Reading Dostoevsky

Devils.

The first chapter would be cruel if it were not burlesque.

Downright funny characterization of radical chic.

Tom Wofle with a sense of humor.

Varvara Stavrogina seems to have bipolar disorder.

Think of Mary Todd Lincoln.

Our objective is to destroy ISIS, says O

Obama: ISIS killers will not intimidate U.S

Emphasis on "our," and that is where the mistake lies.

"We care about protecting our customers."

Home Depot Probing 'Unusual Activity' After Reports of Data Breach

Maybe so, but it's not the top priority or they just wouldn't have files of sensitive customer data accessible.

Well, not accessible from the internet, anyway.

If you can deal with someone on line hackers can steal your data from that someone on line.

And what's really scary is that you don't always have a choice.

I'm sooooo shocked

Nude photo "leak"

They save nude photos of themselves to a cloud and then are outraged and just feel sooooo violated when the photos they would probably have sold get taken by hackers and appear, free of charge, at various place on the web.

People whose livings depend on shedding privacy are outraged at the violation of their privacy.

Fox News vs the others

Fox News is a propaganda network that covers news as needed for its mission, with a bit extra thrown in to maintain the transparently false claim that it's a news network.

The others are primarily news networks with varying doses of propaganda, not always consistently in one direction.

All of them are corrupted by competition for viewers for the sake of advertisers, which leads them into sensationalism, vulgarity, stupidity, and even pornography.

None of them mind being highly misleading as to facts to "sell papers."

None of them mind encouraging policy-formation on the basis of falsehoods if that's what it takes to "sell papers."

And here's another major paper gone over to the Dark Side.

WAPO gets new publisher

Fathers and Sons

Fathers and Sons

The novel turns out not to be political at all, really.

In fact, the book is actually about the perfectly ordinary subjects of novels without a word to say about politics, boys and girls, men and women, the young and the old, marriages and deaths.

Bazarov states his views frankly in private conversations with people who can’t be expected to share them and in fact don’t, as well as with the admiring Arkady, who at first swallows it all whole.

And there is little to see in those views that wasn’t already put on the table by the various schools of positivism that cropped up from the time of the French Revolution, and after.

He is a materialist and an atheist with a wholly naive faith in science and though he claims to condemn all of society’s existing institutions it is clear he does not condemn education or the practice of medicine, and he supplies no canonical list of exceptions or qualifications.

He talks tough and says his only business is to destroy, without a thought for what should be built in its place. 

But Bazarov never does anything to further these views and he and his interlocutors never raise or discuss the specific questions of terrorism, violence, and bloody revolution.

According to Wikipedia, at this time (the book was published in 1862, the action takes place in 1859) in Russia the Nihilist movement had not yet adopted political action.

But no one would have to wait long, and the action would become violent very quickly.

Russian Nihilism

Nihilist revolution

The Norton Critical Edition of 1996 has lots of interesting material about the controversy the book’s publication brought about in Russia, including an essay by Turgenev and excerpts about it from some of his letters, and a review by Pisarev, himself a Nihilist of the "younger generation."

It would not be long before he, too, endorsed "smashing everything" without the need for any notion of or plan for what should come after the smashing; after that lots of literal and figurative bomb-throwers would quote him.

Generally, younger people and those who thought themselves to be Nihilists considered Turgenev's book unfavorable to the movement.

Older people and people opposed to Nihilism are distraught that it is too sympathetic.

It will be another decade before we have Dostoevsky’s treatment of Nihilism, Demons (aka The Possessed).

Race propaganda

Softening us up for the next round of elite betrayals of lower class whites.

White Skin Privilege

Anne Applebaum - a new war in Europe?

War in Europe is not a hysterical idea

Sure, AA is a front for the Polish government, a mouthpiece for her husband, the Polish Foreign Minister.

Still, the questions need to be asked.

What if Putin decides the risk of nuclear war is slight, even if, and maybe especially if, Russia uses nukes in Poland or elsewhere?

If war broke out in Europe, again, would the US be crazy enough to jump into a European war for the third time?

I think we would jump in.

O is the least hawkish of the office-holding, DC Democrats and even he has already said the US will honor its Article V commitments to the Baltic States, which are NATO members.

All the more so as, since the end of Soviet Communism, the NATO countries have relied more, not less, on US guarantees, at our own instigation.

And nearly all Republicans are more hawkish than the Democrats.

You want to be indispensable?

Be careful what you wish for.

Would jumping into this war require an unheard of regime of press control and suppression of dissent here at home?

Yes.

Let the blame shifting begin

To fight ISIS the West must do more to integrate potentially alienated Muslims

Money down a rat hole.

Deportation would be cheaper and much more effective.

This is what liberals always say.

Somebody is mad at us and wants to kill us?

We should be nicer to him.

We should buy him a pony.

ISIS is a Saudi creation

People have written books and become famous saying US Middle East policy is all about Israel and is in fact controlled by "The Lobby."

But US policy has been a fool for, if not quite a tool of, the Saudis since the American government chose to fold against OPEC rather than occupy the Saudi oil fields, as WFB insisted we should at the time.

Saudis did 9/11 to us, so GW the oil man swept Saudi big shots out of DC on a special jet to rescue them from arrest and questioning by the FBI.

Then he invaded and smashed Afghanistan.

Bush senior the oil man beat up Iraq for the Saudis.

Bush junior the oil man crushed Saddam for the Saudis.

The Saudis have been funding Islamic extremism, terrorism, and even war throughout our "war on terror," and few American leaders have even mentioned it.

The Saudis built ISIS against Assad in Syria.