Sunday, April 28, 2024

Yes, it is genocide. It is so difficult and painful to admit it, but despite all that, and despite all our efforts to think otherwise, after six months of brutal war we can no longer avoid this conclusion. Jewish history will henceforth be stained with the mark of Cain for the “most horrible of crimes,” which cannot be erased from its forehead. As such, this is the way it will be viewed in history’s judgment for generations to come.

From a legal point of view, there is still no telling what the International Court of Justice in The Hague will decide, although in light of its temporary rulings so far and in light of increasing prevalence of reports by jurists, international organisations, and investigative journalists, the trajectory of the prospective judgement seems quite clear.

Wednesday, April 24, 2024


The man talking above is a liar, a hack, abetting a crime. The kid below thinks he's saying what he sincerely believes, riffing with no idea beyond enthusiasm of what his words might actually mean, a spoiled moralizing brat, one of a group that now includes "African Americans".
"The cloying theatricality of American protests" etc.
'It's like pop culture, concentrated teen angst,' she said of the rally. 'The rhetoric is too heavy handed. That's the problem with American activists. They need to simplify.' Someone on the stage railed against police brutality, and she rolled her eyes."
Nicholas Christakis in 2024—

"Universities remain strikingly incurious about where all the anti-semitism (as distinct from opposition to Israeli policy) has come from? How and why have students come to think and act this way? Might the pedagogy of faculty and policies of administrators have anything to do with it?"

—and 2015: "...other people have rights too." Responding to protests about Halloween costumes, but not this one:

2015 NYT,  "Walmart Withdraws Hooked ‘Sheik Fagin’ Nose From Halloween Store"

The link (Christakis ) from 2015 includes a link to this. 

"To be perfectly clear, student journalists do have the right to take photos and protesters do not have a right to push away journalists. Students engaged in public protest, the very purpose of which is visibility, cannot credibly argue that they have any reasonable expectation of privacy."
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education changed their name in 2022. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression hasn't commented on the behavior of the students at Columbia.

The protestors are or have friends who are Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim. Any sense of principle beyond loyalty is minimal. "The fact that Bella Hadid exists is more important than anything Edward Said ever wrote." 
"This was the most astonishing thing about teaching freshmen at Cornell this fall: students who had never read anything longer than a reading comprehension excerpt for the SAT."
Some can read, or at least want to, but it's a battle.

Monday, April 15, 2024

Never mind the tits.

Sunday, April 14, 2024

old and new "Behind the chiliasm..." etc.
It is from this ambivalent conception of humanitas that humanism was born. It is not so much a movement as an attitude which can be defined as the conviction of the dignity of man, based on both the insistence on human values (rationality and freedom) and the acceptance of human limitations (fallibility and frailty); from this two postulates result responsibility and tolerance.

Small wonder that this attitude has been attacked frorn two opposite camps whose common aversion to the ideas of responsibility and tolerance has recently aligned them in a united front. Entrenched in one of these camps are those who deny human values: the determinists, whether they believe in divine, physical or social predestination, the authoritarians, and those "insectolatrists" who profess the all-importance of the hive, whether the hive be called group, class, nation or race. In the other camp are those who deny human limitations in favor of some sort of intellectual or political libertinism, such as aestheticists, vitalists, intuitionists and hero-worshipers. From the point of view of determinism, the humanist is either a lost soul or an ideologist. From the point of view of authoritarianism, he is either a heretic or a revolutionary (or a counterrevolutionary). From the point of view of "insectolatry," he is a useless individualist. And from the point of view of libertinism he is a timid bourgeois.

Saturday, April 13, 2024

Monday, April 08, 2024

cell phone