Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I actually agree that most of those chanting FTRTTS don't know how it's taken. Most of the people chanting don't appear to know much about a lot of things. Which is where one is when one is 18-22.

Regarding Soros paranoia, it is amusing to see the right argue that a 93 year old Jew is bankrolling a worldwide antisemitism campaign. That's left me more than a little confused and giggling to myself.

But I do disagree that the antisemitism at hand is limited to a few fringe players. For too long, the academe has countenanced a weird view of the world that puts everyone into oppressor/oppressed buckets. I'm not going to cite Foucault, Derrida, or Marcuse, or any "post-modernists" as a source, largely because those people were nuts and deserve no more air than they've had, which is already far too much. But all of this "social justice" stuff and identity politics, all of which derives from the playpens of campuses (along with "Critical Theory" and "Gender Theory") has created a bizarre landscape in which grievance is paramount.

Somebody's rigging the system against you.
Somebody's in charge behind the scenes.
We must identify those oppressors!

Enter (dragged upon) Stage Left in this paranoid fiction, as always: The Jews.

It always happens. From Charlottesville, where the Right bleated about being replaced by Jews, to the campuses today, where Jews are "super colonizers" (and somehow, despite being the most oppressed minority, excluded from DEI efforts), when the rabble decides it needs a conspiracy to make sense of the world,* the Jews will be in the dock. So, no, I don't think it's but a small smattering of antisemites in the crowd at these protests. I think campuses are far too comfortable with the idea of Jews, or any generally successful and peaceful people that has done well, as oppressors. And this leads to an unfair and entirely unwarranted dislike or suspicion of them.

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* Gore Vidal said there are no conspiracies because the powerful all act in the same way, so they needn't connect. Don Draper said "there is no 'plan'... the universe is indifferent to you." The maniacs of the left on campus and the maniacs of the right at MAGA rallies would do well to understand that their lots in life are more a mix of randomness and their own decisions than any boogiemen running the world in a manner that cheats them.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Presumably, we all agree that 10/7 was horrific and demands some response, and yet we all agree that there are possible responses that would be wrong. To take one example, I assume none of us think that Israel should nuke Qatar for having provided so much funding to Hamas, because it would kill so many innocent civilians.

Harping on how Hamas has chosen to hide among civilians, or on the compromised moral judgments of Arab governments, or reminding everyone how horrific 10/7 was -- none of that justifies the wanton killing of Palestinian civilians, any more than whatever Israel has done or not done in the past justifies what happened on 10/7. So much of what you are writing about this is an extending evasion of reckoning with the actual choices Israel is making and the resulting death toll.

And that, fundamentally, is what is driving most of the campus protests.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I'm not going to say there is no anti-semitism in academia, but if you were going to make a list of the places in society where it is a problem, academia would not be near the top of the list, and if you think anti-semitism is a problem elsewhere in our country, you cannot believe it's because academics are an important influence. Like, look at what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter.

I mean, it's not crazy to see Israel as a colony. A great many Israelis came from Europe, displacing the people who were previously on the land. No one pretends that non-Jewish citizens of Israel have the same rights as the Jewish citizens. You don't have to read Foucault to connect those dots.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Actually, they only promised not to hire students who enroll at Columbia this fall or later, i.e. they chose to go to Columbia with knowledge aforesight.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

So then let me ask, you feel you’ve rat proofed your garage?

And, putting aside the ethnic slur, you believe Israel could simply do the same at its border to keep Palestinians out?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I hope so.

No, that's not quite the way the metaphor works.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Yep keep hiding under those branches. A guy ten years younger than I, who could be the nicest and most well-respected of my peers had his ticker go out between days of a deposition.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Weird that you read a comment about the holocaust this way.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

It is bizarre to mean that anyone who has had contact with our legal system does not see the pretty obvious truth that money and power make a huge difference to legal and political outcomes.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Good piece on Zionism by Yuval Noah Hariri.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

This Covid thing has fucked with people in untold ways. Never had any issue with my health, despite historically having run the machine hard, until last year.

Out of the blue, got a massive, stroke level spike in BP (testing 200/120). All while heart rate was still in low 70s, indicating pretty athletic cardio capacity at that level of stress. Felt fine. Was actually on my way for a run when a chance decision to test it led to discovery.

Scans and scans and tests later, everything came back fine. No organ issues, no left ventricle expansion consistent with longer term exceedingly high BP.

Cause? Unknown. Told to avoid excessive salt. Told booze intake inadequate to cause that kind of spike. No kidney disease. No thyroid issues. Heart attack enzymes actually low. All potential causes eliminated but one: Having had Covid a few times, both before and after having been vaxxed and boosted.

Maybe it was transient (I opted for meds rather than fuck around, which have a delightful calming side effect). Or maybe I'd have had a fucking stroke. I'd never have known except for a chance decision to play with a family member's BP cuff.

You gotta get lucky in life. In so many ways. And maybe you also have to avoid Covid?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

While I agree with much of that, which seems eminently pragmatic and reasonable, Zionism and Judaism are not the only ideologies and religions to be examined here.

The maniacs who executed 10/7 were infused with a disregard for both the value of their own lives and those of "infidels" by a religion the central tenet of which remains global conquest. Gaza is on the water. Its inhabitants could reside in a giant resort, which at times portions of it have been. But they don't. Instead they are ruled by snake oil salesmen who goad their young into war against Israel.

Why select such a terrible option?

Radical Islam. And I don't use "radical" in lazy substitution for "fundamentalist." It is mere radicals of that religion who create the ideological scaffolding - the belief in martyrdom, and that control by others of any lands Islam has once controlled is an apostacy - that spurs young men to go on murderous rampages.

The Koran is a lousy piece of fiction, arguably worse than the Old and New Testaments. Among its self-contradictory gibberish, however, it offers a directive that is far more effective than the other two - that it is the final truth, and that all must follow that truth. This being a rather tall order with which the rest of humanity has refused to comply, such a "global conquest" eludes its adherents. And this is a source of deep shame, because if you really believe in those faery tales, any world in which non-believers control land is one at odds with the Prophet's wishes.

There are a lot of political and economic reasons for Hamas' posture. No doubt at all. But you can't goad people to mass murder with mere economics or nationalism. No, for that you need them to believe that what they are doing is right, divine perhaps, noble at the highest level. You have to sell them the 72 virgins and the glory of martyrdom.

Israel has fucked up a lot over the years. But it is always trying to do the right thing. Its aims are never bloodthirsty except in reaction to violence upon it, which is understandable given the disgusting acts of 10/7. And it is impossible to separate that urge to do the right thing from Judaism generally, which is a religion that does not seek conquest and does not demand others join it. Counter that against the religion of those who committed those murders. Take the Koran's directives that all lands must be Muslim lands at its word. Because about 1/5 of its adherents, and a lot of them young, angry males, do exactly that.

All religions are mind viruses, but the one of those paragliders on 10/7 is uniquely pernicious when followed seriously and stridently, which is far too often the case. And if we must question Zionism, which will always include an argument about why a Jewish state should be as it is, then why not question why we should countenance those who follow a book that says there can be no peace until we have an entirely Muslim world?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

That's scary. I hope it's transient.

I don't know what to make of the people who go on about post-COVID risks. On the one hand, some of them seem a bit, um, touched. On the other hand, why not?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

(1) If you going to argue that there is something unique about radical Islam that causes depravity, then you have to ignore all of the depravity connected with other religions (Sri Lanka, Rwanda, and so, so much more) or with nonreligious Christian societies (the Holocaust). Without minimizing the awful things done in the name of radical Islam, you can't make a case that it is uniquely inhumane.

(2) We all agree that Hamas is bad. Beating this dead horse sounds like a form of evasion.

(3) I do not think Israel "is trying to do the right thing" in Rafah, nor it seems do most Israelis.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I don't pretend to be informed enough to have opinions about religions (especially as a heathen unbeliever), but I do think that certain adherents to Judaism do seek sovereignty over certain bits of land on the basis of their religion, which has been a direct obstacle to a two state solution.