What Comes After Paranoia?

No doubt some other meaningful use of your last diversity-training seminar, or some other feature of behavior on the way to phase IV societal collapse.

Golfis Yiannis stands on the dock of the Athenian port of Piraeus, unflinching among the dust clouds stirred by the thundering lorries and clattering forklift trucks unloading the vast container ships.

"That's Europe's new China Town over there," he says, pointing to the pier adjacent to where he is standing. "The only thing that is certain is that we've sold our soul to the Chinese."

Yeah, yeah, We’ve heard it all before Spankidoplos. What you have to do is pull the neck of your bouzouki out of your ass and get a job there, instead of trying to unionize the unemployed.



It brings to mind the Village People, does it not?

Probably Still There to Join in the Fun

Miguel Ángel Moratinos, a 68er if there ever was one and a member of the “fisting for peace” Socialist Workers' Party is visiting the holy city of Havana.

A few weeks ago, he was demanding an end to the “Gaza Blockade”, that inhumane Israeli practice of keeping missiles away from their civilians. Now he is in the worker’s paradise, with the best medical care in the world, while a Cuban dissident on hunger strike is near death.

Before departing from Madrid on Monday (5 July), Mr Moratinos told journalists the aim of his three-day trip was to support a dialogue between the Cuban government and the Catholic Church on improving respect for human rights.

I guess just to appease those warmongering, inhumane neocons, Moratinos feels obliged to try to do SOMEthing, though.

Some contact will also be made with the entourage of Cuban activist Guillermo Farinas. Mr Farinas, a psychologist and online journalist, is reportedly close to death after 132 days on hunger strike in defiance of the country's Communist government. He is demanding that sick political prisoners be freed.

But don’t expect too much. Rich Europe having long ago proved itself willing to have its’ free will brought to its’ knees by comparatively powerless rogues.

No blood for chicharonnes, spanky!

By the way, Moratinos, in his Sicialist Worker’s party radicalism for eschewing aristocratic class mutual support and suchlike holds the following honors:

Knight of the Order of Civil Merit,
Officer of the Order of Isabel the Catholic Queen,
Commander of Civil Merit,
Commander of the Alaouite "Ouissan" Order of Morocco,
Commander of the Order of the Republic of Tunisia,
Commander of the Order of Isabel the Catholic Queen,
Cooperation Prize of the Arab Journalists Association (Presented by H.M. the King in 1994),
Alaoute Ouissan Order (Officer) and
Commander of the Orange-Nassau Order of the Netherlands.

Not bad for a “pacifist” crypto-maoist and a lawyer. But let’s not forget who the real brave radical, defender of the people’s rights is: Guillermo Farinas.

"I want to die in my country right under the noses of the dictators who have the guns, rifles, cannons and bombs. I have the moral weight of the people from below, who have been deceived and repressed for 51 years by those who have the weapons,"

The fact remains that all of those European “fisting” socialists thinking paranoiacly that they are the bulwark of humanity against a sea of evil you name-it-ANYthings pretend that dey got da bravitude, but not one of them will EVER once consider for a second placing themselves in the position of being in a hunger strike in a dictatorial state with the very real risk of death, even if one ends the hunger strike. Every last one of them, with their wet dreams of taking violence the man (when they ARE the man) belongs in an adult diaper compared to Farinas.

Probably There to Join in the Fun

Until they expire, we will have to carry the legacy and the trail of social destruction left behind by the 68ers. In retrospect, it seems largely to have been driven by a gigantic hang-up so many of them accused others of: their weird relationship with remorse that drove so much of the violation of what gentler and thinking people know to be universal in nature:

Even a cursory review of the material revealed that the educational work at the Rote Freiheit ("Red Freedom") after-school center was unorthodox. The goal of the center was to shape the students into "socialist personalities," and its educational mission went well beyond supervised play. The center's agenda included "agitprop" on the situation in Vietnam and "street fighting," in which the children were divided into "students" and "cops."

They channeled their own internal nonsense to “solve problems” that these children didn’t have. There’s nothing new there, but that’s not the worst of the abuse.

The educators' notes indicate that they placed a very strong emphasis on sex education. Almost every day, the students played games that involved taking off their clothes, reading porno magazines together and pantomiming intercourse.

According to the records, a "sex exercise" was conducted on Dec. 11 and a "fucking hour" on Jan. 14. An entry made on Nov. 26 reads: "In general, by lying there we repeatedly provoked, openly or in a hidden way, sexual innuendoes, which were then expressed in pantomimes, which Kurt and Rita performed together on the low table (as a stage) in front of us."

The children were between the ages 8 and 14.

The left has its own history of abuse, and it is more complicated than it would seem at first glance. When leaders of the student movement of the late 1960s are asked about it, they offer hesitant or evasive answers. "At the core of the movement of 1968, there was in fact a lack of respect for the necessary boundaries between children and adults. The extent to which this endangerment led to abuse cases is unclear," Wolfgang Kraushaar, a political scientist and chronicler of the movement, writes in retrospect.

Unclear to whom? Everyone other than the ones that drank the revolutionary kool-aid instead of looking inside to their own humanity and, yes, capacity to feel remorse when dealing with the well being of children.
Useful stuff, that pain. To quote James T. Kirk: “It makes me who I am”. More to the point, regretting the things one’s done wrong, and learned from is what really does.

So let’s say you’re a caring, communal prole/hippy, at war with the world, rationalizing your indispensability to the fate of humanity, wondering why people have never done this before, and drunk on your own wonderfulness, see it as a power over others. The innocent other happen to be children, and you are then convincing yourself of the goodness and fitness of being little more than a child molester.

For instance, "Revolution der Erziehung" ("The Revolution in Education"), a work published by Rowohlt in 1971, which quickly became a bestseller, addresses sexuality as follows: "The de-eroticization of family life, from the prohibition of sexual activity among children to the taboo of incest, serves as preparation for total assimilation -- as preparation for the hostile treatment of sexual pleasure in school and voluntary subjugation to a dehumanizing labor system."

In short, none of us are supposed to have any remorse in order to make them feel less bad for the hurt that their own self-indulgence causes others, a point made beautifully made in Mary Eberstadt’s recent book, Loser Letters.

As St. Augustine should have said, “Make them good, God, not me!” But You have to admit, there’s a lot to be said for having the rest of the Species play by the rules.

Thus one sanctions ones’ own violations. Rationalizations couched as social though is the tool to convince oneself that there should be no regrets – if you can make yourself live with it.

There should be no surprise at all that another generation would react so badly to it all. The have reason. To use Eberstadt’s monologue character discussing abortion as an example, we can decrypt the present day behavior of those onetime “young radicals” fairly well.

I mean, face it! If You’re over fifty, there’s not much chance that anyone would have aborted You. But nowadays it’s different. It’s like anyone who’s even born now, in the Age of Choice, either requires explanation or feels like there’s a reason for it.

It’s changed the existential experience of the very question, Why am I here? I’m not saying this bizarre state of affairs is altogether bad for our godlessness. Some kids, today as ever, do turn effortlessly toward Atheism’s chief transmitter belts among the young, i.e., nihilism and melancholy. In fact, some do it easier than ever. The fact that their generation is the first truly disposable one—even disposed-of one—puts extra pressure on all of today’s kids to find a meaning in life. Some just can’t. That’s what Goth is for. And a lot of their music. And Norplant. And, of course, drugs.

For that you can thank those “revolutionaries”.

Two Kinds of Humor: The One That Brings Together and the One That Separates

If Elena Kagan is praised for anything, from non-liberals in any case, it is for her wit and for her sense of humor. But the philosopher Hugh Prather used to say that there are two kinds of humor in this life — the humor that brings together and the humor that separates.

Which kind is that of Barack Obama's candidate for the Supreme Court? It seems clear to me that her humor is the one that says: "I am part of the élite, and the opposition has no more right to question my credentials than has the common American citizen. And if they should so try, I will ignore, I will castigate, and/or I will ridicule their concerns relentlessly."

Unproductive and Leads to Loss of Sphincter Control

Those of you who can’t help but look at an accident might enjoy this coverage of the Greek way of solving your fiscal meltdown: riot, plant bombs, and bring what’s left of a feeble economy to a standstill. That’s sure to pay the bills and make good on Yaya’s pension – when there’s no-one left earning anything that the omnivore-left can tax at a higher, ever more “socially responsible” rate.

I.E.:

On June 14th, anarchists stormed a super-market in Thessaloniki, Greece. They destroyed the security systems, took food and money from the cashiers, which they burnt outside.

A Thought for the Day Century

In reality, political films are very often screened in the exact same place as they always were: in former factories, which are today, more often than not, museums.

- Hito Steyerl, ‘Is a Museum a Factory?'

McChrystal Ripple: French General Also Is Summoned by Authorities to Cease Criticism of Obama's Strategy and of the "American" War

Following the Rolling Stone interview that landed an American general in deep trouble, a similar fate (although not as drastic a dénouement) is befalling a French general for similar reasons, writes Nathalie Guibert of Le Monde.

After France's newspaper of record published an interview with Général Vincent Desportes on the subject of the difficulties of American strategy in Afghanistan, the officer was summoned to the office of Edouard Guillaud, the chef d'état-major des armées (the equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), who went on to ask defense minister Hervé Morin to sanction the officer with a 38-year career behind him for what he, the chief of staff, called "misconduct."

Indeed, General Desportes' "faute" is compounded by the fact that he has been serving as director of none other than the Collège interarmées de défense, France's answer to West Point, Annapolis, Parris Island, and Colorado Springs, all rolled in one (and all in the center of Paris). And in the Le Monde interview, the head of the institute teaching military strategy states that General Stanley McChrystal's discharge "opens a debate on the chosen tactics," and this, at a moment when "the situation on the ground has never been worse." The French general, who is about to retire and who has an impressive bibliography to his name (including in English), goes on to make the same criticisms that have been leveled at the White House, both within military circles and without: "Strategy will need to be revised" because Barack Obama has "chosen a middle road that is struggling to function effectively."

Most revealing, perhaps, is the fact that when asked if the revision
of tactics was not a matter for the international coalition to decide, General Desportes corrected the journalist, stating that the conflict is, in fact, "une guerre américaine" — an American war.

The "truth to power" aspect in this case, therefore, seems not only to be the (rightful) one of questioning the left's wishy-washy feel-good "strategy" (the strategy of the left in America or anywhere else), but also to be the (self-serving) one of depicting the war in Afghanistan (not just the one in Iraq!) as being nothing if not one of the "does not concern us" type.

Indeed, the French seem to be showing, once again (and in knee-jerk fashion), that they are constantly on the outlook for excuses (however valid or otherwise) not to have to stand beside the Américains — something seen also among a majority of comments from Le Monde readers — and that the French, therefore, are not to be trusted as reliable allies. Stating this taboo subject publicly may have been the main reason that the général earned his superiors' displeasure.

Update: in wake of the scandal, a CID page showing the original French version of Desportes' book (La Guerre Probable) seems to have vanished…

Adolescent Error or Stunning Insight? (Part 2)

For some in Brussels the words "Latin America" still conjure up an image of basket-case economies, but the message from a recent high-level conference in the EU capital was loud and clear: ignore this region at your peril.

...the article begins. The irony, however that it’s Europe that conjures up that image now.

And with good reason, because they go on to discuss European engagement with latin America as if it was territory to be conquered away from China and the US. The all too typical tone is insulting.

Adolescent Error or Stunning Insight?

Every year, the funniest answers to France’s national comprehensive exams are published, such as:

Mai 68 voit l’émergance d’un nouveau leader de la jeunesse: Daniel Kohn-Bandit.

Fourth of July Tribute

A tribute to the men and women who sacrifice their lives for our country's freedom…

Related: Some Thoughts on American Patriotism…