Gaza Relief: Flat chicks for tiny guys

Ever ready to provide far more information than the average person wants to deal with, here I will give just a short bit of detail on flat boats, one of them being the Rachel Corrie, destination, supposedly at Gaza today or tomorrow.

What are some interesting facts about flatboats?

1. flatboats can hold up to 20 people, and 2. they were taken apart for lumber when they reached their destination.

wiki answers.

Even better, flat folks like Rachel Corrie can easily be stacked on deck or in the hold, laid flat or vertical. The best thing about a shipment of Rachel Corries to Gaza is that guys with really tiny dicks will impress the hell out of women like Rachel Corrie, given that she's about an inch thick.

Truth in Parody

Another excellent video: The Flotilla Choir, "We con the world."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOGG_osOoVg&annotation_id=annotation_665723&feature=iv

Thanks to Pajamas Media.

Teenager Stands for Israel in Mob of Jihadis

A teenager confronts a gang of irate Muslims in Los Angeles in the video here. Man, this is a work of beauty. This kid is fearless.

http://minx.cc/?post=302236

Oicos: The Human Ecology

A handful of jihadis died trying to run an Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Dogs bark at the moon. Men recite poetry around the fire.

Shield against shield
keep the shield wall tight.
And the gift of death
they bring, let no man take.
In the hospitality of war
we left them their dead
as a gift for them to remember us by.

Archilochus. (C. 680 B.C. - C. 645 B.C.)

Life imitates Art

Agon and Eros: Memorial Day

Today some people died in the never-ending theatre of war. Over all, it's just another day in the world.

Six ships out of Turkey bound for Gaza were intercepted in international waters, and the result, over a dozen dead jihadis and sympathizers aside, is that the world is now indulging in another hate-fest against Israel. We cannot expect anything else from the world as is. Who cares? What matters is how the follow-up turns out, whether the Israelis can maintain their military superiority, not just in physical terms but in terms of the will to win each and every conflict big or small till the enemy is beaten. But, is obvious, Israel is not interested in fighting, certainly not for the sake of concluding this Melian Dialogue. Too damn bad they won't drag the corpse of Hector in the dirt. Seems we can't remember that kind of life.

A dozen or so jihadis and dhimmi lackeys are dead on the Turkish ships. No one but friends and family will really care about them, but the dead themselves make great public relations props for the Jew-haters to fling into the arena as symbols of agony. That's life. We know how it goes. If Israelis were a different people they'd look with some sympathy on Stalin's observation that if one kills a dozen jihadis on the open seas it's a p.r. coup for the jihadis; but if one kills a million of them it's a statistic. Israelis aren't Stalinists; I could be.

Why do people in the West, which includes according to me those in India and Japan and Israel, care about Muslims in a continuing state of active jihad? Why take any side at all in a tiny and otherwise irrelevant local conflict between two minute populations in the world? It's generated by European Jew-hatred. When Jews kill a dozen jihadis, the Muslims go crazy on cue, as always, and the dhimmis fall in automatically, sponging off the hate as if it's their own. Then it becomes their own, more of the same but now second-hand and phony, though the best they can come up with. Nevertheless, it suits them fine. Any excuse will do.

It's got to be pretty tough for the average guy to get upset over Shlomo at the deli as the evil embodiment of The Jooos. How does one get outraged over Puah at the dry-cleaner's as a Christ-killer? It's embarrassing to pour all ones hatred onto a middle-aged fat lady who slips you cherry knishes on Friday afternoon. But that desire to hate EVIL is still there for many, those desperate to find the meaning of life in hating, hating so they can fill up the void of their lives with something really big and important and cosmic. Beating up on Lenny the delivery guy is kind of small when it comes to hating EVIL. What to do? Well, one can hate Jews in the abstract and fulfil ones hatred and need for meaning by hating Israel instead. For some lonely and empty people, hating EVIL in the guise of Israel is pretty hot, it being a popular theme with many significant backers, something almost certainly guaranteed to win one some praise as a moralist in larger realms than ones own little mind and privacy. No, pushing over Avi the computer repair guy and watching him suffer bleeding knees on the sidewalk is not cool. It's not even close to being MORAL. But reading the news and identifying with the OPPRESSED in Palestine, that's got some oomph in the circle of jerks we see here. It's safe, it's generally applauded, and it can satisfy ones need to be cool and full of something other than ones own petty privacy. Hating Jews can provide one with a Meaning of Life. Assuming of course that the Jews can be seen to be, can be made to seem to be EVIL. Punching Ruthie in the stomach because she's Jewish? No, that's not so cool.

Today is Memorial Day. Today is our day to remember and to honour our war dead. Some of us like to think, and this against the prevailing view today, that those war dead are men and women who sacrificed their lives for the purpose of the greater good of Mankind, to preserve freedom and common decency in the world under threat and barrage from tyrants. Some of us think it's an honour to fight to preserve the Good and to further it in the world. Some of us think it's a good thing to kill and die for freedom generally, not just our own but for the world. We call it Just War. Others call it just war. Those latter are all too willing oft times to support war against many who fight for freedom. Those latter seem to delight in being more moral than the moral. They go out of their ways to find some way to hate the good in hopes of being holy. Tbere's so much emptiness in the Hollow Men that they must fill the universe of personal emptiness to make a speck of difference, none that lasts. They can't remember ordinary and dirty war for freedom, the small and personal sufferings of men and women who died in battle and peripheral carnage, because it's too much like slapping Ephrat in the face, calling her a dirty Jew in front of party-going friends. No, those who hate as moralism need to hate on a large and impersonal scale so that no one knows they hate. Most would be shocked and disgusted by the person who actually hurt another physically and personally right there with others watching. That would be memorable, and this is not about being remembered as real, it's about being remembered as making a moralistic impression so one is invited back to the next party. One wishes to be remembered positively, not to remember those who died anonymously somewhere a long time ago somewhere far away. "Remember me." This is Memorial Day.

For the people on the ships in the flotilla today this will be the defining moment of their lives. They will never forget this event in all their days. The dozen or so dead will follow the living throughout their lives. For the living, death would likely have been the crowning event in their petty lives if only they too could have been remembered like those dead. Living with the memory of the dead will be almost as good. It will give them something "important" to fill their lives with. They will remember.

The sad joke of all this is that the jihadis who died on the ship didn't die to preserve the good or to bring common decency to others, they died to be martyrs to The Cause, a pretty forgettable reason for being. Those not involved in the incident today will forget about it, unless they're reminded constantly by the boors who have nothing else to yack about. It's not a memorable event, just one more shoddy deal done in offices and carried out by fools who know no better than to die in a grand gesture. This big event for a few will be forgotten almost immediately by most because it doesn't have any reason in it to be memorable. It was nothing bigger than a day's tactical work. It's just a bullshit ploy, though one that seems likely to work well, for what it is. Tomorrow or sometime soon there wil be another ploy. They're all forgettable because they aren't about people. These ploys are about filling the void with farts.

Who's taken in by this? Empty people are pleased with this kind of stinking gesture of grandness. Dying in a blaze of glory is pretty cool for some, and cool for those who afterwards can talk about having been there. For those who weren't there, this will last for a few days till some other noxious event takes over to fill the void momentarily, and so on. It's an empty gesture, this dying for The Cause. That's because the gesture is not anything to do with Humanity, only to do with some people back at the office who make a life at filling up their time with the meaningless. That meaninglessness looks far better when filled with hatred and murder, seems significant when it's coloured with blood. The ordinary and philistine qualities of making a living and raising children and contributing to maintaining the roadways and sewarage is too petty to fill the void of a meaningless life. Those with completely empty lives have to fill themselves with "meaning" rather than ordinary mediocrities or the stark awareness of their personal emptiness must be unbearable. For the Muslim, what else is there but death to break the monotony of living as a slave? For the Left dhimmi fascist, what else is there to fill up an empty existence but to cheer the biggest and loudest moralistic farts? Uh, nothing. There's nothing to remember in a long life of emptiness unless one can find vivid events of violence to make it memorable. But no one else will remember because it's not important to anyone else. Its not universal. It's just petty personality one day then, long ago, somewhere else. Boring. Forgettable.

We remember our war dead because they died not for their own vanity's sake but to preserve universal goodness and freedom in the world. Muslims and their dhimmi cheerleaders are just playing with themselves. I see this:

Fjordman, "Why I Write About History," Brussels Journal. 25 April 2010

[ I ] have come to realize that Islam is a secondary infection. Are Islamic teachings inherently violent? Yes. Can Islam be reformed? No. Can Islam be reconciled with our way of life? No. Is there such as thing as a moderate Islam? No. Can we continue to allow Muslims to settle in our countries? No. These few sentences contain all the information about Islam that you will ever need to know. It is still useful to know more about the way your enemy thinks and how to exploit his weaknesses, yet there is no point in spending too much time on studying the failed Islamic culture. Whatever you need to know can be found daily on websites such as Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch.

Our culture did many things right, but has gone horribly wrong along the way. The interesting question here is not what is wrong with Islam since Islam has always been wrong. The interesting question is what is wrong with us.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4438#comment

Our military people have done and still do great things for our nation and the world. That's why we remember them, happy to do so. No doubt some of our soldiers went to war for their own personal pleasure, for their own desires to do for themselves; but most likely went reluctantly and humbly for the sake of families and communities and the nation itself as a matter of doing some small thing for the Good even if it meant dying in the process. That's unlikely in this time among our own, that sense of communal responsibility among the common man. In large part, that's what's went wrong with our culture. Today there is a deep vanity among the common man, a need to be important, to be meaningful, to be grand. It comes often to looking to the void for fulfilment. The void offers "Art" and publicity; reality offers the dirty and petty realities of roofing tar on ones boots, sawdust in ones shirt, plaster on ones jeans. A problem is that so few want to build anything real. Hauling a truckload of dead mustangs to the dog-food cannery is far less interesting to the many than is making a documentary on the suffering of the Palestinian peoples. One can be morally outraged at the shooting of wild horses trampling a farm field, but to preserve ones livelihood, provide for oneself and family and community and nation is boring, hard, and often dirty and tiring when one is a builder. The moral of our story is polluted with vanity.

It's Memorial Day, and I don't recall any jihadis in particular, they being glory seeking enemies of mine. I'm happier when I find they're dead. They don't bring any feelings of sympathy. I recall our own.

Achilles, secure behind his shield, waited the approach of Hector. When he came within reach of his spear, Achilles, choosing with his eye a vulnerable part where the armour leaves the neck uncovered, aimed his spear at that part, and Hector fell, death-wounded. Feebly he said, "Spare my body! Let my parents ransom it, and let me receive funeral rites from the sons and daughters of Troy." To which Achilles replied, "Dog, name not ransom nor pity to me, on whom you have brought such dire distress. No! trust me, nought shall save thy carcass from the dogs. Though twenty ransoms and thy weight in gold were offered, I should refuse it all."

So saying, the son of Peleus stripped the body of its armor, and, fastening cords to the feet, tied them behind his chariot, leaving the body to trail along the ground. Then mounting the chariot he lashed the steeds and so dragged the body to and fro before the city.

Homer, "The Death of Hector"

That's what I remember: our glorious and our anonymous Achilles. I don't know or care that some savages died for vanity on the high seas at the hands of Israelis. I care about Achilles. In private moments I remember him, now dead.

Everybody dies, and there's some sadness when we know them and care and love those who die, especially those who die for our common good and the good of the world. I let them rest in my mind, giving them some quiet thought when I see the living benefit. I sometimes wave when I see the triumphant, those fortunate men and women who went home again to work at building. Those are the ones I remember this Memorial Day.

Canadian Blogger Assaulted by CUPE Jihadi

Blazing Catfur was video-taping a demonstration by Jihadis in Toronto yesterday when one of the latter walked across the street and assaulted him. Here's the video and commentary.

http://blazingcatfur.blogspot.com/2010/05/ali-mallah-cupe-union-thug-assaults.html

The Perfect Illusion

Below we have two clips from a short essay by Bertonneau on classical Gnosticism. What makes this particularly interesting is that we find obvious parallels between it and today's Left, as Voegelin would point out in a different way. Bertonneau moves from Voegelin to the main source for some clearer background than one finds in Voegelin, a big help to those who come to Voegelin from Archaeology of Religion. Or, to be a bit clearer myself, we see in these clips that Gnosticism has its own history, which Voegelin is happy to work from. The current lot in political power in Washington, "brilliant" as they are, likely have no ideas about any of this, being too smart to care about the ideas and insights of Dead White Men. For the rest of us, this is pretty interesting.

Thomas F. Bertonneau, "Gnosticism from a Non-Voegelinian Perspective, Part I," Brussels Journal. 27 May 2010.

II. When Gnostics say, “Look to God,” they are invoking the knowledge-without-experience, the special knowledge, that the word Gnosis denotes. Such proprietary knowledge they specifically refuse to share with outsiders because possession of it – or the claim to possess it, for that is all that the outsider has – is what differentiates the illuminati from the vulgate. Thus by virtue (so to speak) of their special knowledge, the Gnostics consider themselves elect. They are an extreme in-group phenomenon. Under this conviction, they “proceed to assert that Providence cares for them alone.” When the Hidden God abolishes the corrupt world, only those whose being has been transfigured by secret knowledge will remain, and they, too, shall be as gods. Compared to those in whom the secret knowledge does not reside, and who are therefore not transfigured, the illuminati are already gods. They may thus mock and revile their ontological inferiors.

[....]

IV. Augustine’s plausible representations of the Manichaeans in The Confessions indicate of those sectarians the same hatred of inherited custom and established social hierarchy that Plotinus attributed to his Gnostics, the Valentinians. The devotees of Valentinus regarded the material world as intrinsically and inalterably corrupt. They fervently desired that world’s abolition, after which the pure of heart would be reunited in a kingdom of supernal light known as the Pleroma, or “Fullness.” Augustine would like to see the world improved, but he knows that human behavior is stubborn and that it takes historical ages for a new moral order to take hold. Before he heard differently from God, for example, Abraham would have understood the offering of a child in sacrifice as ordinary religious practice, which it was in the Bronze Age almost everywhere. The Manichaeans, by contrast, exhibit hysteric impatience both with secular recalcitrance and with the crooked timber of humanity. There is one dispensation, theirs, and not holding to it can be charged against an individual even though he had the misfortune to live before the dispensation could be published. The Manichaeans agitated for apocalypse now, the fundamental transformation of a way of life, to coin a phrase.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4440

These excerpts cover a lot of ground in a short space. Well worth the few minutes it will take to look at the full essay linked above.

I'm getting ahead of myself here writing this bit about Czeslaw Milosz's epigram of “An old Jew of Galicia” in his book The Captive Mind, but it seems appropriate in light of the Bertonneau essay here. The beauty of Gnosticism is that the gnostic is not only right, he is perfectly right all the time about everything; and those who don't agree with him fully are totally wrong all the time about all things. Being right in this sense means one has a monopoly on the meaning of life, and one can sneer at those fools who don't share the secret. Everyone else's life is meaningless and wrong and pointless and despicable. What armour. No criticism of oneself can ever penetrate. That is perfection for the man who is terrified of existence and its cosmic loneliness. All of ones terrors can fit into a bag one can fling away, and from then on, one is free to be the fool he is without fear of himself and his knowledge of his foolishness. One can even be proud. Everything is permitted. That's got to be attractive to many. Complete control of life and the universe.

When someone is honestly 55% right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God. But what’s to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever say he’s 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.

--

Conformity Hippie Sucks Left

Here's an excerpt from an essay by Noah Pollak on a Jewish Israel-basher, what we call here a dhimmi, Peter Beinart. Pollack sums up nicely the idiot pose that anti-Zionists are somehow, in any way, daring and courageous. Obviously, and to most that's not too obvious, to be anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, or even openly anti-Semitic, an outright and full-blown Jew-hater, is pretty safe in the West, and often applauded by our intelligentsia. To call this anti-Semitic pose "daring" or anything other than as safe as can be is to lie. To openly agree with Conformity Hippies isn't daring. What the fuck do these people think they can get away with? Seems that it's nearly anything at all. And who's going to stop them? Not the World Jewish Conspiracy, I'm thinking.

Try this just for fun: Stand on the street and yell: "Death to Israel. Death to America." No doubt that even in the middle of Kansas on the Fourth of July you'll find a lot of people cheering you on. But dare whisper to no one but yourself: "Stop building mosques at Ground Zero. Mohammed was a paedophile warlord," and see if you don't get into a fist fight, maybe go to jail for causing it. Pollack writes of Mr. Daring Beinart Leftard:

As the astonishingly polite reaction to his article over the past week has demonstrated, there are few postures today from which it is more comfortable and advantageous to call out one's anguish and concern than as a Jewish critic of Israel. The ranks are full of people who have made careers out of being contemporary prophets, traveling the land to warn the Israelites that their arrogance and sin is inviting catastrophe. The key difference is that the biblical prophets were often despised and persecuted figures, whereas the prophets of today enjoy the embrace of a vast array of institutions, foundations, and publications.

How hard it must be for Beinart to ally with his employer, the New America Foundation, and Haaretz, Americans for Peace Now, the Israel Policy Forum, the New York Review of Books, the Nation magazine, the New York Times editorial and op-ed pages, Time magazine, the American Conservative, the American Prospect, Mother Jones, the entirety of the British and European media, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B'tselem, J Street, J Call, the New Israel Fund, Richard Goldstone, the UN Human Rights Council, the UN General Assembly, the European Union, the British Foreign Office, the European Council, scores of NGOs, Walt and Mearsheimer, Tom Segev, Avi Shlaim, Tony Judt, Tel Aviv University, every Middle East Studies department, George Soros, the Ford Foundation, Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter, Andrew Sullivan, Noam Chomsky, Mondoweiss, and ... well, you get the picture.

The sad truth is that Peter Beinart isn't any kind of trailblazer or whistleblower, and he most certainly has not earned himself any trouble by coming out as an Israel-basher. He is someone who has rather belatedly fallen completely and predictably into line with the demands his ideological compatriots make for orthodoxy when it comes to their increasingly passionate interest in assaulting Israel and championing the Palestinian cause. In Beinart's work, we are not witnessing an act of courage but rather a spectacle of conformity.

[My emphasis.]

Full essay at Powerline.

I call these wankers Conformity Hippies. They ain't daring. It's not courageous to proclaim your sympathy with the violent majority. Conformity Hippies. They suck.

Then, mere moments later, I found this:

(1) Beinart claims that he is engaging in an act of courage [update: Beinart, via email, says that this is a misinterpretation of what he meant when he said that he found the piece hard to write, and he has explicitly disclaimed the idea that he was exhibiting courage. Fair enough.] by criticizing Israel and the American Jewish establishment, but nothing is more trite, and better for one’s career in left-wing circles, than to be a Jewish liberal/left intellectual publicly attacking Israel. Exactly how many pro-Israel left-leaning organizations and periodicals are there right now, beyond the New Republic? Even back in 1987, a journalist friend of mine was turned down for a job from The Nation Village Voice because it wouldn’t hire anyone who was sympathetic to Israel, especially anyone Jewish. Things have only deteriorated dramatically since. Fact is, Israel has become a liberal-conservative issue in the U.S., with conservatives overwhelmingly supporting Israel, liberals much less so, and liberal intellectuals often hostile. If you’re someone in Beinart’s shoes, writing an essay like his is, as Pollak puts it, “a spectacle of conformity,” not a profile in courage. [UPDATE: Okay, Beinert didn’t claim to be a profile in courage. But the fact remains, even if we grant that Beinert is sincere and not a careerist, if you’re Jewish it’s hard to stay in good graces with the intellectual left, here and abroad, unless you write the obligatory hand-wringing piece criticizing Israel.

http://volokh.com/2010/05/27/peter-beinart-trite-not-courageous/

Does it change a thing? No. Conformity Hippies still suck. It's all a pose, and they are not anything but scabs. They still suck. They will always suck.

Another up-date. This story is everywhere that counts.
There's more to this story.

It's not likely that readers today will recall Joe Slovo, leader of the South African Communist Party, a Stalinist hack who toed the Soviet line regardless of its evils. One criticism we can't make of Slovo is calling him a hippie. He wasn't. He was a stolid party hack. He and his mates would twist anything at all to fit the Party line, and then twist it again in contradiction of moments before if they found deviation from the current Party line. You had to have known these people to grasp how committed they were to their religious ideology. They were barely human. They weren't clownish, they were boring and metallic, brittle and hollow. I raise this because Peter Beinart claims that Joe Slovo was his hero.

Dear Reader: You have to imagine for yourself what Beinart says when he says that Joe Slovo was his hero. Imagine proclaiming that one adores a phoney and violent robot-man who would on orders exterminate the world's population for the sake of ideological purity. Slovo was a mad-man. But no, not mad, just filled with boring and evil conformity to his masters. Beinart adores him. Here's more, an excerpt from Ron Radosh at Pajamas Media:

Way before it was popular among today’s liberals, Communists like Slovo who followed the Soviet line on Israel called it an apartheid state and condemned it leaders as racists. Now, their line is being echoed by today’s liberals like Beinart. The Beinart article is just the latest example in a new chorus of Israel bashing. As Noah Pollak says, Beinart has “fallen completely and predictably into line with the demands of his ideological compatriots.”

And given that we now know one of his heroes was Joe Slovo, Stalinist leader of the SACP, why should we all be so surprised? Liberal Zionism is becoming an endangered species, as its once proud members like Beinart have become comrades in arms with the Joe Slovos of the world. By choosing Slovo as his one hero, Peter Beinart has helped us understand his comfort level with joining the Israel bashers. He has also shown us how far liberalism has fallen from its once admired heights.

What Leftist heights? That part confuses me. That Beinart would like Joe Slovo is not surprising, being too typical of a sucking leftard Conformity Hippie.

Bearing up on the Procrustean Bed

This jihadi is too short, and this jihadi is too long. Well, now they're both just right.

SRINAGAR: It seems these are the worst of times to be a militant in Kashmir. First, a Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist was axed to death by a teenage girl in Rajouri roughly a month ago. Now, a bear has mauled two Hizbul Mujahideen militants to death as they hid in its cave in Shopian, South Kashmir.

Full Story Here.