WBParsons

[wbparsons]

Exploring the cosmos from the center of the universe.

Speaking truth to falsehood over seven decades.

Respect all persons/beings. Differences of opinions, cultures, and lifestyles are opportunities for learning and new understanding, not a right to bully, harass, intimidate, or exploit others. Those who don't grasp this will be blocked.

Exploring the excitement and pleasures of living is a reward of its own and not a financial transaction. This is not the place where money changes hands. Your time and mine are the only investments needed.

So, sit back, relax, keep your sense of humor, and let's have fun together.

[rangerdad1]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Sam Harris: Why It’s Futile to Debate Israel’s Enemies

There is only one nation on Earth that must continually argue for its right to exist, even when the very survival of its people is threatene

By: Sam Harris

Published: Jun 6, 2026

Many readers and podcast listeners have been dismayed by my enduring support for Israel and now urge me to debate someone—really, anyone—drawn from a growing cast of scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics who have made that beleaguered country their professional or psychiatric obsession. I’ve explained my position on Israel across several podcasts and in my public talks, but it might help to summarize it here.

First, my general attitude: I’m not interested in exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark—from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right, to the many crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank, to the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars—because none of these failings, however grave, will alter my sense that (1) the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast, and (2) the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions.

Next, a simple heuristic: If my intransigence on these matters mystifies you, it might help to understand that, for whatever reason, I think militant Islam is 10 times worse than you think it is. When I talk about “jihadists” and their various groups—Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, etc.—I’m talking about people who I consider to be worse than Nazis (jihadists being, essentially, Nazis who are certain of Paradise). My views about the conflict in the Middle East will not fundamentally change unless my critics produce evidence that Israel has become as evil as her enemies.

However, you can rest assured that if the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) morphs into a death cult that uses its own civilian population as human shields (and yet somehow remains widely popular); if ordinary Israelis begin to celebrate martyrdom above every earthly priority, producing generations of bright-eyed, suicidal fanatics; if the residents of Tel Aviv condone the taking of Palestinian infants, old women, and other noncombatants as hostages and then gather in crowds of thousands, baying for their blood—if, in other words, the Israelis begin to resemble the Palestinians, then I won’t care who wins this war. Short of this, there remains a world of difference between the two sides, and I believe that we should focus on how brutalizing it is for any free society to confront enemies that can sincerely claim to “love death” more than everyone else loves life—for this has been Israel’s predicament for the better part of a century.

The problem in the Middle East is not, and has never been, the existence of the State of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism, militant Islam—or whatever words you want to use to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.

I won’t debate the history of the Middle East because it is irrelevant to resolving the conflict there. Of course, many people insist that we must disentangle and reconsider every strand of this history, going back at least a century. The reason I’m convinced that this is a fool’s errand is simple: Palestinians and Israelis have discrepant accounts of the past, and no amount of study or debate will reconcile them.

What’s far more important to understand—and I think it really is the only thing worth considering—is what the current inhabitants of Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the surrounding Arab states want out of life now. (Not what they pretend to want or what a handful of royal families want, while their populations want something quite different.) What do the Jews and Muslims in the region really yearn to accomplish? What are they willing to sacrifice for? What are they willing to die for? And what are they willing to let their children die for?

When we focus on the present this way, if we’re being honest, we must concede that there are two very different realities on either side of this conflict: culturally, psychologically, ethically, spiritually—in every way that matters. Yes, Israel has its religious fanatics too. But they aren’t the same sort of fanatics we find in Hamas or Hezbollah, and they’re far less representative of the surrounding culture. Notwithstanding everything that can be said against Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Israeli far right, and the settlers in the West Bank—and there is much to condemn—I believe the following remains true:

If the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace. There could be a two-state solution. There could even be a one-state solution; it wouldn’t matter. If the Palestinians simply stopped killing Jews and stopped building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom as its highest values, there could be a diverse, tolerant, and prosperous society between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. There could have been one 80 years ago. But if the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be a genocide. This was obviously true on October 7, 2023. And for anyone who has been paying attention, it has been true on every other day since the founding of the State of Israel.

The truth is, I have never known how Israel should have responded to the events of October 7. I only know that it, along with every other free society, must ultimately defeat militant Islam. How we should do this is genuinely debatable. But that’s not the point of contention among Israel’s critics, especially on the left. To them, worrying about militant Islam—even in Israel, even in the aftermath of the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust—is just more “Islamophobia.” It’s just more “colonialism” and “racism” (as though that last charge made any sense in the Middle East).

If you want to understand my view of this conflict, simply ask the one question that clarifies everything in the present:

What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted?

Though many pretend otherwise, everyone knows the answer to this question to a moral certainty.

If Hamas had the power, it would perpetrate a real genocide in Israel. The group has affirmed its commitment to this project on countless occasions, both before and after October 7. And while it is true that Jew-hatred throughout the Muslim world has been made immensely worse by a century-long fascination with Nazi propaganda and conspiracy theories, this animus isn’t merely a modern phenomenon. For instance, there is a famous hadith which predicts that the end-time will not come until the very stones and trees cry out, “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him.” Unsurprisingly, Hamas cited this hadith in its founding charter.

Most Palestinians know this, and yet Hamas remains popular. For over a decade, Hamas diverted foreign aid that was meant to improve life in Gaza and used it to build the largest bomb shelter our species has ever constructed—hundreds of miles of tunnels—and yet no Palestinian civilians were allowed to shelter there during the war. Why not? Because Hamas was using these men, women, and children as human shields. And when Israel made phone calls and sent millions of text messages urging civilians to evacuate, the loudspeakers in the nearest mosques warned them to stay in place. And Hamas snipers murdered many who tried to move to safety. The Palestinians know all this, and yet Hamas remains popular. Even after all the devastation that Hamas has brought down on its own people, it remains the most popular Palestinian faction, well ahead of its rival, Fatah. This is why there is no peace in the Middle East.

The suffering in Gaza is terrible, and I’ve never pretended otherwise. But the suffering elsewhere—suffering you aren’t thinking about—is just as real. You should ask yourself why you don’t care more about it. This difference, emotionally and politically, is what it looks like to lose an information war.

We haven’t seen all the dead children in Yemen, Syria, or Sudan, where the numbers are far worse than in Gaza, but everyone has witnessed the pornography of misery and death that has been steadily manufactured by supporters of Hamas. You might think that your special concern over Israel is due to the fact that we (Americans) supply many of the weapons the IDF uses to kill Palestinians. But we supplied arms to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for a war in Yemen that has killed an estimated 377,000 people. Where were those protests? Where was the celebrity sanctimony over Yemeni dead? Why didn’t Zohran Mamdani trumpet his opposition to this evil while campaigning to become mayor of New York? Yemen was the world’s worst humanitarian crisis for years, with American weaponry and logistical support fully implicated, and yet it never became the organizing moral obsession of universities, media institutions, activist networks, or left-wing politics the way Gaza has.

To point this out isn’t to commit the rhetorical sin of “whataboutism.” Rather, it exposes a glaring moral disparity: The world simply does not care when Muslims kill other Muslims—amazingly, it doesn’t much care when they kill Christians either—but it does care, enormously, when Jews do it. The General Assembly of the United Nations and its Human Rights Council have passed more resolutions against Israel than against all other nations combined, including North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. A few of these countries have committed actual genocides. None of this makes sense. But this is the world we are living in.

Of the world’s nearly 200 nations, two-thirds were created by mapmakers who merely imagined their frontiers into being, without much regard for the tribal interests of the people living within them. In fact, more than half were created since 1948, the year that Israel was founded. And yet there is only one whose legitimacy is still debated everywhere. There is only one nation on Earth that must continually argue for its right to exist, even when the very survival of its people is threatened by avowedly genocidal enemies.

This obsession with Israel, and the double standards to which its people are held, now forms the center of mass of that shape-shifting moral affliction widely known as “antisemitism.”

I’ve lived most of my life believing that dangerous antisemitism was behind us, at least in the West. Unfortunately, the response to October 7 has put that assumption very much in doubt. The atrocities committed by Hamas revealed a level of Jew-hatred, globally, that shocked even those of us who have been students of antisemitism for much of our lives. Crucially, this hatred showed itself before Israel invaded Gaza. When the corpses of the young people mutilated and murdered at the Nova Music Festival were still being identified, we had students at Harvard and professors at Columbia—and demonstrators in New York, London, Sydney, and Toronto—celebrating their killers.

Why does antisemitism matter? Well, for the Jews, it’s obvious why it matters, but why should it matter to everyone else? It matters because when you look at what antisemites also hate, you find they hate everything that makes culturally rich, diverse, open societies possible. Real antisemites bring with them more than just their hatred of Jews: They bring censorship, political repression, conspiracy thinking, and the politics of dehumanization and scapegoating. So decrying antisemitism is not an act of special pleading. It is a defense of the moral and institutional architecture that free societies require.

Let me close with another general point: Many people have written to tell me that you’ve lost respect for me over this issue, or that you still value my work and are giving me “a pass” on Israel. I reject this framing, and you should too. If I’ve fallen off a pedestal because I said something you don’t agree with, the pedestal was the problem, not the disagreement. Of course, if you think I am lying to you, or that I otherwise lack integrity, you should leave and never look back. But if you just think I happen to be wrong, even about something important—especially about something important—I encourage you to keep showing up with better evidence and arguments. This, after all, is what a real intellectual and moral community is for.

[simply-ivanka]

Good advice.

Please share

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Death to the regime. And fuck Islam.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Samuel Montgomery

Published: Jun 6, 2026

Middle-class white men have been banned from a public sector internship.

The National Audit Office (NAO), which is funded by the taxpayer, said only applicants who are female, of black heritage or from lower socio-economic backgrounds could apply.

Zia Yusuf, the Reform UK shadow home secretary, said that this was “blatant discrimination”.

Candidates on the six-week diversity internship in Newcastle will receive a pro-rated salary of £25,089 per annum when they start this month.

The job advert states that the scheme is designed to support diverse talent in accounting. It is open to penultimate year undergraduates from any degree discipline, and will be focused on exposure to financial audit work.

The NAO scrutinises government departments and agencies on behalf of Parliament to ensure value for money and the correct allocation of public funds.

The watchdog is taxpayer funded, with allocations voted on by Parliament. In an estimate memorandum for 2025-26, the NAO requested a budget of £111m.

‘Anti-white, anti-merit ideology’

Mr Yusuf told The Telegraph: “A government department barring white men from applying for an internship is blatant discrimination.

“Jobs and opportunities should be awarded on merit, not handed out or withheld on the basis of race or sex – young people deserve a fair chance to succeed regardless of their background.

“This is anti-white, anti-merit ideology masquerading as diversity and inclusion, and Reform UK would end these discriminatory schemes and ensure equal treatment for everyone.”

[ Zia Yusuf called the internship ‘blatant discrimination’ ]

Claire Coutinho, the shadow minister for women and equalities, told The Telegraph: “Nobody should be blocked from opportunities because of the colour of their skin or the job their parents did.

“We should all be judged by the content of our character and not protected characteristics.

“Identity politics will only make us more divided as Kemi Badenoch has argued for years.”

In an advert for the programme, prospective interns are promised “exposure to Financial Audit and Value for Money (VfM) work, support real audit projects, and learn from experienced colleagues”.

It added: “If you are interested in developing your skills in a professional, supportive environment and gaining insight into a career in public sector accounting, we encourage you to apply.”

‘State-sponsored discrimination’

The NAO is one of several internships in public services to exclude white men.

Last year, the British intelligence services reopened their paid summer internship scheme from which white participants are barred.

The MI5, MI6 and GCHQ summer internships, which start this month, are only open to young people from a Black, Asian, mixed heritage or ethnic minority (BAME) background and from a socially or economically disadvantaged background.

Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, described the requirements as “racist” and called for it to be axed, while Ms Coutinho called the schemes “state-sponsored discrimination”.

Transport for London also operates an 11-month paid internship called the Stuart Ross Placement, for which candidates must be BAME, disabled or from a disadvantaged background.

The House of Commons, The House of Lords and The Senedd Commission have partnered with the Windsor Fellowship to run an annual internship for BAME individuals.

With applications closing last month, the 12-month internship at the Senedd will see four BAME students taken on and trained “at the heart of Welsh politics”.

Under the Equality Act 2010, companies and public bodies are permitted to take “positive action” to “address disadvantage or under-representation”.

In such cases, the recruiter must demonstrate that the action is “proportionate” to address the issue of under-representation for it to be legal.

Bank of England internship

The Bank of England also came under fire last year from leading Tory MPs and Elon Musk for a £5,000 internship scheme which excluded white candidates.

At the time, Rupert Lowe, leader of Restore Britain, wrote to Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, asking: “What message does this send to a bright, hard-working student who happens to be white?”

An NAO spokesman said: “Our long-running diversity internship schemes offer valuable work experience in the audit sector.

“The internship opens doors to people who are under-represented in the sector including anyone from less affluent backgrounds.”

==

The fact a government office – one related to compliance – is breaking the law is absolutely wild.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

You are not misinformed; you are disinformed. Here are the four lies spread by pro-Palestinians that I like the most:

1. Jews came from Europe and stole land from the Palestinians. 2. The Palestinian people are an ancient nation. 3. Jews brought a disaster on the Palestinians in 1948, the Nakba. 4. The genocide that started in 1948 continues until today.

Does this sound familiar? Have you heard this once or twice? Let's quickly prove these four lies wrong, and then we will talk about the most interesting part.

–

The first lie: Jews stole land. I said this before, but it is so easy to prove this wrong. If Jews stole land, please give me the name of just one Jewish town that was built on stolen land before the Arabs started the war on November 30, 1947. This should be easy, right? Gedera, Chedera, Zichon Yaakov, Tel Aviv, Kineret. I can go on and on. Just find one.

On one hand, this lie is very popular. On the other hand, nobody can give me a single name. Nobody can show me a single newspaper article from 1946 where an Arab says Jews stole my land. Interesting, isn't it? Yes, the Arabs lost land in the war they started in 1947, but they did not start the war because Jews stole land. They started the war because they wanted to destroy the Jews. We will get to that in a second.

By the way, I can give you the opposite example, Jewish property that Arabs stole. Let's look at two classic examples, Gaza and Hebron. In both places, ancient Jewish communities lived for hundreds of years. In the attacks of 1929, the Arabs stole the Jewish property and forced the Jews to leave.

–

The second lie, the Palestinian people are an ancient nation. They are not. It is amazing that even in 1948, not a single Arab leader talked about Palestinians. If the Palestinian people are so ancient, how is that possible? Even in 1956, Ahmad Shoukeri, who later became the founder and first chairman of the PLO, said in the United Nations, "it is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria."

So yes, there are maps with the word Palestine on them. But that is because it is a colonialist name given by the Roman Empire, and European languages have kept using it. I made a video about this recently.

All the organizations built during the British Mandate with the name Palestine, the Palestine Electric Company, the Palestine Football Team, Palestine Airways, were all built by Jews.

Before the British arrived, the Turks ruled here for 400 years, and they never called this area Palestine. No nation has a more colonialist story than the Palestinians. The name was given by the Roman Empire, the borders were drawn by the British Empire, and the narrative was invented in the 1960s by the Soviet Union.

Maybe the best proof, and it is a bit embarrassing, is that Arabs cannot even pronounce the name of this region. In Arabic, there is no letter P, so when they try to say it, it sounds like Philistine or Balestine. Again, if you think I am wrong, find me just one quote of an Arab leader from 1948 talking about a Palestinian nation.

And have you noticed, by the way, that pro-Palestinians never talk about their leaders from that time? Interesting, isn't it? Well, there is a reason for it. Because all the Arab leaders, Amin al-Husseini, Fawzi al-Kawakji, and Hassan Salameh were in Nazi Germany, collaborating with the Nazis, building Muslim SS units to kill Jews. Read a million pro-Palestinian posts and you won't come across their leaders from the 1940s.

–

The third lie, the Nakba. The Nakba is simply the result of a war that the Arabs started to destroy the Jews and lost. Did they pay a price? Yes. When you start a war, you might lose it.

The Arabs started the war on November 30, 1947, when they shot at Eged Bass No. 20-94. By the way, this event that started the war tells the whole story. First, the Arabs shot at a civilian bus and murdered Jewish passengers. Second, a detail that very few people know, the shooting happened near a village called Fajja. This was an Arab village built on the ruins of a Jewish village from 1700 years ago. And the Arabs who lived there arrived only around 1830 from Egypt during the Egyptian conquest.

So yes, the Arabs paid a price for a war they started. This is not different from any other war in history. By the way, the Jews paid a much higher price. How many Arabs remained in Israel after the war? 160,000. How many Jews stayed to live in the areas that the Arabs conquered? Zero. Not a single Jew was left alive in those areas. This is complete ethnic cleansing.

–

The fourth lie, and the last one for this video, the genocide. Someone might say, ok, so Jews did not steal land, the Palestinian nation was invented in the 1960s, and they lost the war they started. But nothing justifies the genocide that has been happening for almost 80 years. And I agree.

But the truth is, the only ones who did ethnic cleansing and genocide are actually the Arabs. Look at the numbers. The number of Arabs between the Jordan River and the sea, in Gaza, in Israel, and in Judea and Samaria, aka the West Bank, grew by about 10 times since 1948.

Inside Israel, the number went up from 160,000 to 2 million. In Gaza, it went from 200,000 to 2 million. In the West Bank, from 400,000 to about 4 million. You can say many things about this massive growth, but genocide is definitely not one of them.

Do you want to talk about real genocide and ethnic cleansing? Let's look at what happened to Jews in Arab countries. In Egypt in the 1940s, there were 85,000 Jews. Today, there are 3. In Yemen, there were 65,000 Jews. Today, there is one in Houthi jail. In Iraq, there were 130,000 Jews. Today, fewer than 5. In Algeria, there were 140,000 Jews. Today, zero.

Doesn't it look strange to you that people use the word genocide to describe an Arab population that grew by 10 times, one of the fastest growing in the world, but they completely ignore the Jewish communities in Arab countries that were wiped out by 99.99%?

–

Now, let's talk about the most important thing. This video is not about the lies, it is not about history, and it is not about 1948. It will take you just a few minutes on Google or ChatGPT to check and see that everything I say is 100% true.

This video is about you. The reason you never heard these facts is that you are being manipulated. It is not easy to admit it. But if you are an honest person and you can't prove me wrong, this is exactly what happened. You became a victim of brainwashing, and I don't blame you. Millions of smart, educated, and good people in the West have never heard these basic facts.

I am not asking you to agree with me; I know I am right. I am asking you to do something much harder: to be honest with yourself. You want to criticize Israel? Fine. But let's start with facts, and that is hard because for 30 years, they have fed you emotional propaganda. In Gaza, there is a whole industry of faking suffering I will put a link below to Gazawood, which shows hundreds of examples of Gazans acting and staging scenes from injury and death for the cameras. Not just one or two videos, thousands. This is a professional lie industry, pushed by Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood.

And again, do not believe me. Go to Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera Plus in English. Most of their content is about attacking Israel, some about attacking America, and some about starting protests in the West. There is zero criticism of Muslim countries, which are almost all dictatorships, and zero stories about the situation of women or minorities there. You can hate Israel as much as you want, but if you had to be a minority in the Middle East, you would pray to God to be a Muslim in Israel and not a Christian in Egypt or Iraq.

–

And this brings us to the last point. All the protests you see against Israel in Spain, Ireland, Australia, or on U. S. college campuses are not about human rights, and they are not about caring for human lives. They are simply the final product of this disinformation system. How do I know? Here are a few simple facts.

Recently, Pakistan expelled 1. 7 million Afghan refugees back to the Taliban. Did you hear a single word about this in the news? Did you see a single student protest at Howard against this massive expulsion?

In the civil wars in Yemen and Syria, hundreds of thousands of Arab Muslims were killed by other Muslims. Did you see crowds shouting in the streets of London, Wisconsin, or Paris about the horrors in Yemen?

And in Nigeria, there is a cruel daily killing of Christians by radical Muslims. Does anyone in the West set up protest camps for them? No one.

Because the people organizing these protests do not really care about human rights, and they do not care about Arabs or Muslims. They only care when they can blame Israel. Billions of dollars were spent so that you and people like you would focus only on one target and ignore the rest of the world.

I will go back to the sentence I started with. You are not misinformed; you are disinformed. Now that you know the facts, now that you realize you were fed paid propaganda, the ball is in your court. You can keep going out to the streets and shouting the empty slogans they fed you, or you can be honest enough to stop and start thinking for yourself.

And if you want more real information, just subscribe to the channel. If you are my follower, please share this video with someone who needs to see it. As you probably noticed, I am uploading many more videos now, also on Twitter. By the way, I was blocked on Facebook just a few days ago.

Anyway, I can keep uploading content at this speed only thanks to your support on Ko-Fi. It really warms my heart to sit here and talk to the camera, just me, my phone, and a few Mossad agents behind the scenes, and to know that you are watching and supporting my work. You make this all possible. Thank you so much for your support. See you in the next video, yalla bye!

[trainer0084]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

How Liberalism Got Hacked by Victimism

Why decent societies are so easy to game – from every side.

By: Frederick Alexander

Published: Jun 6, 2026

The Soviet Gulag was one of the cruellest inventions in human history. Like the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, it attracted its share of sadists. One notorious punishment was to tie naked prisoners to a tree and leave them to the mosquitoes, which swarmed the camps in the summer months.1 At best, prisoners were treated as disposable economic units for the Soviet state. At worst, they were playthings of guards who killed them for their sport.2 In every case, the Gulag was designed to strip human beings of their dignity. Into that hell were thrown dissidents and ordinary citizens, poets and peasants. Among those who came out the other side was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

The astonishing thing about Solzhenitsyn is that he refused to define himself by the horrors of the camps. “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life,” he wrote in the book that made the Gulag famous worldwide.3 It’s a sentiment almost impossible to comprehend except, perhaps, as a way of making peace with injustice rather than being destroyed by it. Solzhenitsyn turned his experience into testimony. He never traded on his suffering, nor asked to be excused from ordinary judgment because of it. He simply bore witness to staggering human cruelty, showing us the worst of humanity, but also, through those who endured it, the best.

There are millions today suffering at the hands of others. From Christians in Nigeria to the women and girls of Afghanistan, these are people who know the real meaning of victimhood in a way few of us do. In 2012, Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban for insisting that all girls have a right to education. She went on to campaign publicly, and at continued risk – a response so alien to our own moment that it almost sounds eccentric. Partly this is because we can’t imagine living under those conditions, but it’s also that we’ve grown used to a different response to suffering. Ours is a culture that incentivises taking a wound – sometimes real, often inflated – and placing it at the centre of our identities. If you’ve opened a newspaper today or scrolled social media, you’ve already seen countless examples: personal injuries displayed like medals, worn with defiant pride, and daring you to contradict the claim.

Philosopher Pascal Bruckner calls this victimisme (victimism): suffering converted from something to be overcome into a source of status, moral authority and power.4 We’re all victims of something because to live in this world is to suffer indignity and face injuries, real and imagined. Think back to the school bully, the neglectful teacher, or the boss who humiliated you in front of your peers. What if you could make these injuries into instruments within a moral system of blame? What if, rather than overcoming these injuries, you turned them into symbols of virtue and moral authority? Those who play this game and profit by it, Bruckner calls “victim entrepreneurs”.

None of which is to say that compassion is the problem per se, nor that victimhood is imaginary. One doesn’t have to endure the Gulag to be a victim. People are bullied, neglected, humiliated and destroyed in all sorts of ways that decent societies are morally obliged to notice – and decent people do notice. When someone in obvious distress tells you he’s been badly hurt, most of us are inclined to believe him and act on it, unless we have very good reason not to, or we’ve been conditioned out of it. The question is not whether suffering exists. It plainly does. The question is what happens when victimhood becomes the most reliable route to authority.

• • •

Here’s where liberalism comes in. Compassion wasn’t something added to liberal ideology by sixties hippies doing peace signs. It was there at its roots. Montaigne, writing in 1580, well before liberalism had a name, wrote that among all other vices “there is none I hate more than cruelty, both by nature and judgment, as the extremest of all vices”. Or take Adam Smith, the supposed paragon of self-interest, who established himself first as a moral philosopher, arguing that our moral ideas and actions are rooted in sympathy for others. Centuries later, philosopher Judith Shklar built an entire liberalism on that instinct, one that begins not with a vision of the highest good, but with the rejection of the worst evil.5 Do not start by deciding what the perfect society looks like, she argued. People who do that tend to build camps. Start instead by naming what no decent society may do. And the first thing it may not do is be cruel.

This is very much the liberal inheritance we recognise today, one that exists, before anything else, to shield the vulnerable from cruelty and arbitrary power. None of it will be news to the modern “liberal” in the American sense, who makes this the foundation of their politics. But hold the classical version in mind, because it goes far beyond shielding the sensitive from microaggressions. The classical liberalism of Locke and Mill is about protecting individual freedom from state tyranny – something the right would sign up to as hurriedly as the left signed up to compassion, but they are hardly unrelated. And it is these liberal virtues – compassion above all, and the regard for human dignity – that let victimism in through the back door.

Nietzsche put this down to a master-slave morality, in which the masters embodied all that was good: vitality, pride, and the capacity for action. Or, more precisely, the good was everything they embodied. What was bad was simply everything they were not. But because the weak couldn’t compete on these terms, they inverted the whole structure. Slave morality begins not with affirmation but with ressentiment, and takes its revenge where the weak can actually win: in the realm of values. Now the master’s qualities are reimagined as evil, while the qualities exalted are precisely those the powerless happen to possess: meekness, humility, pity, the turning of the other cheek. Powerlessness gets relabelled as virtue, and suffering becomes meaningful. It’s significant that slave morality cannot affirm itself directly; it needs monsters against which to define itself.

Nietzsche saw Christianity as the great historical triumph of this inversion, but there’s a modern version he couldn’t have imagined: slave morality running most freely among the safest, richest, and most insulated people who have ever lived. Their resentments are turned into policy by a diversity consultant drafting corporate speech codes from a corner office overlooking Central Park. Codes that begin in universities now filter out into every public institution in the land. There’s a multi-billion-dollar industry built on it.6

Liberalism has inherited and universalised something from the slave-morality lineage: concern for the weak and the dignity of the individual. But liberalism organised around the prevention of cruelty has to take all suffering seriously, from claims of systemic injustice to the colleague who “felt unsafe” after someone complimented her haircut. Once a society agrees that injury confers moral authority, it has created a currency. And currency invites counterfeiters.

• • •

In 2019, on a freezing night in Chicago, a TV actor left his apartment to buy a sandwich. He returned with a story that quickly made headline news. Two masked men, he claimed, had hurled racial and homophobic abuse at him. A noose was involved, bleach was in there, somehow, and his assailants were Trump supporters: “This is MAGA country”, they yelled. The story ticked every box in the progressive media’s platonic ideal of a news story: racism, homophobia, and especially a finger pointing the blame at Satan himself, Trump. It was perfect. Almost too perfect, you might say.

Sure enough, details soon emerged that didn't quite add up. It was one of the coldest nights of the Chicago winter (around −23°C). The probability that two attackers would be loitering on a residential street at 2 am, on the off chance of finding a target, seemed low. When the police arrived, the actor – Jussie Smollett – was still wearing the noose he claimed was put around his neck. Gradually, it became obvious that far from being a botched lynching, the actor had written an improbable script too far-fetched for a TV show, let alone real life. The attackers were not white supremacists but two black brothers who knew him personally. Money had changed hands. Smollett understood his target audience perfectly, and it was their eagerness to believe it, rather than the plausibility of his account, that made it headline news. Smollett presumably saw an opportunity to elevate his status from mere actor to something the culture would prize above almost anything: the certified victim of a Trumpian hate crime.

Smollett is Solzhenitsyn in reverse. One man endured the camps of a totalitarian state and declined to put grievance at the centre of his identity. The other man invented a persecution, understanding that in a certain kind of liberal democracy, persecution had become a career asset.

Smollett is perhaps the most spectacular version of victimhood culture, but it operates in the same way in everyday life. Imagine you’re at a work meeting. Someone is challenged on a point of fact, and they respond with the magic words: “As someone who has experienced…”. They don’t even need to finish the sentence; it’s already done its work. The matter is no longer the fact under discussion, but whether you’re the sort of person who would continue to press a wounded colleague for evidence. Few among us take that route because the penalties can be severe.

Sometimes the injury is real. That’s what makes the manoeuvre so hard to contend with. Our person at that meeting may genuinely have endured cruelty, but they might also be using that experience to manipulate others. Modern victimism depends on our reluctance to press against others’ wounds, even when those wounds bear no obvious relevance to the matter at hand. We’ve been trained to think that questioning the use of suffering is the same as denying the suffering itself. It feels indecent.

• • •

This is why victimism is not an ideology but a technique. Ideologies have doctrines, histories, and sacred texts. Techniques don’t require a belief system, only usefulness. A left-wing activist and a right-wing identitarian may hate each other’s principles, assuming either still has principles, but both can learn the same trick of presenting themselves as injured and obtaining permission to do things that would otherwise look ugly.

It’s also why it travels across tribes with such ease. The left is already beholden to notions of collective grievance: classes, races, genders, and so on. There are often real and legitimate grievances here. But victimism is extremely amenable to this, because once you claim to be the victim of structural racism, say, it’s almost impossible to deny the particular instance without denying the broader historical claim. The right, meanwhile, might show contempt for this manoeuvre, prizing stoicism, responsibility, and self-command – and, at its best, it embodies these things. But it’s also discovered that grievance is too useful to leave to the other side. The left has personalised its politics until every disagreement becomes an injury. The right has discovered that anti-victimhood is more persuasive when delivered in the voice of victimhood. It’s how anti-white racism – a legitimate complaint – comes to work as a precise mirror of the anti-racist activism it despises, putting a grievance at the heart of an identity, and at its margins the inevitable emergence of white supremacist movements. Both sides accuse the other of weaponising victimhood, and both are right. When social psychologists use the term “competitive victimhood” to describe situations in which both sides in a conflict argue over who has suffered more, this is exactly what they mean.

Hamas understands all this better than the Westerners who march for them. They supply the left with a ready-made oppressor-oppressed framework, with Palestinians the victims of an evil regime. For the identitarian right, they provide a scapegoat for their own ills. It’s one grievance, bought wholesale by two tribes who agree on nothing else but the cause of their own victimhood. As Nietzsche put it, “Someone must be to blame for the fact that I do not feel well”. Today, for many in the West, that someone is the Jew.

It’s tempting to think victimism is the result of social media, and there’s certainly some truth in that.7 But it goes deeper, as we’ve seen. It’s written into the Christian inheritance and secularised through liberalism. When someone fakes a wound for advantage, the only thing that could catch them out is suspicion – the willingness to look at a claim of injury and ask, “Is this real?” But turn that same suspicion on someone genuinely hurt, and scepticism becomes cruelty.

This is the back door of liberalism that moral fraud depends on. But it’s also the only door through which the genuinely persecuted can pass. You can’t close it to the fraudster without shutting out the true victim. Nobody wants to stand guard and demand evidence of suffering in the moment it’s declared. When a man tells us he’s been racially abused, most of us will believe him, because we are decent and can’t imagine telling the same lie. When a breathless man on the ground tells us he’s been stabbed, our instinct is the same: to do the right thing. But it’s precisely that instinct which moral fraud trades on, and the more decent we are, the higher the profits. This is liberalism’s tragedy and its betrayal: the thing being exploited is the thing worth keeping.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in the Soviet Gulag because he’d criticised Stalin in a private letter. Stalin himself had spent time in Siberian exile as a young man, put there by another cruel regime. The revolution he helped bring about, and the regime he eventually led for decades, didn’t consider itself cruel. It saw itself as an instrument of the wronged – the proletariat rising against its oppressors; the slaves victorious at last over their masters.

The grievance came first. The camps came after.

[dragonsllayer22]

[round9-fight]

[round9-fight]

[americanfreedomfighter]

[nogodsnokingsnomasters]

Today is a special day. June 4th 2019 marks the 15th anniversary of the Killdozer’s rampage through Granby Colorado.

Sit down kids and let me tell you a tale, about a reasonable man driven to do unreasonable things.

Marvin Heemeyer was a man who owned a muffler shop in Granby Colorado. The city council ordained to approve the construction of a concrete factory in the lot across from Marvin’s shop. In the process this blocked the only access road to the muffler shop. Marvin petitioned to stop the construction to no avail. Petitioned to construct a new access road, and even bought the heavy machinery to do so himself. Denied.

The concrete factory went up in disregard to the ramifications on Marvin’s business. To add insult to injury, the factory construction disconnected the muffler shop from the city sewage lines. An indifferent city government then chose to fine Marvin for this.

His business and livelihood were in ruin. Rather than lie down and die, Marvin chose to fight back. Over the course of a year and a half Marvin secretly outfitted the bulldozer he bought to save his business with three foot thick steel and concrete armor, camera systems guarded with bulletproof glass.

On June 4th 2004 Marvin Heemeyer lowered the armored shell over top of himself, entombing himself inside the Killdozer to make his last stand.

He burst fourth from the walls of his muffler shop and straight into the concrete factory that ruined his business. Over the course of the next several hours Marvin drove his Killdozer through 13 buildings owned by those officials that had wronged him, including the city council building itself.

Swat teams swarmed the dozer, but it proved immune to small arms fire and even explosives. Another piece of heavy machinery was even brought out to fight the Killdozer, but it too fell to the dozers righteous fury.

In the end, Marvin’s Killdozer became trapped in one of the buildings it was built to destroy. Marvin chose to take his life, the only life he took that day.

Today we celebrate Killdozer day and Marvin Heemeyer, the last great American folk hero. A man driven to the brink who chose to fight back against an indifferent system.

From notes left behind after his passing:

“I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to be unreasonable. Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.”

HAPPY KILLDOZER DAY EVERYONE.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

You have to bring the cleansing, which means removing shirk [sin of worshipping anyone or anything other than Allah]. That you declare yourself to be free of shirk and free of its people. Free of shirk and free of its people.

Basically, wala’ means association and bara' means disassociation. You associate with the mu'mineen [believers], with the believers, with the good people, with the Muslimin, and you disassociate from the evil, bad people, the disbelievers, and all that.

First priority is to serve Allah and to serve Islam and the Muslims. This is al-wala'. Al-bara' is to disassociate myself with anything that is not associated with Islam. So I disassociate myself to disbelieving nations, to ideologies that don't relate to Islam, to sinful people.

Al-Wala’ wal-Bara’ means loyalty and disavowal. Some people can translate this into love and hate because love and hate are basically the basis of loyalty and disavowal.

––

https://grokipedia.com/page/Al-Wala'_wal-Bara'

Al-Walāʾ wa al-Barāʾ (Arabic: الولاء والبراء, literally "loyalty and disavowal"), also rendered as loyalty and enmity, constitutes a foundational principle in Islamic theology mandating Muslims to extend allegiance, love, and support exclusively to Allah, His Prophet, and the community of true believers while dissociating from, hating, and opposing disbelievers, polytheists, and apostates. Rooted in Quranic injunctions such as Surah al-Mumtahanah 60:4, which declares the example of Abraham and his followers in disavowing unbelievers, and Surah al-Ma'idah 5:51, prohibiting alliances with Jews and Christians, the doctrine integrates hadith traditions emphasizing enmity toward those who reject tawhid (the oneness of God).

https://quranx.com/60.4

There has already been for you an excellent pattern in Abraham and those with him, when they said to their people, "Indeed, we are disassociated from you and from whatever you worship other than Allah. We have denied you, and there has appeared between us and you animosity and hatred forever until you believe in Allah alone" except for the saying of Abraham to his father, "I will surely ask forgiveness for you, but I have not [power to do] for you anything against Allah. Our Lord, upon You we have relied, and to You we have returned, and to You is the destination.

https://quranx.com/5.51

O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you - then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people.

==

You don't get to whine about "Islamophobia" when a divine commandment to hate, despise and oppose all non-Muslims is baked into your doctrine.

NOBODY. EVER. Needs to feel guilty about "Islamophobia." EVER.

The next time someone bleats the non-word "Islamophobia," send them the link to the Grokipedia page for "Al-Wala' wal-Bara'" and tell them to go fuck themselves.

[a-path-by-the-moon]

[jardinssteve]