium. You may know that Mercedes Benz, along with BMW, Volkswagon and IG Farben all supported Hitler with his racist fantasies. They robustly enabled his international criminality and crimes against humanity, and specifically, his program to eradicate the Jewish people.

All major German corporations actively engaged in the genocide by using slave labor subjected to abysmal conditions and starvation diets, and worked unto death, times. But it doesn't seem to bother us as we sit fatted before the football game in the stadium funded by their ill-gotten monies.

No, in fact, we are untroubled by the re-location of these same German industries to the Southeast right-to-work states in order that they may hire workers at one-third the cost they would have to pay workers in Germany -- and the U.S. workers have no benefits, to boot. This outrage gets nary a peep, while we seem to have the attention and energy to attack memorials of our own Civil War, and a few pathetic slogan-carriers who look like Cousin It frozen in time from the The Munsters.

While we see fit to attack our pathetic marginalia holding anti-Jewish signs at a march to retain Civil War memorial statues, we do not bother to attack anti-Semitism in all of its guises. In fact, it is a convenient good when enlisted by liberals to support a plethora of entrenched anti-Semitic organizations.

This is called "hypocrisy".

Are we the people who supposedly won War World II? Are we now become their servants?

Since we seem so keen these days to get up in arms, why do we not bulldoze their factories, and leave our CSA heritage alone?

Ranger would rather see a Confederate statue than a monument to a foreign-owned factory with blood on its hands employing non-Union labor to avoid paying what they would pay their own -- shades of 1945. Our Southern population is the newly-exploited cohort in a time-honored behavior for these companies.

And while we are in the protest mode, why not dismantle all NASA memorials to U.S. space programs since all or our efforts sprang from the efforts of SS Maj. Wernher von Braun and his Nazi comrades? Their factories also enslaved and starved workers in the V1 and V2 rocket experiments, experiments later happily assimilated by U.S. efforts.

This should be more egregious to us than a Confederate statue.

It's amazing how quickly we forget. Is it from convenience, poor education or lack of attention spans, or a combination thereof?

We vote for Rebels over historical Nazi corporations any day of the week.

What Did They Say Before Kristallnacht?

 --Mr. Holder's Lynch Mob 
 ______________________

[Lisa has been taking "news fasts" as an adjutant to a program of maintaining sanity and emotional equilibrium. Dr. Weil says it's a good thing, and she finds that nothing much has changed after a period away, anyway. However, what continues to stand out in sharp relief is the media's shameless bias and hatred.]

Take yesterday's Slate piece, "Jew Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me",  which uses the examples of disgraced public figures Weiner, Spitzer and Filner to ask, "Are Jews less likely to cheat? The data say no."  The title is neither funny, clever nor factually correct.

What an egregiously anti-Semetic non-descriptive title for this piece of non-reportage. This was not a story in the White Supremacist "Stormfront", but in a supposedly liberal, supposedly credible online magazine. Cocking my head, I thought, "O.K. -- someone thinks this is a clever title, probably borrowing from the Kenny Rogers song, but what does it have to do with the copy?"

When I asked Ranger why my feelings of revulsion at the title, he said correctly, "It's just offensive. It's racial profiling." And he's correct. Why is it that liberals -- who claim to be for the underdog -- cannot find sympathy for a people composing just .2% of the world's population? That is about 14 million people, versus say 1.6 Billion Muslims, who make up just under one-quarter (23%) of the world's population. Must not racially-profile Muslims or Blacks, but apparently we are happy keeping our old scapegoat the Jewish people in place.

The piece offers nothing beyond the author's decision to NOT BELIEVE a 2005 survey taken by the condom company Durex regarding its users self-reported behaviors. In that survey, Israelis were the LEAST LIKELY to respond they had an affair:

The survey included more than 300,000 people in 41 countries. On a list of possible “sexual experiences you’ve had,” the questionnaire asked respondents whether they’d ever had an “extramarital affair.” Israel came in dead last. Across the 41 countries, the average percentage of respondents who said they’d had an affair was 22. In Israel, it was 7.

Not one to be discouraged by facts, the creative statistician Saletan summates his piece with a Redbook survey of WOMEN to arrive at the non-conclusive statement that Protestants cheat probably a little more than Jews or Catholics. And this passes for reportage in an otherwise respectable publication. So ... why the pejorative title? 

Is this not as offensive as going through the list of black personages who have cheated and calling them "Mandingos" or some such? Why is Slate singling out one racial group and suggesting they suffer from a racial taint, as the result of a handful of examples? Is there a useful or positive message behind this non-story?

This is akin to the offensive "driving while black (DWB)"; we will call it, "Living While Jewish (LWJ)". Just as with blacks of a previous generation, Jewish people must be twice as good as a white Christian person to be free of contempt. This is probably a sour grapes extension of the Zimmerman non-story: Because some in the press are disappointed over not being able to skewer a Jew as a gunman (Zimmerman = not) killing one of their ACLU buddies (a black), they will go after their target population in another way. By any means necessary to disguise the egg on your face.

However, instead of the offensive and misleading title (these men did not leave their wives), why not ask compelling questions about these disgraced men like, "Did they remain married after their transgressions? Do they pay for their children and their family? Their schooling? Do they marry their sweet things more often, and do their offspring tend to matriculate into college more often?

"Disgraced" -- an interesting term, no? For the usually irreligionist Left, grace would seem to infer a status of moral rectitude, and morality is something enlightened Slate writer Saletan and ilk would argue vehemently against. Yet exploit the concept of morality they do.

Anyway, it's all piffle, right? Someone's misguided effort at humor, or not-so-cloaked prejudice. Hardly worth a look.

A tidbit for your Sunday.

{As an aside, my friend Alex Lickerman has written a brief piece today on morality fr. a Buddhist MD's perspective @ his blog,  HappinessInThisWorld.}

Media Lynch Mob

Everybody's so busy wanting to be down
with the gang.
"I'm conservative", "I'm liberal",
"I'm conservative". Bullshit!
Be a fucking person! Lis-ten!
Let it swirl around your head.
Then form your opinion.
No normal, decent person is one thing, okay?
--Chris Rock

The cops reported you as just an another homicide
But I can tell that you were just frustrated
From living with Murder Incorporated
--Murder Incorporated,
Bruce Springsteen

one may smile, and smile,
and be a villain
--Hamlet, I. v
__________________

Rounding out race week: What it means to be liberal.

One of Ranger's associates once asked me, "So what are you?" after their discussion of their early years in Catholic school. "I'm a human" I said (thank you John Lennon), so absurd seemed the question, as though he could draw a bead on me via such categorization.

So how do we know who anyone is? We have been discussing the rush to judgement this week on the Trayvon Martin case. In legal matters, we come to know what's relevant based upon the workings of our legal system. If we no longer have faith in the process, we have a problem.

The quick and severe sectarianism even in the legitimate press over this issue has been shocking. Among the commentariat, if one sides for the guilt of Zimmerman, one is correctly liberal, and if one calls for delegating the matter to the authorities, one must be a bigot. I am confounded by the majority of my supposed fellows who cannot countenance my position of non-outrage over the non-revealed facts.

To be a liberal thinker is to be broad-minded and inclusive, to consider as many angles as possible, and to shut off no option until it becomes a dead-end or fails to jibe with the preponderance of the data one ingathers. Yet -- it seems today, liberal equates with toeing the party line, swallowing an agenda, being either-or. How did thought become so factionalized and such a bully point?

In the Martin case, what does this imply, this imperative to whitewash any possible culpability of the killed member of a confrontation if he is black and his killer is not? I am not making any judgement here, but simply asking the questions. Is this another opportunity for the anti-gun crowd to argue their agenda?

We have a race problem in this country; of this there is no doubt. It is Hobbesian in proportion, as it really is all against all. Of course, this is not admitted in polite company, but if you drive a mile across Division Street in most towns, you'll see it. It is confusing why we cannot seem to get it together. Part of the problem is that we are not brave enough to speak about it; part is that we -- none of us -- do not even understand it. Magical thinking -- not acknowledging the problem or erasing any culpability is not solving it.

There are some nuts and bolts deficiencies, but there are esoteric and philosophical aspects, too. It may be that people always need a scapegoat. Maybe we are lazy and scared, or angry, or a little of all. What seems clear is that we like to be outraged and like to feel righteous, but still, NIMBY rules the day for most.

I loved the "Portlandia" clip about the principles deep and abiding concern for the provenance and well-being of the chicken they were ordering at a restaurant, but the bottom line? They are going to eat Harold the chicken, providing his upbringing is devoid of enough terror so as not to upset their delicate equilibrium after ingesting him. And this is not to bang Portland (how wonderful to have a microbrew - cafe culture; I wish we had such a thing!)

So you can gussy it up and make eating meat a little more palatable, or you can stop eating it altogether. Your degree of conviction is what is on the chopping block.

All I'm saying is, we have some race problems, and we have people entrenched on both sides of the matter. The problem cannot be solved through outrage over one incident which only got print because of some salacious thinking in the hardcore liberal circles. The problem is not going to be fixed by throwing money at it; it is intransigent, and has thus far resisted the solutions offered.

So, you can get up in arms at the police, or call people pansies for not walking in the Tenderloin or being suspicious of a guy with a hoodie pulled over his head. But it's all about place and time, concealment and intent: A burqa, niqab or a chadri would arouse similar suspicions in our terror-fearing world, and what to do about that?

I'll stick with my original statement: Martin's death would have been a non-starter, save for some crime reporter picking up up on the novelty of the name of the shooter. By the time it went national, the reporters had only just discovered that Zimmerman was not only not white, that he was, in fact Hispanic and Catholic.

The Jewish students who campaigned for and died fighting in the American Civil Rights Movement are forgotten; it is a long-known sociological phenomenon that those who help pull you up are later resented for the inequity of power which they once represented.

In one of the more grotesque examples of the hatred in the Left, the radical's darling rag, CounterPunch (The Second Killing of Trayvon Martin), describes Zimmerman as "a pathetic, chubby, Chaz-Bono-lookalike" -- boy that really makes you bust a gut, huh?

Writer Eskow goes on to enjoy more schadenfreude at Zimmerman's expense: "Any man who lived through public high school knows George Zimmerman, and may well have had occasion to kick his ass," because, you know, George is fat and pathetic, and looks like a transgendered individual. Hey, let's laugh at some she-males ... do we feel bigger, yet?

And the final line delivers the knock-out punch: Zimmerman has "a shyster lawyer" -- surprise, surprise. So, dammit, we have missed the bus on finding a Jew perpetrator, but we can surely skewer a Jew sort-of accessory to the fact, right?

I see this media lynch mob as a prime example of racist bullying, and racism is racism. If you want to present as anti-racism Mr. Eskow, et. al, it would be really good if you were not racist.

So the liberals do the weighing act, and I guess up against the shysters and the alternatively-gendered buffoons, Mr. Martin in his hoodie is looking pretty good. Is this the best we can do in our efforts to ferret prejudicial rot out of our society?

You are either all in about civil rights and human rights and trust in the rule of law, or you wallow in a personal miasma in which you are constantly tallying up the score of least-reviled individuals based on your proximity to the perceived threat.

It looks like easy outrage has trumped rationality for the moment.

Sin City Mumbai

And so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong
--Happy Christmas, John Lennon

In 1993, Hindu mobs burned people alive in the streets
— for the crime of being Muslim in Mumbai.
Now these young Muslim men murdered people
in front of their families
--Suketu Mehta

Terror made me cruel
--Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
______________

Ghandi's words apply across the board.

This is just an observation on the recent bombings in Mumbai. While it is unclear exactly who is responsible, what is clear are the targets -- Americans and Brits, and members of a Jewish center, who were killed execution-style.

One theory voiced by a guest editorialist at the New York Times offered that Mumbai represents everything offensive to strict Muslims: it is the New Babylon pandering to affluent tourists, and it is Bollywood -- "Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness (What They Hate About Mumbai.) Taking this reasonable interpretation, one could understand the rationale behind a religious fundamentalist's offense, if not their murderous actions.

But why the Lubavitcher Chabad House?

The Lubavitchers are to Judaism what radical Islam is to its more assimilated members. They are ultraconservative, standing out even as odd relics in America, with the men in their peyot and heavy overcoats and covered heads, and women also in modest dress and head coverings who live in traditional family ways. The keep apart from "corrupt" society, like the Mennonites or the Amish, and reject modern society much as the radical Muslims do.

If the bombers are fundamentalist Muslims opposing corrupt society, their logical allies were they to cross the religious spectrum would be the very people they executed at the Jewish center. While I can suspend my disgust for a moment to see the Muslim rationale against modernity's corruption I cannot understand their lack of fellow-feeling with another fundamentalist religious group which also rejects such societal degradation, if that is indeed their cause célèbre.

I guess anti-Semitism always trumps any other concern.