Veterans Day in a time that reminds us how important veterans are

The first part of today's post is mostly a repeat of a post from 11/11/2017, except for a link to today's parade in Fresno, which starts at 11:11. There has already been an opening ceremony.

Good morning. Hope you have a meaningful Veterans Day today. Any commemorations going on near you? There are near us. The parade in Fresno, plus smaller events at veterans halls, little cemeteries, fairgrounds and other venues all over the Valley.

Below, a quote from my grandfather, a young chaplain in WW I whose habit was to go in unarmed with the front line troops. This is from a letter to his father from the Belgian Front, late 1918:

I am happy to say that peace seems to have come. I was slightly wounded in the right arm in the offensive we took part in on the Belgian front. I felt happy to be alive and safe and I look forward to coming home.

My sympathy goes out to those who will never go home and for those who expect to see friends and relatives who will never come back. I have come to the conclusion that life is a precious gift and is worth living, no matter what the difficulty, but we are so helpless to save it or preserve it that it is not worth while to consider our health and happiness and comfort above that of others. It is worth while sometimes to die, if death will serve to help others. When we think too much of our comfort we expose ourselves to more danger by disintegration than we do when we make a brave fight and face every danger and exposure.

I hope I come home from this war more of a man then I went into it. If I don't I'll feel that I have not played my part.

My grandfather suffered wounds not mentioned in the letter above. He carried shrapnel in his back for the rest of his life. Couldn't eat chicken because of an experience with spoiled chicken under desperate circumstances. Still, he was ready to volunteer for WWII. . . .

Thanks to our veterans.

I'm sort of hoping that our future veterans don't get too involved in the current foreign conflicts

Part of that conflict is coming to us in the form of propaganda. I have been trying to keep track of a few sources of sound information to counteract the flood of misinformation we have been swimming in. Some people can't be reached with sound information, but some can.

This piece by Melanie Phillips on Israel's fight against an existential evil is a good place to start.

At some point, past experience tells us, pressure from public opinion is likely to become intense over the number of civilians who will be said to have been killed in Israel's bombardment of Gaza.

In previous wars, Israel has been accused of flouting international law by wilfully killing civilians and committing war crimes. This has been the opposite of the truth. The IDF (Israel Defence Forces) has always gone to greater lengths than any other army in the world to protect enemy civilians as far as possible, and its ratio of civilians to combatants killed has been far lower than any other country has achieved.

This pressure, however, imposed most critically by the US, has repeatedly forced Israel to curtail its military operations against the Gaza terrorist infrastructure.

How does limiting the Israeli response end the "cycle of violence"?

Embedded in the piece above is a video discussing how the State of Israel was formed. Excellent.

The UK is having some serious problems of its own related to the Israel/Palestine conflict, and Melanie Phillips has a new piece out for today:

In this war against Hamas and Iran, Israel is fighting for its life and the lives of its people against Palestinian Arabs whose forbears allied themselves to Hitler in the thirties and pledged to wipe out every Jew in the Middle East. Today's Palestinian Arab genocidists display the same depravity. The spectacle of their acolytes in Britain crowding out those who wish to commemorate the British heroes who fought Nazism and aggression against the free world is beyond sickening.

Worse, yet another such demonstration is planned for this coming Saturday, the actual anniversary of the armistice agreement that ended the First World War on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918.

The only lessons the Old World offers to America these days are cautionary.
Joel Kotkin

More disinformation explained:

The video below drags some and it is by the Ayn Rand Institute, which may be a negative (due to association with her name), but it does a good job in pointing out the fallacies in the set of four maps being widely used to portray Israel as "stealing" Palestinian land.

This piece by David Strom on the UN in Gaza is great:

In addition to education, the UNRWA provides a multitude of services and aid in the region.

You might think that it is better to have the UN run the schools than Hamas, but you misunderstand: the UN basically runs the schools with Hamas. It serves as something of a propaganda arm within the Gaza Strip for the ruling clique. How could it be otherwise, given how Hamas will happily kill anyone who they see as a threat, and how the terrorists require a steady stream of "martyrs" to further their evil goals.

The UNRWA is basically an internationally funded Hamas front, and the largest contributor to the organization is the United States of America. Trump had cut off funding, but Joe Biden opened the spigots once again.

It includes lots of shocking items, like a UNRWA official suggesting that civilians who flee to the South should be considered traitors.

Meet UNRWA employee Mohammed Al-Shaikh Ali. On October 10th he posted that "anyone who tries to flee to the south should be treated the way we ought to treat traitors" and that the only acceptable direction to move is "east" or "north," endorsing the Hamas invasion of Israel. pic.twitter.com/BLZKFt73aH

— UN Watch (@UNWatch) November 6, 2023

The Home Front - It's not all about the Middle East

Protesters blocking roads, be careful. Shouldn't the police be ending false imprisonment of citizens by protesters?

The Men Who Wanted To Be Left Alone

I'm not condoning this man's actions, but this incident reminds me of a haunting quote attributed to the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago:

"The most terrifying force of death comes from the hands of Men… pic.twitter.com/rvrPtFT4le

— William Wolfe 🇺🇸 (@William_E_Wolfe) November 10, 2023

Abigail Shrier's first piece for Commentary.

This Is Not a Drill
The Anti-Semitism Epidemic

Examples of some of the insanities of leftist groups are given. Then:

Why are the BLM supporters, climate extremists, academic feminists, and trans activists so quick to side with Hamas? Why are those who champion women's reproductive rights so quick to align themselves with a Hamas-controlled Gaza where women lack the right to drive, let alone get an abortion? Why would they rally to a society where men are encouraged to hit the stray uppity wife? For that matter, why would so many LGBTQ+ groups side against a society that hosts some of the largest Pride festivals worldwide so that they can throw in with another that puts homosexuals to death?

Conservative thinkers James Lindsay and Christopher Rufo have painstakingly traced the Marxist roots of all of these groups, showing that they all branch from the same rotten revolutionary trunk. These groups aim to overthrow the West, and so they support one another. Nests of critical theory fill their interchangeably empty heads.

But I want to suggest a motivation less highbrow and more straightforward. They are all fed by the same polluted water source: hatred, envy, and resentment.

What leads them to show up at the pro-Hamas rallies in remarkable numbers is not ideological commitment. Sure, some may want Marxist revolution, if they even understand what that is. But whatever beliefs they may hold about gender, race, or climate quickly unravel under the clumsy weight of the obvious contradiction of supporting a regime so hostile to these causes.

Which means they are no more motivated by ideology, in other words, than Adolf Hitler was when he allied himself with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Arab mufti of Jerusalem, or the Japanese--another race allegedly inferior to whites in his despicable hierarchy--and made war upon the white French and British. Hitler believed Nazi racial theory, of course. But sometimes hatred simply burns brighter and hotter than all other ideological commitments combined.

So don't bother informing Gays 4 Gaza that same-sex attraction is proscribed by criminal law in Gaza, backed by a penalty of 10 years' imprisonment, in that very territory they're so wild about. No need to educate them about the finding by Pew Research that the Palestinian population's opposition to homosexuality is among the highest in the world; that in 2016, Hamas responded to a senior commander's homosexual activity with a firing squad; or that gay adoption and gay marriage are strictly forbidden in Palestinian territories.

They already know--and they really, truly don't care . . .

They are not the dupes of a hideous regime in opposition to their values -- racial justice, reproductive rights, women's liberation, climate awareness. We are the dupes for believing they sincerely held those values in the first place.

Link to Marxism explained at the . . . link.

Of course, some of their feelings are held in behalf of others. They think.

Related, David Foster on The Hollow Men:

Someone at X said that the Cornell student arrested for making threats against Jewish students was probably just trying too hard to fit in and win approval of his peers and took it a step too far. My view is that there's no just about it...the desire to fit in and win approval is very often the reason why people commit evil acts. I'm reminded of something CS Lewis said: "Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things." . . .

So yes, the passion for approval has always existed. But I feel sure it is much stronger, or at least has fewer countervailing forces, among people who experience today's college admissions race and its eventual fulfillment. . .
The students about whom the professor wrote in the essay linked above have not only been encouraged to devote their time to hoop-jumping, they have also been told again and again that their country and their society are evil - that their ancestors were evil, and their parents are probably evil as well. And that practically all aspects of culture more than five years old, whether traditional songs and folktales or classic movies, are harmful and certainly unworthy of study except for purposes of deconstructing their bad examples. And, of course, relatively few of these students are influenced by or have seriously studied any traditional religion.

So they will likely be attracted to ideologies that promise to give a sense of meaning and coherence to their lives. I'm once again reminded of something in the memoirs of Sebastian Haffner, who came of age in Germany between the wars.

It's important to note that much of the current anti-Semitism, especially the kind seen on college campuses, is different from the traditional kind. While Jews were once disliked because they were too different from the overall society, they are now denounced because they exemplify things that the 'progressives' despise about their own societies.

What should we do now? End DEI. One of the "What Now?" essays by Jewish thinkers after the initial IDF offensive.

What should we do now?

Many things.

One of them: End 'DEI'.

It’s not about diversity, equity, or inclusion. It is about arrogating power to a movement that threatens strivers of every race, ethnicity, and class—and ultimately America itself.https://t.co/smVQahmHu9

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) November 7, 2023

Weekend Story Time

Owed to a Grapefruit

Jim was a sullen fourteen-year-old boy when his aging English teacher in rural Michigan, Donald Crouch, first encountered him. The boy was unnaturally shy, wrapped in a cocoon of self-imposed silence.

It would have been easy to think of his student as dim, disinterested, and backward, except for the way the boy's eyes lit up whenever the subject turned to poetry. Though subtle, Donald always noticed a slight shift in the boy's posture--a quiet but unmistakable enthusiasm that accompanied any discussion of the likes of Milton, Chaucer, or Shakespeare.

One day Donald asked Jim to hang around after class. He hoped that he could make some progress toward breaking down the invisible wall surrounding the kid. After a few minutes, Jim opened up to Donald, and at once the veteran teacher understood the problem: Jim stuttered. A lot. Donald listened with the patience of Job as Jim stammered and sputtered, fitfully recalling the humiliation he had experienced all of his life due to his speech impediment. Donald understood why his pupil was so taken with poetry; its elegant lines, its rhythm and cadence, every smooth word laid right in place. And this gave Donald an idea. . .

See a new word here?

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1723046596626006308

Bennett's Phylactery

Problem 1: anything important & lasting eventually needs women sincerely bought in

Problem 2: building important & lasting things requires asabiyyah, which has literally never been observed in an egalitarian mixed-gender group, of any size, ever

Asabiyyah is for the fellas

Best-known failure mode of anything genuinely cool since the sexual revolution:

>ambitious single men do something risky
>it works
>they gain status among other men
>women naturally drawn to this, want in
>cool/risky/ambitious thing gets totally & irrecoverably Yoko'd

The attraction of women to cool ambitious high-status projects is obviously not a problem - it's literally the engine that generates cool ambitious high-status projects

The problem is that an egalitarian & individualist society gives women the wrong frame to buy in

Men & women aren't meant to be considered singly - certainly not for their entire lives

the "fundamental unit of society" - the correct frame of analysis in weighing incentives & interests - is the family

Yoko'd> 👏👏

More musings in the thread.

One cool thing about a melting-pot civic nation is that not even a congresswoman owes any exclusive debt of loyalty to it & can openly pursue the interests of hostile nations with taxpayer funds

Maybe she hasn't melted yet.

Music

The Stars and Stripes Forever

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, November 4, What time is it?

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

posted by K.T. at 01:00 PM

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