The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Saturday, October 31, 2015

Perspective

American believers bitch that the New Atheists display a heat and hostility towards their opponents that makes them deserve the label "fundamentalists."

Really?

Bunch of sissies, compared to the real thing, I think.


A publisher of secular books has been hacked to death in the Bangladeshi capital, police have said.

In a separate attack in Dhaka, police said two other writers and a publisher were stabbed and shot at a publishing house.

Fears of Islamist violence have been growing in Bangladesh after at least four atheist bloggers were murdered in the country this year.

The attacks have been linked by police to domestic Islamist extremists, while Islamic State has claimed responsibility for three other attacks.

And in any case the charge ignores the meaning of the word, "fundamentalism."

Much as liberal discourse so often ignores the meaning of "fascism" while conservatives ignore the meanings of "socialism," "communism," and "Marxism."

A surprise in Putin's Russia

Gulag museum recreates Soviet terror

Didn't drive off the cliff this time

US Senate passes budget deal to fund federal government for two years

Lots of good bits in this.

Friday, October 30, 2015

A conservative with a sinecure

Virgil and Horace, though defenders of the Augustan regime and neither of them religious believers, were political conservatives.

And both were beneficiaries of the largess of Maecenas, friend of Augustus and the regime.

The phenomenon is familiar from many ages when conservatism meant primarily resistance to anarchy, chaos, violent turmoil, and fanaticism.

Think of Moliere and his king.

Or Dryden, Pope, and Swift and the monarchy of their age.

Like an enlightened monarch or a patriot king, a dictator can expand the sphere of ordered liberty and enrich his country and his people, opposed by a self-seeking oligarchy wrapped in the virtuous mantle of republicanism or seeking such wrapping.

Of course, not every conservative in the sense given has a sinecure, or is a poet.

Anyway, a conservative, so understood, could "steal the Whigs' clothes," follow Bismarck, or vote for Bernie Sanders.

Particularly if he saw the appropriators of the name as mere nitwits, doctrinaire boobies, and whores of an unscrupulous and dangerous plutocracy.

Much like the Senate disempowered by the Emperors.

Gorgeous driving in the mid-Atlantic region

The weather has been clear most of the time for the last couple of weeks, and the scenery has been spectacular.

Around Mt. Lebanon, PA, around Pasadena, MD, and all the way through the mountains from the former to the lat
What beautiful country!

Nothing like it in the prairies or plains states.

Remotest from regions that are both, like North Dakota. 

And yet, Pasadena is part of that infamous Bos-Wash stretch of urbanization that extends over hundreds of miles along the Eastern coastal littoral, the gently rolling country between the Appalachians and the Atlantic.

Not less beautiful in the least, the area is all the better as a place to live for having every amenity and advantage of civilization ready to hand.

Even allowing for the disadvantage of proximity to the urban canaille.

Surveillance

Cameras everywhere, 24/7, seems too much.

But not this.

FBI planes that flew over police protests had sophisticated surveillance cameras

Lighten up

Treat marijuana like alcoholic drinks?

Sure, but alcohol is over-regulated in America.

Bernie Sanders says marijuana sales should be regulated like alcohol

Bernie really wants the college kid vote.

Free tuition, student debt relief, and decriminalized dope.

Isn't alcohol a gateway drug?

Isn't any intoxicant a gateway drug?

Phooey.

The stupidity of it all

And the current hysteria about vaping?

Which is not to say all intoxicants should be legal to sell or use.

Is marijuana at all as addictive and harmfull as tobacco?

After smoking enough, long enough to get emphysema, I quit May 1, 1999, within a few weeks of getting the news.

I drink almost nightly, generally a beer or two but fairly often a double whiskey or two.

With a rare night of more.

No other drugs since infrequent marijuana as a student.

I most certainly did inhale.

The campaign to punish and silence skepticism

Environmental groups demand inquiry after Exxon 'misled public' on climate

The Guardian loves this.

From the same marketers who did the Guinness commercial

It's good for you!

St Louis confronts blight with proposal for $1bn investment in football stadium

The GWOT in Syria

Complicated by the roles of Russia and Iran.



Where key players stand on Assad

• US: Assad must go, but does not need to happen before a political transition process get under way
• Saudi Arabia: Assad must go "within a specific timeframe" and before any elections for a new government
• Turkey: Assad must go, though could remain for a "symbolic" six months
• SNC (main Western- and Gulf Arab-backed anti-Assad opposition): Assad must go, cannot be part of any political process
• Russia: Assad should not be forced to go, Syrians should hold elections to decide who rules them
• Iran: Assad should not step down, Syrians should decide their own political future

If not Assad, then who?

The Sunni powers want a Sunni, but not ISIS, and the Americans side with them, apparently out of moral purity.

Assad, like Saddam, is too wicked for the moralizers of the American classe politique.

Democrats who label the war on Iraq foolish but endorse regime change in Egypt, Libya, and Syria are such hypocrites.

The Iranians want Assad rather than any Sunni, and the Russians want anybody but ISIS.

And to snuggle up to Iran and create a Syrian government indebted to them.

What an idiotic new liberal taboo

Or maybe it's not specifically liberal.

No corporal punishment for kids.

This carries the taboo way to extremes.

How can a teacher remove a disobedient pupil?

Shouldn't he expect to be lied to?

Part of the system.

The burden of proof on the accuser, the routine plea of not guilty, the right against self incrimination - they all add up.

Jail for US prep school sex attacker

The story provides no context for this remark.

Superior Court Judge Larry Smukler called Labrie a "very good liar" as he sentenced him.

For the elites, the law is a little different.

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Theological skirts in a twist

Apparently, there's a flap over this and a few tweets in which Ross Douthat used the word "heresy" correctly.

Is there a concerted effort by liberal theologians to change the position of the church on various points related to sex and morals?

Yes.

Would these changes move the church to espouse views regarding the indissolubility of marriage previously condemned by the church?

Yes, though without quite daring to admit what's happening in so many words.

A man talks some sense while Republicans babble like madmen

All their candidates, most of their pundits, and many of their congresspeople oppose the more or less clean deal in play to raise the ceiling and ease sequestration through March of 2017.

This is the most sensible idea I've heard on the topic.

We'll see if this holds up.

Democrats are pro-crime

The FBI director is saying something the Democrats need to hear

The Decriminalization Delusion

Overwhelmingly, people in prison are there for a very good reason.

Monday, October 26, 2015

A sample

Of right wing thought, today.

Hillary claws Bernie

She rips Bernie with her feminist cat claws.

Just as she did to O and his allies in 2008.

Sanders criticized the "shouting" from both sides on gun issues in the first Democratic presidential debate. 

He was not talking about her or anyone in particular but only addressing the climate of discourse.

Clinton said Saturday in Iowa that Sanders' remarks came with a gender-related undercurrent.

She said: "I'm not shouting. It's just that when women talk, some people think we're shouting."

Sanders on Sunday laughed at her suggestion that his remarks were about gender.

Instead of calling her a vicious bitch.

That would have been accurate but politically suicidal.

This is going to get worse, the longer he stays in and especially if he threatens to pass her in the race.

She got pretty ugly with O even though she dared not alienate black voters and the very large part of the party that truly believed and still believes any hint that the place of women in society is or has been at all comparable to the place America has allowed blacks in the past is shocking and offensive, not quite but almost as bad as Holocaust denial.

Nothing like that protects Bernie and in fact she will use not just sex but race against him.

I swear she'll find a way.

She is and has always been her own Lee Atwater.

She will probably be the Democratic candidate and in that case we have to hope she wins.

But it will be shameful.

We will feel every day that we are being slimed by her.

Popular sovereignty? Not in Portugal. Banker sovereignty!

Portugal's anti-euro Left banned from power

An anti-austerity coalition won and absolute majority in Parliament, but the president refuses to allow them to put up a PM or form a government.

Unity of apperception, again

Does the unity of apperception finally preclude not only the materiality of the Ego, but also of the object?

Sunday, October 25, 2015

The GWOT in Britain

The Tories and Labor face off on this one, too.

Labour has signalled [sic] it is prepared to oppose new surveillance and counter-terrorism legislation if it is too heavy-handed, as David Cameron announces more details about his anti-terror strategy such as measures to prevent teenagers travelling to join Isis.

Andy Burnham, the shadow home secretary, said Labour will support legislation that is “reasonable and proportionate” but stressed the party had a duty to make sure the government gets the balance right.

He warned Cameron to proceed with the utmost caution and make sure his laws do not fuel “resentment, division and a sense of victimisation”, especially among Britain’s Muslim population.

By that standard the Brits could do nothing at all.

Well, I suppose they could invite some conservative Imam to publicly butt-fuck the queen.
Anything short of that they are bound to resent and claim victimizes them all as Muslims.

They fought hate and violence with hate and violence

And they were deluded hard-left revolutionaries.

What's not to like, huh?

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution

Attack the elderly

These will become ways to police the old, making vital benefits contingent on "responsible behavior."

Denying them to the undeserving old.

Joe was and is the better man

Megan Carpentier says not a word about why those "centrists" did not want to embrace Hillary.

But it was that whole character thing that Megan is being discreet about.

Hillary is unscrupulous, dishonest, mendacious, treacherous, cold, and uncandid.

Joe letting everyone down (he did dither far too long) does not change that.

[T]he only people who are really crying today are those people too centrist to be Berners who hated the thought of “having” to vote for Hillary Clinton.

To those people, I can only say: it’s time to suck it up

The latest polling had her up by at least 20 points over every other candidate in the race with Biden in it; the narrowest recent poll shows that, with Biden out, her lead over Sanders among Democratic primary voters goes to 25 points.

The tragedy of aging

When they age, bad-ass bikers become old white guys.

Harley-Davidson's reputation as an 'old, white-guy brand' may be its downfall

Draco

He was 18, she was 15.

They had what he admitted was consensual sex, but they did not have intercourse.

He was convicted of sexual assault against a minor.

He faces up to 11 years in prison and will have to register as a sex offender for life.

Had he, too, been under the age of consent there would have been no charge at all.

Another book too repulsive to finish

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is deplorably profane, which I suppose many think makes it authentic (what?) and gritty.

I found it unreadable.

Ulysses, which I have dutifully tried to get through four times, has always become intolerable to me about half way through, by which time it has already been too often almost, and even too often exactly, pure gibberish for pages on end.

Naked Lunch is unreadable for profanity but also for, to some extent, unintelligibility.

Yes, she's a liar, we got it.

The Benghazi Hearings Confirm Yet Again What a Brazen Liar Hillary Is

Hillary’s Breathtaking Mendacity

What Hillary Knew

She's repulsively dishonest and a contemptible spinmeister, she's too bellicose, and she's too Wall Street.

But on some of the things Bernie attacks her for she was actually right and became wrong by edging toward him.

Gay marriage was and is a travesty, for example.

The pipeline is a good idea and forbidding it only appeals to people who want to "leave it in the ground."

And it is by no means entirely clear that the TPP would hurt ordinary Americans more than it helps.

Or hurt more ordinary Americans than it helps.

The way of a liberal with the constitution

[J]ust this week, the Obama Justice Department (DOJ) announced it was backing a lawsuit against a Boise, Idaho, ordinance that forbids camping or sleeping on public property.

The DOJ claims that when a city can’t provide adequate shelter for all its homeless, such laws violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

From the DOJ’s filing: “​If a person literally has nowhere else to go, then enforcement of the anti-camping ordinance against that person criminalizes her for being homeless.”

Not "criminalizes him"?

Anyway, the laws in question forbid camping or sleeping on public property such as in city parks or on the streets.

The persons affected do not literally have no place else to go.

The laws in question do not forbid camping or sleeping per se, nor do they forbid existing, nor do they criminalize homelessness.

And a punishment is not cruel and unusual or not according as the law for violation of which it is imposed is inhumane or not.

Liberals choose stupidity, play dumb, in order to abuse the law and the constitution to get their way.

Bait and Switch, Bernie style

Public college should be free

He appeals for legitimacy to the precedent of the GI Bill.

But the GI Bill has always been similar to a voucher plan, the government offering to pay a fixed amount for any eligible student's tuition to any college, university, or other post-high school institution, with minimal restrictions.

And yes, that does include private colleges as well as state institutions, whether church-affiliated or not; if I recall correctly, you could even use the GI Bill to cover seminary or divinity school costs.

And I personally would support an agenda calling for "the GI Bill for all," were anyone to propose it.

But that's not actually Bernie's plan.

Bernie wants to use a tax on "Wall Street speculation" to directly subsidize state public colleges and universities in order to make them tuition free for all students, in-state, out-of-state, foreign, illegal aliens, or whatever.

Private colleges and students attending them will not benefit by this.

And these subsidies will be accompanied by an increased regulatory burden deepening and strengthening the grip of political correctness at these schools and, directly or indirectly, on all of higher education.

Bernie's plan is a secularist and PC attack on private and church-affiliated, religiously committed higher education as well as on the independence of education at state colleges and universities.

If his plan results in states with public colleges and universities cutting aid to private colleges - Pennsylvania, for example, not only supports a system of state colleges and universities but annually provides crucial assistance to such private institutions as the University of Pittsburgh - that will only make the impact of his plan more devastating.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Names from the Underworld

Pluto's Kerberos finally shows itself

Greekified spelling of Cerberus.

Cyber crime

Scary.

TalkTalk boss 'receives ransom email'

Killing half a million people in The Year of Living Dangerously

Indonesia cancels 1965 festival events

In 1965 communists in that country, too long tolerated, encouraged, and even supported by Sukarno, had enough mass as well as elite support to attempt a coup with relations to that leader that remain mysterious.

The coup was crushed and an onslaught against the communists ensued.

Today Indonesia is the most populous of Muslim nations and is pretty backward about it, though media that once wrote of moderates and hard liners in the Kremlin often describe Indonesia as a moderate Muslim land.

If you wonder how that could have happened, consider that body count.

Counterrevolution can be as bloody as revolution.

Friday, October 23, 2015

Plato and Pisarev

It is interesting that Pisarev, one of the leaders of Nihilist thought, deplored Plato's ideal republic much as did Popper.

He even cited the destruction of the family as one of Plato's absurdities and crimes.

Plato's Idealism,  in Russian Philosophy,  Volume II, The Nihilists, the Populists, and the Critics of Religion and Culture.

Home truths

Laws are commands backed by force.

And government is force backed by bullshit.

Enjoy.

PS, in every society without exception the most fundamental and massive deed of that force is to distinguish those who control property from those who do not.

In our time and place, the haves from the have-nots.

A question of interpretation

The First Amendment pertains only to the federal government and the incorporation doctrine is a liberal, and nowadays libertarian, fabrication.

Hence its breathtaking breadth.

When adopted, it was widely felt by Americans that the state governments were the real governments, with the real responsibility for governing and the real and complete authority needed to govern.

Hence they could afford to quite absolutely forbid the federal power to at all meddle in the real and necessary business of governing, which of course includes limiting and policing speech, the press, and religion.

The states at the time did many of them both establish specific brands of Protestant Christianity and in varying degrees suppress other denominations and other religions.

Religious tests for office and for witnesses in court were common.

It was absolutely within the power of the states to suppress the worship of the Devil and witchcraft.

But in any case it is highly unlikely the authors or ratifiers of the First Amendment thought "free exercise of religion" extended to witchcraft or Satanism.

Most might not even have agreed it extended to all, or perhaps even any, non-Christian religions.

How did we get to this point?

Incorporation.

But why agree an admitted atheist has standing to demand the right to give an invocation in accordance with a religion he does not share?

PS.

Don't the liberals and Democrats nowadays teach principled contempt for the actual constitution, anyway?

Except when it suits them to be sticklers, of course, for its real or fraudulently alleged provisions.

Just like the Republicans and the libertarians.

Or for that matter the Christian right.

When criminals and thugs dictate values

Obama defends #BLM

"I think everybody understands all lives matter," Obama said. 

"I think the reason that the organizers used the phrase 'Black Lives Matter' was not because they were suggesting nobody else's lives matter. 

Rather, what they were suggesting was there is a specific problem that's happening in the African-American community that's not happening in other communities.

Perfectly true.

Black communities are dominated by their own predators to a far greater extent than any others, maybe excepting Hispanic slums.

The predators have families and sympathizers adding up, if not to a majority, then to a minority that dominates community valuations.

Who hates cops?

Who wants to cripple or weaken law enforcement?

Who burns down the neighborhood to "demand justice"?

Thugs and other criminals.

And a significant fragment of the political left.

Or for that matter the especially alienated political right, in lesser degree.

Self interest and the social good

Or something like that.

Spanish firm iGenomix, which developed the test, says pre-pregnancy genetic screening could soon become as commonplace as ultrasound scans and cut the number of children born with diseases like muscular dystrophy from one in 25 to one in 100,000.

A recent study by iGenomix found that 8 per cent of couples were "clinically incompatible", meaning both had the same faulty DNA. 

Such couples would be told there was a one in four chance of their child being ill and counselled on their options.

These include an IVF technique, in which only healthy embryos are implanted in the womb, the use of donor eggs or sperm or adoption. 

Some women may opt to get pregnant naturally and abort later.

On the other hand, if firms like Ancestry dot com are any guide, this is junk science at its worst.

The clock-boy story

Lee Smith

Never mind the bonehead "folk wisdom" about people who fall for a con.

Frustrated idiots versus Hillary

They won't see it that way but the dolts of the right blew this one badly.

Hillary did an amazing job of not blowing her cool, not bursting into a rage, and not puking contempt all over these loons for a full eleven hours.

If anybody but their own true believers doesn't now realize Trey Gowdy and his political dirty tricksters were simply out to get her, I can't imagine how he missed it.

I think Susie's reaction is pretty typical of how many women of America see this, and especially Democratic women.

For them, it's all about sex, all day, every day.

Like the race psychos of #BLM, they radiate resentment and hatred of their mostly imaginary enemies even in their sleep, and every second thing they say is an accusation.

And they really just don't care how many men their own shithead attitude angers.

All the same, it remains true that Hillary, O, and many leading Democrats together totally, shamefully, and perhaps in some measure deliberately misinterpreted the events of 9/11/12.

Read Kim Strassel's excellent and damning account.

Those were celebratory riots and other violence by America-hating Muslim masses all over the Muslim world, which included the organized plot to attack the American diplomatic presence in Libya and kill our ambassador.

But even yesterday Hillary continued to tell the lie that it was all caused, or anyway in large part caused, by a mocking video of the life of Mohammed put up on the internet by some poor schmuck whom the White House shamefully persecuted for it.

On that occasion and on every such occasion the White House and leading Democrats have taken the side of Muslim fanatics in suppressing blasphemy, even demanding passage of laws to satisfy the demands of Islamofascists.

And those on the right, left, or in between who damn them for it are entirely right.

KS thinks they told this whopper of a lie for many days on end in order not to have to admit they had been taken by surprise by organized terrorists allied with al-Qaeda and by the violent hatred of so much of the Muslim world that took to the streets to denounce America and celebrate OBL and the attacks of 9/11/01.

That is, after all, a hatred the existence of which does not sit well with the established narrative exculpating "real" Islam and the vast bulk of the world's Muslims, ascribing dangerous and sometimes violent theocratic politics and enmity to Israel, America, and all things Occidental only to the fraudulent and "hijacked" version of the Islamists, supposed to be only a small minority.

And she probably did break the law, seriously break the law, using a personal email server, too.

And she and her agents have blown smoke and told lies about that for some time.

On the other hand, this in no way establishes that negligence by Hillary or the White House played a role in enabling the horrors of 9/11/12.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

It's a smear, and the left loves it

Merkel's spokesman chimes in.

Leaving today's Germans out of account, were all Germans of the Weimar and war years really to blame?

The German Communists?

The German Social Democrats?

The other Germans who opposed Hitler?

The German Jews, for cryin' out loud?

It's even a bum rap to lay this at the door of all the anti-Semites of Germany, modern or medieval.

Few among them had any idea of the Holocaust, or ever intended anything so horrific.

Liars all

Killing Osama

Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday for the first time that he had privately urged President Obama to order the raid that killed Osama bin Laden — a new account contradicting his prior public claim to have opposed the audacious May 2011 operation.

Biden, speaking at a George Washington University forum on the vice presidency, also seemed to undercut Hillary Clinton’s contention in her memoirs that she had unequivocally backed the raid.

But there is reason - plenty of reason - to believe his earlier claims he opposed the attack.

And the many reports that Hillary favored it.

All the same, Biden is out.

Interesting he announced before Hillary's testimony at the Benghazi hearings.

The perils of liberty

Even the prosecutor doesn't approve this PC censorship of free speech.

Complete and total evasion

What is democratic socialism?

This is how close Bernie got to an answer, according to John Nichols.

“Well,” replied Sanders, “we’re gonna win because first, we’re gonna explain what democratic socialism is.”

And then he didn't, but said this, reducing socialism to progressive bumper stickers.

“[What] democratic socialism is about is saying that it is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of 1 percent in this country own almost 90 percent—almost—own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. That it is wrong, today, in a rigged economy, that 57 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent,” continued the senator, who explained “that when you look around the world, you see every other major country providing healthcare to all people as a right, except the United States. You see every other major country saying to moms that, when you have a baby, we’re not gonna separate you from your newborn baby, because we are going to have—we are gonna have medical and family paid leave, like every other country on Earth. Those are some of the principles that I believe in, and I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.”

For readers who may somehow have forgotten or never known, socialism is public ownership of the means of production, and democratic socialism is socialism in the context of democratic government.

And Bernie's history, like much of his current rhetoric, shows him to be much brighter pink than his current agenda lets on - a point which has always been true of socialists, even those who founded parties of that name, running for office in a capitalist democracy.

Hillary, in no way a socialist and like every other non-socialist Democrat, is in no position to red bait Bernie for fear of sliming her party and herself.

She and they have to shield him as hypocritically as those who know quite well what he really was and is.

What does it say that Democrats so badly need to coerce money from the white working class?

Ian Millhiser has an excellent piece on the threat to the future of the Democratic Party and hence to the historic achievements of progressivism, whether redistributive, welfarist, or regulatory.

And it refers the reader to the equally interesting piece by Matt Yglesias.

But I refer above to the role of union contributions enabled by mandatory, dues-paying membership in closed shops, a source that had already dried up quite a bit even before the current wave of right to work laws.

If the Republicans would follow Main Street rather than Wall Street and abandon their class war, becoming again the party of Eisenhower, Nixon, and even Rockefeller, would the entire white working class defect to them?

Not bloody likely though, given its prospects as considered by Millhiser and Yglesias.

[Aside:

Ezra Klein points out that many Democrats are in fact anti-abortion, though that view has been successfully suppressed among the party leadership.

He avoids a firestorm of hostile reaction, perhaps even threatening his career, by saying nothing about race.

/Aside.]

By the way, the idea that gerrymandering is forbidden by the First Amendment, which constrains only the federal government anyway, is an hallucination explicable only by the delusion that all political sins must be unconstitutional.

The text.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Politicians and lawyers lie about the constitution like clergy and theologians lie about the Bible.

It may or may not be true that voter ID laws disparately impact blacks.

It is almost certainly true their intention is to disparately impact Democrats.

And that they are actually a useful move against fraudulent voting.

Bibi defends Hitler. So what?

Josh Marshall.

Netanyahu Reduced to Defending Hitler. Really ...

In a speech Tuesday, in an effort to make his case about Palestinian provocations and violence against Jews, the Israel Prime Minister actually found his way into defending Adolf Hitler.

. . . .

Here's the passage in question, from a transcript released by the Prime Minister's Office (emphasis added)...
This attack and other attacks on the Jewish community in 1920, 1921, 1929, were instigated by a call of the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was later sought for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials because he had a central role in fomenting the final solution.
He flew to Berlin.
Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews.
And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, "If you expel them, they'll all come here." 
"So what should I do with them?" he asked.
He said, "Burn them."

Bibi may not have been right, and Marshal may be right in insisting, in effect, that Hitler never really considered mass expulsion, despite historical precedent, and favored genocide from the earliest days of his obsessive Jew hating.

But however that may be it is bizarre, offensive, and disappointing to find JM writing as if no one is allowed to believe or claim that there is something of which Hitler was not guilty, that some possible accusations against him would be false if actually made.

So far as I know, Hitler was not a pedophile, nor a serial rapist, nor a secret agent working to betray Germany for Stalin, for example.

But it is absurd to suppose he was born lusting to exterminate Jews.

And it is not absurd - though it may be false - to suppose he may have reached that extremity of Jew hating by degrees, first favoring expulsion in order to make Europe Judenrein, and only later settling on extermination.

No, not absurd.

But JM apparently finds it egregiously morally repulsive.

Interesting.

This writer in The Guardian reports Bibi, for these same remarks, has been accused of trivializing the Holocaust.

From the ludicrous to the ludicrous.

Defending his comments Netanyahu said: “I didn’t mean to absolve Hitler of responsibility, but to show that the father of the Palestinian nation wanted to destroy Jews even without occupation.”

But his remarks as quoted by Josh Marshall as well as Peter Beaumont indicate the Mufti advocated extermination in order to prevent occupation.

Here is the writer in The Guardian.

In his speech, Netanyahu purported to describe a meeting between Husseini and Hitler in November 1941. 

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said: ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to Palestine].’” 

According to Netanyahu, Hitler then asked: “What should I do with them?” and the mufti replied: “Burn them.”

Oh, well.

Perhaps someone will complain he was exonerating the Mufti!

When they remove the monument I'll be more impressed

Ole Miss Students Vote To Remove Confederate Symbol From Campus

Student leaders at the University of Mississippi voted on Tuesday night to remove the Mississippi state flag, which contains the Confederate battle emblem, from campus.

. . . . 

At Ole Miss, the flag flies on campus near a monument honoring Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War.

The state should have beat them to it by changing the state flag.

The university should already have removed the monument.

Politics is like religion. It draws psychopaths.

In America, the right more than the left.

Not the fringe right, oh no.

The official right; the right that holds not just office but high national office.

It's not the establishment versus the extremists, as the media and even left comment so often say.

It's the extremist versus the moderate factions of the conservative, Republican establishment.

Both are wings of the main stream.

GOP Congressman Already Floating Impeachment For Hillary Clinton

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

No free speech for you!

Remember the soup Nazi?


Abuse of racketeering and advertising statutes.

Bernie joins the bad guys.

Left wing fraud

Drone war is no more a civil liberties issue than gun ownership a health care issue.

ACLU demands CIA disclose drone program details after document leak

Ebola becoming an STD?

Ebola lingers in semen for nine months

Two new Ebola cases in Guinea

Fronting for cartels, stoners, and 3rd World drug farmers

UN attempt to decriminalise drugs foiled

The war against men in science


Like a fish needs a bicycle.

Culture wars in Holland

Dutch alarm over child brides from Syria

The other shoe would be polygamy, I suppose.

Monday, October 19, 2015

An anti-interventionist election?

Trump vs Sanders, says Pat Buchanan.

Reflection provoked by Rushdie's mortal soul

Substance dualism is too strong but physicalistic monism denies the substantial unity of the self as well as the unity of apperception, leaving experience unaccountable.

The subject of my experience is me and I am my body, as William Leijpen put it a long time ago in his Existential Phenomenology.

But the living, sensing, perceiving, thinking, desiring, willing body that I am is no insubstantial aggregate, no mere congeries of physical parts and processes.

A different kind of emergentism?

Maybe.

Just a thought.

Rushdie.

Yes and no

The race angle is largely (doubtless not entirely) spin and black paranoia, but the story appears for real.

For decades the impression has been common that American cops are the most lawless and brutal of police in the contemporary Occident, and by no means only in their behavior towards minorities.

The scandal of Chicago, reported recently in several stories in The Guardian related to a lawsuit by that paper of major importance, goes a long way to validating that impression.

The relatively weak, poor, and powerless of society are quite naturally the chosen victims of official thuggery and abuse of power, and not only at the hands of the police.

Given our immigration patterns and various other realities of life, some - but by no means all - minorities have historically been and today remain over-represented among that pushover population of easy targets.

I'll take Sweden. Or Denmark. Or France.

Krugman discussed Bernie's point and Hillary's weak rejoinder.

And the Republicans?

Always the same bullshit.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

The idea of a tropical paradise

However useless your product, package it properly, and people will buy it.

People will buy anything if the approach is correct.

Jack McDevitt, Firebird.

Of course, the notion originated when sex-starved sailors first set foot in Polynesia.

Since then it's just advertising and the lemming phenomenon.

No one in his senses could think a bug and disease ridden place with such a terrible climate a paradise.

You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone

Nothing makes you appreciate civilization like spending a few days visiting relatives in North Dakota.

And don't ask.

And the GWOT will go on

Bernie and Hillary both support O's decision

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Sunday that he supports President Barack Obama's decision to keep troops in Afghanistan, prolonging the war beyond 2016.

Obama announced last week that he would keep 5,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan after he leaves office in 2017, breaking his promise to end the war during his tenure. 

He originally planned to maintain only a small military presence based at the U.S. embassy there.

During an interview on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday morning, host George Stephanopoulos asked Sanders, a Democratic presidential candidate, whether he backs keeping U.S. troops in the country.

"Well, yeah, I won't give you the exact number. Clearly, we do not want to see the Taliban gain more power, and I think we need a certain nucleus of American troops present in Afghanistan to try to provide the training and support the Afghan army needs," he said.

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton also said Friday that she thought Obama had made "the right decision."

Who's got my six?

Not Hillary.

Bernie.

Asked again whether she would expand Social Security benefits, Clinton conceded that she would expand benefits for some of the program's poorest beneficiaries, specifically citing widows and single women.

"I want to enhance the benefits for the poorest recipients of Social Security,” Clinton said. 

“We have a lot of women on Social Security, particularly widowed and single women, who didn't make a lot of money during their careers and they are impoverished and they need more help from the Social Security system."

Sanders, by contrast, has introduced a bill that would expand Social Security across the board and increase its solvency by lifting the cap on earnings subject to Social Security payroll taxes.

Responding to Clinton, Sanders said the reason he so strongly supports expansion is because he believes current benefits are inadequate for the vast majority of seniors.

“My view is, when you have millions of seniors in this country trying to get by -- and I don’t know how they do -- on 11, 12, 13 thousand dollars a year, you don’t cut Social Security, you expand it," Sanders said. 

"And the way you expand it is by lifting the cap on taxable income so that you do away with the absurdity of a millionaire paying the same amount into the system as someone making $118,000.”

Tell me again

Why do retirees vote for this guy's party?

Friday, October 16, 2015

Bernie calls the poster boy for greed "the poster boy for greed."

The Guardian has his response to that hedge fund twit, Martin Shkreli.

O covers for Hill

FBI investigators are seriously annoyed.

O has not been studious about avoiding political meddling.

The right is aware.

Wait for the train wreck

Some people think the markets are just getting over Greece, China, and talk of the Fed raising rates.

And now for the congressional Republicans.

Bernie is, and Hillary is not, a socialist

The outlook of a progressive, not a socialist.

As Michelle Goldberg quotes in Slate,

Hillary Clinton defended capitalism, not bombastically, but earnestly: “[W]e are not Denmark. I love Denmark. We are the United States of America. And it’s our job to rein in the excesses of capitalism so that it doesn’t run amok and doesn’t cause the kind of inequities we’re seeing in our economic system. But we would be making a grave mistake to turn our backs on what built the greatest middle class in the [sic] history.”

Her remark reflects, though it does not define, the outlook of a progressive or, as we used to say in the late 20th Century, a liberal.

Not a socialist.

A social democrat?

Well, it's a question of dosage, really.

Bernie, an alleged fan of Denmark, seems really in his sympathies way over there with Castro, the Sandinistas, the Russians, and other practitioners of overwhelming and even totalitarian socialism from Lenin to Che.

Hillary's sentiments put her about where the progressive presidents' practice put them.

Let the lying denials, bullshit smokescreens, and phony accusations begin.

Salon's writers are all but universally fellow-travelers at best and outright reds at worst.

As I mentioned before, if you surf the net for it you will find that while some people and some dictionaries define "red-baiting" as (1) denouncing someone as a communist, anarchist, radical, socialist, or what have you others define it as (2) falsely denouncing someone as a communist, anarchist, radical, socialist, or what have you.

Calling Bernie a socialist is only red-baiting in sense (1); it is definitely not red-baiting in sense (2).

But calling Hillary a socialist is red-baiting in sense (2).

I note that the left has also drawn parallels between Bernie and Jeremy Corbyn, and between and among both of them and Syriza as well as Podemos.

But now, when others do the same, they portray it as sinister, wicked red-baiting.

A Clintonista bitch in charge

Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

It's about the debates, but not only the debates.

I used to like this girl.

But I don't like this naked partisanship.

She's just a Clinton tool when she's supposed to be doing what's best for the party.

Trump for real. And Hillary. And Bernie.

Heard on Morning Joe, today, while driving to the mall for my walk.

Per Joe and Mika, establishment Republicans and pundits, much though they hate it, are admitting Trump might actually be their party's nominee, when the dust settles.

He is far more Main Street than Wall Street, being opposed to immigration and free trade while refusing to try to eliminate Social Security and Medicare.

Each of these is directly opposed to the Wall Street view.

In the money primaries, Jeb W, Cruz, and Rubio are way behind Trump and Carson.

In the polls, Trump leads and Carson isn't far behind, while all the "respectable" candidates are in single digits.

Carly Fiorina gets a bounce with every debate and then falls back, again.

Eugene Robinson, writing about the Democrats' debate.

The main event was Clinton versus Sanders, and what should worry Republicans is that the two leading Democrats spent so much of the evening on the issues Americans say they care about. 

To cite one representative survey, a recent CBS poll asked registered voters what they most wanted to hear the candidates discuss. 

"Economy and jobs" came in first at 24 percent, while "immigration" was a distant second at 11 percent and "foreign policy" third at 10 percent.

But what do Republicans talk about in their debates? 

Who is going to be toughest on illegal immigration, who is more opposed to President Obama's foreign policy, who is more determined to defund Planned Parenthood. 

On the economy, they fight to establish who is more opposed to raising the minimum wage.

The GOP establishment candidates have no economic message to offer beyond the party's standard prescription of tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation for businesses. 

That may be why the front-runners are Trump and Carson, who have never held public office and whose economic prescriptions are more populist.

It is a pressing fact of daily life for most Americans that middle-class incomes have fallen in the past decade and are roughly the same as they were 20 years ago. 

This explains why Gallup found recently that despite the economic recovery, only about half of Americans are "feeling better" about their financial situations.

How can government help the middle class? 

With a higher minimum wage? 

With a mandate for businesses to offer paid family leave? 

With assistance in paying for higher education, perhaps even free tuition at public universities? 

With trade and tax policies that encourage keeping jobs in the United States?

The Democratic candidates understand that these are the issues people care most about. 

Trump gets it, too, in his own bombastic way. 

A party that goes into the election without a compelling message on jobs and incomes -- I'm talking to you, GOP establishment -- is begging to lose.

And then there is Krauthammer.

Unless she’s indicted, Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination.

. . . . . 

Amid the playacting between today and Clinton’s coronation next summer, we can joyfully savor the most delightful moment of the debate, when we were reminded by Anderson Cooper that Sanders had honeymooned in the Soviet Union.

Really?

Well, yes, supposing a working honeymoon is still a honeymoon.

And if it was red-baiting, as Bernie's fans on the left are insisting, to allude to this it was only red-baiting of a venial sort.

First, because Cooper did not actually denounce him but only alluded to his working honeymoon.

And second because, if you surf the net for it you will find that while some people and some dictionaries define "red-baiting" as (1) denouncing someone as a communist, anarchist, radical, socialist, or what have you others define it as (2) falsely denouncing someone as a communist, anarchist, radical, socialist, or what have you.

Now, the truth is that Bernie deserved to be red-baited in sense (1), given his unrenounced past and flaunted present.

Thus red-baiting someone who was for decades an apologist and fan of red revolutions and even now daily and unreservedly denounces capitalism, calls vociferously for a "political revolution," and insists he is a socialist is hardly unfair.

In any case, it is clear one could not denounce him any more falsely than he has, himself, as a communist, anarchist, radical, socialist, or what have you.

In a nutshell:

Calling Bernie a socialist is only red-baiting in sense (1), which is to say, it is telling the truth.

Calling Hillary a socialist, as some lying right wingers have done, is red-baiting in sense (2).

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Catholics and tubal ligation

Catholic hospital denies Michigan woman treatment on religious grounds

TL is a totally effective form of contraception and as such some Catholics decline to do the procedure.

And that is certainly a liberty issue, if not necessarily a specifically religious liberty issue, though the reason for not providing the service is religious.

Mexican restaurants needn't sell Chinese food, and this is a liberty issue though the reason they don't want to needn't be religious.

Anyway, probably, the bishops' view is that the lady should abstain, though I am not aware the Church has ever insisted sex after menopause is wrong and the Church's position on the rhythm method is blatantly hypocritical.

The Church considers sex without the possibility of reproduction immoral, and so opposes birth control, with the exception noted.

You might think, given her condition and the Doctrine of Double Effect, they would cut her some slack.

But no.

Because it works so well for HIV


Ebola persists in the semen of male survivors much longer than previously thought, a study shows.

The report in the New England Journal of Medicine found two-thirds of men had Ebola in their semen up to six months after infection, and a quarter after nine.

A separate study, in the same journal, reports Ebola being spread through sex with a survivor six months after their symptoms had started.

Men who have survived Ebola are being encouraged to wear condoms.

Reality mucks up "Out of Africa" story

Humans in Asia '20,000 years early'

TV verisimilitude

Muslims annoyed at lack of representational accuracy in Homeland.

'Homeland is racist' graffiti on set

The racism thing is just Islamobullshit pushing our PC buttons.

As for the rest, North Dakotans whine Oil and Money, shot in Utah, shows mountains in the background.

There are no mountains in the background anywhere in North Dakota.

Fighting the Taliban and Boko Haram


After all this, the Taliban are as dangerous as ISIS.

And the situation looks shaky in light of ISIS snd Taliban successes.


And BH has actually signed up.


The GWOT, ashamed to speak its name, is still with us, a global war against Muslim fundamentalism.

Or Islamofascism.

Or whatever.

McCain, with a shrug, said it would go on for a century.

He might have underestimated.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Saudi savages

PM to write over Saudi alcohol case

Mother of condemned Saudi seeks US aid

Mother of Saudi man sentenced to crucifixion begs Obama to intervene

Saudis to chair the UN Human Rights Council?

Hilarious.

By "crucifixion" they don't seem to mean crucifixion, a horrible form of  execution.

It seems they plan to behead him and then crucify his dead body.

Hillary fights dirty

Bernie was right about suing gun makers and "We're America" is no answer to Bernie's praise for Scandinavian social democracy.

She was wrong about Iraq, she is wrong about Putin, and she is going to be as bad as GW in foreign affairs.

She is who she is, after all.


But she is unlikely to undermine and won't seek to abolish Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare, unlike the Republicans.

Thank God for small favors.

Which is not to say this is unreasonable.

She reportedly said Bernie voted 5 times against the Brady bill.

It's been so long I have forgotten what it did.

She can't flank him on the left on foreign policy or core progressive issues so she's hammering him on this one social issue.


When asked if the Vermont senator was strong on gun control, she said, "No, not at all," before vowing to go after the makers of guns used in shootings.

She is flat wrong on that, I think.

Per BBC

The two also argued over the merits of capitalism.

If they did, the reported squabbling does not include or show it.

Mr Sanders called for a "political revolution", arguing that "Congress does not regulate Wall Street. Wall Street regulates Congress".

But when he suggested that the US should look to Nordic countries because of "what they have accomplished for their working people", Mrs Clinton responded: "We are not Denmark. I love Denmark. We are the United States of America.

"I'm a progressive, but I'm a progressive who likes to get things done," she said.

Hillary waves the flag in opposition to Bernie's social democratic criticisms and they call that a defense of capitalism?

It was a dodge.

To my knowledge, Bernie has never explained his talk of a "political revolution."

Is that his inner Leninist speaking out?

I think she's more right about this than Bernie.


Clinton was unmoved by public approbation for Snowden, who exposed the depths of US and UK surveillance to media including the Guardian in 2013.

“He broke the laws of the United States,” she said.

“He could have been a whistleblower, he could have gotten all the protections of a whistleblower.
He chose not to do that.

He stole very important information that has fallen into the wrong hands so I think he should not be brought home without facing the music.”

Snowden has said he did not believe he was granted adequate protection from reprisal under whistleblower laws.

Laws protecting whistleblowers in intelligence agencies are written differently from laws protecting others who oppose their employers – including in the government – on grounds of conscience, and are generally considered comparatively weak.

Sanders – Clinton’s main challenger for the Democratic nomination – was more lenient.

“I think Snowden played a very important role in educating the American public,” the Vermont senator said.

He, too, said that Snowden had broken the law and suggested that he ought to be tried.

“I think there should be a penalty to that,” he said.

“But I think that education should be taken into consideration before the sentencing.”

Monday, October 12, 2015

A complete crock of shit from Pat Buchanan

Yup.

The growing problem of stupidity among Brit girls

Really.

"Native Americans Day"

The left does not celebrate but frankly deplores, even as it denies, the European discovery of America.

October 12: Best Wishes On This Native Americans Day

Every year, the same racist bullshit.

Europeans invented every social evil and every war crime, and basically stole the Americas from the Indians, previously sole owners and holders of exclusive rights to the entire Western Hemisphere.

Really.

Lo, the Poor Indian, sweetie-pie that he was, never had a chance.

"Indigenous Peoples Day"

These people are nuts

The Freedom Caucus has demands for the next Speaker

Susie Madrak summarizes.

Their goals are standard and universal among conservatives, and have been since the Republicans rejected Social Security in 1935.

What makes these folks radicals and causes the media to call them ultra-conservatives, the hard right, and so on is their willingness to wreck the government, the country, and even the global economy if they don't get their way, right away.

How Kevin McCarthy predicted his own demise

Friday, October 9, 2015

Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters

Pauline.

In real life nothing is solved; everything continues.

We remain in our uncertainty; and we shall remain until the very end without knowing what to make of things.

In the mean time life goes on and on, the same as ever.

But the man of faith gets the last word, after two murders, one more shocking than the other.

La Perouse in grief over Boris.

The devil and God are one and the same; they work together.

We try to believe that everything bad in the world comes from the devil, but it's because we should never find strength to forgive God.

He plays with us like a cat tormenting a mouse.

And then afterwards he wants us to be grateful to him as well.

Grateful for what? for what?

Do you know the most horrible thing of all that he has done?

Sacrificed his own son to save us.

His son!

His son!

Cruelty! that's the principal attribute of God.

No Speaker, yet

Republicans in disarray as Kevin McCarthy drops out of House speaker race

Republicans in Freedom Caucus support Florida conservative as speaker

Paul Ryan for speaker? 2012 VP pick resists but momentum is building

Teaching for the test


All the diesel cars passed the EU’s official lab-based regulatory test (called NEDC), but the test has failed to cut air pollution as governments intended because carmakers designed vehicles that perform better in the lab than on the road.

There is no evidence of illegal activity, such as the “defeat devices” used by Volkswagen.

Cultural evolution that didn't happen

And is now resisted.

Jihad vs. McWorld.

The West and the rest were alike in the 17th Century, but the West has since then been changed ever more profoundly by increasing secularization that has little affected the rest.


Use of child soldiers, corporal punishments, and beheading are examples.

Jessica Stern sees ISIS in the shadow cast by fascism and especially communism.

In the tradition of Hannah Arendt, she writes of "total institutions" and "totalitarianism."

Of course, it's not just Islam, though it is mostly Islam.


“The country has to stand united. Harmony, brotherhood and peace will lead us to development,” Modi said at an election rally for the forthcoming polls in the eastern state of Bihar.

Modi also implored people to ignore political leaders who have jumped on the issue to win votes along religious lines.

Several of Modi’s own ministers have stopped short of condemning the attack, fuelling concerns among religious minorities of an erosion of rights in the world’s biggest democracy and a strengthening of Hindu hardliners.

Cows are considered sacred by most Hindus in an officially secular India, whose millions of Muslims and other minorities eat beef as a source of protein.

India is the world’s biggest exporter of buffalo meat, an industry mainly run by Muslims.

Modi’s comments come just hours after legislators from his ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) punched and shoved an opposition Muslim member in a state parliament over eating beef.

Television footage showed several BJP legislators attacking Abdul Rashid in the Jammu and Kashmir state assembly, for holding a provocative “beef party”.

“No amount of condemnation can be enough for what happened today,” the state opposition leader, Omar Abdullah, told reporters outside the assembly in Srinagar.

“Trying to beat up a member; this is the first time I have ever seen something like this in any house,” said Abdullah, whose party walked out of the chamber over the attack.

“Do I assault everyone who eats pork or alcohol?”

Rashid served beef kebabs at the party this week in protest against a ban on killing and eating cows in India’s only Muslim-majority state.

The issue was ignited in the region after a court last month ordered that the long-standing but little-enforced prohibition be strictly implemented.

The mess GW made

He and the neoconservatives.

Gulf 'steps up' arms to Syria rebels

US axes $500m scheme to train Syrian rebels, says NYT

Syrian insurgents vow to attack Russian forces as Moscow hints at ground role

Australia set to abandon opposition to Assad as part of Syria settlement

Former CIA operative detained in Portugal over kidnapping of cleric

Many are still around and still giving bad advice, like John McCain.

Not quite over


A Scottish nurse who contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone last year is in a "serious condition" after being readmitted to an isolation unit in London.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde confirmed that the virus is still present in Pauline Cafferkey's body after being left over from the original infection.

She is not thought to be contagious.

. . . .

Finding the virus in Ebola survivors months after recovering is not unheard of.

Previous outbreaks have shown the virus can survive in semen and it was found in the eye of a US doctor two months after recovering.

This can pose health problems for the patient, but is there a risk of spreading the virus?

Men are advised to use condoms indefinitely until more is known.

But there are now so many survivors in West Africa - around 13,000 - that if there was a major risk then we would know about it.

. . . .

Dr Ben Neuman, a virologist from the University of Reading, told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland programme that the outlook for Ms Cafferkey was good and it was unlikely the virus remained infectious.

He said: "Once the virus is removed from the blood once, it tends to retreat into the hard-to-access components of the body. It'll hide in places like the back of your eye or breast milk."

He said the effects of the virus on the body could last for up to two years, although it was difficult to know how long it could actually persist.

. . . .

Ebola virus disease (EVD)

• Symptoms include high fever, bleeding and central nervous system damage

• Spread by body fluids, such as blood and saliva

• Fatality rate can reach 90% - but current outbreak has mortality rate of about 55%

• Incubation period is two to 21 days

There is no proven vaccine or cure

• Supportive care such as rehydrating patients who have diarrhoea and vomiting can help recovery

• Fruit bats, a delicacy for some West Africans, are considered to be virus's natural host

The future they are planning

Global elites.


The European Food Safety Authority has published its initial risk assessment of using insects as a source of protein for human consumption and animal feed.

It concluded that risks to human and animal health depended on how the insects were reared and processed.

The UN suggests that "edible insects" could provide a sustainable source of nutrition for a growing population.

. . . .

Insects are an incredibly good source of animal protein, fat, vitamin, fibre and mineral content.

It is estimated that they already form part of the traditional diets of at least 2 billion people.

A progressive, not a socialist.


Per the story.

US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has outlined her plan to curb Wall Street abuses.

Her proposals include harsher penalties for executives, including forcing them to share fines imposed against their institutions.

The former Secretary of State said there was still too much risk in the financial system.

"'Too big to fail' is still too big a problem," Mrs Clinton said.

Firearms, militia, and tyranny.

The 18th Century view, far from obvious even then, is all the more implausible when stretched to cover unorganized and wholly untrained 20th Century civilians.

Carson links Holocaust to gun control

Smoke. Fire.

India anger at Saudi arm chopping

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Foyle's War

On Netflix.

The objection to conscientious objection.

People who want to avoid war for fantastic, idiot beliefs are let out of the draft.

People who want to avoid war for perfectly sensible reasons - for safety's sake, for example - are forced to go.