Europe Archives - Bookworm Room

“We’ll always have Paris.” No! Paris is dying, along with the rest of Europe.

August 23, 2018 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Thanks to the European decision to invite in the Islamists, not only won’t we always have Paris, we won’t have the rest of Europe either. Europe is dying.

Bruce Bawer, a gay American man who moved to Europe only to be mugged by Islamic reality, is a clear-headed thinker and a marvelous writer. Today, FrontPage Magazine published an essay he wrote about the change in thinking about Islam amongst European elites. Back in 2007, when Bawer was invited to speak to these elites about rising concerns on the ground regarding the growing Islamic presence in Europe, the elites were shocked — and greatly offended — that some little upstart would insinuate that their pro-Muslim policies might change Europe’s face:

It’s easy to read an audience. As I spoke, I could feel the snappily dressed, self-impressed-looking crowd growing restive. When I was done and they were invited to ask questions, I didn’t get questions but incredibly condescending razzes, remonstrations, and reproaches. A German envoy reacted angrily to my account of some recent incident – I don’t remember what – that had taken place in her country. Her colleagues from a couple of other countries had similar bones to pick. “These are just anecdotes!” one diplomat thundered dismissively. I tried to engage them in a reasonable give-and-take, but they weren’t having it.

What made the experience especially striking was that over the course of the previous year or so I’d given a number of talks about the same subject in Europe and North America. The audiences had been composed not of credentialed foreign-policy experts but of ordinary citizens. All of them had recognized that what I was saying was true. During the Q&A sessions, they’d been eager to express their gratitude that someone was talking about these matters, eager to recount their own horrific experiences with the consequences of mass Muslim immigration, and eager to vent their frustration at political leaders who refused to listen to them, to care about their sufferings, or even to acknowledge the plain objective facts.

In sum, in 2007, Bawer was a mean-spirited and stupid racist to think that Islam could affect Europe in any way.

Fast forward to 2018: [Read more…]

Culturally, there’s nothing painless about suicide

August 5, 2018 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

When a whole culture commits suicide, those holding the gun may imagine a future, but the victims of that “suicide” know better: dead is dead.

Those of you who are a certain age might recognize the little cultural reference in my post title. It’s the theme song from M*A*S*H:

Through early morning fog I see
Visions of the things to be
The pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see

That suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please

At an individual level, I don’t know whether suicide is painless, never having tried it myself — and never having spoken to those who were successful in their efforts. I did read recently that even assisted suicide isn’t as painless as its promoters promise, but that’s not actually what this post is about….

I wanted to talk about cultural suicide. I already wrote a couple of days ago about assisted (or imposed) suicide in socialist states, but a new story came out from Canada that must be added to the mix: [Read more…]

Viral photos showing Paris in its death throes

April 18, 2018 by Bookworm 1 Comment

A viral email showing cultural changes in Paris reminds us that, for better or worse, Europe as we know it is dying as a new Europe takes its place.

I’ve received emails from three people forwarding a series of photographs a Czech couple reputedly took during a recent visit to Paris. I doubt whether Czech people were the ones who took these photos. I certainly cannot find any citation to an original blog post or email. Indeed, astute observers will note that one of the photos has an illegible website attribution, suggesting that some or all of the photos come from sources other than a single Czech couple’s photo album. (I know that I can research the images, but I’m too lazy. If you decide to do so, please let me know the result.)

I suspect that what happened is that someone got hold of an email containing observations about a trip to France’s capital and then inserted representative photographs. Since the photos show scenes familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to Europe’s demographic changes in the last few years, the combination of text and photographs is powerful. I’ll add some videos after the photographs to provide support for the images’ legitimacy in terms of showing modern Paris.

I was last in Paris in 2005, when the North African takeover was already in progress but still in its fetal state. The takeover is now akin to a toddler in its development. Give it a few years and Paris’s streets will be indistinguishable from Cairo’s or Islamabad’s.

My issue, as always, isn’t with the skin color of the “new Europeans.” It’s with the values. If they want to assimilate to European values, great, but I doubt that’s what they want to do. Islam is inextricably intertwined with conquest — after all, that’s the mandate Mohamed laid upon his followers. I have a feeling that, inside the heart of many of these new immigrants, beats a single mantra: “Today Paris; tomorrow the world.” [Read more…]

The shooting in Florida — open thread

February 14, 2018 by Bookworm 38 Comments

The horror in Florida hasn’t shattered my faith in the Second Amendment. Let me explain why — and please join in the discussion.

I came home from a scintillating talk by Evan Sayet (which I’ll write about later) to find awaiting me the news that there was a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida — and, of course, the Lefties are calling for gun control, along with their usual claim that America is aberrant when it comes to violent. A few points and then I’ll turn the floor over to all of you.

1. My thoughts are with the victims and their families, which is where all our thoughts should be. I can’t even begin to imagine — I never can begin to imagine when terrorists shoot up masses of people — what the terror of being there must have been like.

2. Contrary to the usual Leftist babble, mass murders in schools are not limited to the here and now in America. For more than 100 years, they’ve happened all over the world, with all kinds of weapons, for myriad reasons (Beslan, anyone?).

3. The Leftists are resurrecting their claim that there were 11 school shootings in January alone. This claim is a lie if one believes, as I do and as the Leftists know most people do, that the phrase “school shooting” has a distinct meaning. That distinct meaning refers to a situation in which a crazy person walks onto a campus during school hours, intent upon murdering as many schools as possible. The numbers the Leftists actually use, though, related to any type of shooting that happens anywhere near a school, but that is, in fact, irrespective of the school. (Reddit has a good thread on the NYT’s January lie.)

4. Unlike Japan or European countries before 2015, America is not a small, ancient, homogeneous nation in which everybody shares the same values. It is a roiling, boiling, dynamic nation with a constant ebb and flow of the population, both legal and illegal, reflecting hundreds of cultures. That’s going to mean more violence. That’s just a fact. It’s also going to mean more wonderful things in terms of innovation and energy. As European nations stock up on their Muslim and African populations, they’re going to find that, as their homogeneity vanishes, they are going to have a lot more violence too. It’s questionable whether innovation or energy will come their way as well. Japan has made a conscious decision to keep its culture and population homogeneous, even as its population diminishes past the point of return.

5. Schools are ideal targets: A vulnerable, disarmed population for easy killing, followed by a phalanx of media talking heads for post-shooting infamy. It’s the ultimate power trip for the sick and the evil. [Read more…]

Despite media pressure, I don’t care about these things

January 17, 2018 by Bookworm 25 Comments

The media hysterically demands that all Americans care about certain things. For Normals, though, these are the things about which you still don’t care.

The anti-Trump media desperately wants me (and you, my fellow Normals) to care about a specific set of “very important things.” Because the media is hysterical, ill-informed, biased, unaccomplished, immoral and amoral, it has failed in this mission. I don’t care. I don’t care about any of these things:

I don’t care whether President Donald Trump slept with porn stars. When campaigning, Trump did not engage in the usual politician’s pretense of purity. He’s on his third wife (with each one more beautiful than the last), he hung around famously salacious nightclubs in the 1970s and 1980s, he owned beauty pagents — we know that this is a guy that likes to indulge in female company, in both public and private. That’s none of my business because Trump didn’t make it my business.

Trump ran on a very narrow platform, telling Americans the following: I am an extremely experienced and successful businessman, and a true patriot. I will make America stronger and safer by shrinking government’s presence in American life (which includes doing away with the federal government’s meddling in social issues such as abortion, transgenderism, etc.), except when it comes to illegal immigration and national security. As to those last two, I will strengthen America’s presence. So far, Trump has been keeping his campaign promises and that’s good enough for me.

The only caveat regarding my sense that other Normals agree with me on these things is that I suspect there’s a sizable subset of Normal men who, if they could see Trump in person, would high-five or fist-bump him for his porn star liaisons.

I don’t care whether President Trump was good in bed when he slept with porn stars. Yes, the media is trying to make Trump’s sexual prowess with porn stars (Stormy Daniels, in particular) an issue. Again, I don’t care. Whether Trump is a dud or a stud in bed, the only thing that matters to me is that he keep his campaign promises — which, as I mentioned above, he’s doing.

I don’t care that President Trump’s dietary and lifestyle habits don’t qualify him for Healthy Living awards. The media is utterly outraged that Trump passed his physical with flying colors. The drones are attacking his unhealthy diet, challenging his weight (as many have quipped, turning the media horde into “Girthers”), and declaring that, despite perfect cognitive function, Trump is still mentally defective.

All I care about is that he keep his campaign promises. If he keeps them while dining on burgers or cat food, I don’t care. If he keeps them while watching some stultifyingly Leftist HBO or PBS documentary or while watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians, I don’t care. I care only that he’s shrinking government, securing the border, and increasing national security. [Read more…]

Different takes on the Trump effect on the media and #NeverTrumpers

December 14, 2017 by Bookworm 29 Comments

A romance novel explains why Trump is destroying the media and a Jewish survival doctrine provides a road map for conservatives who want to win.

These are strange times and I sometimes have a strange brain. That may explain why, in the days since the Alabama election, when I read about Trump’s clashes with the media or see the #NeverTrumpers willing to sacrifice America to their principles, some pretty strange analogies — analogies about romance novels and rabbinical rules — pop into my head. Let me explain:

Writing at the L.A. Times, Matt Welch discusses the fact that conservatives feel strongly that, in the many elections held since (and including) the presidential election 2016, the really big loser has consistently been the American media:

“Roy Moore Proves Media Only Destroys Itself in Elections” ran a headline Monday in The American Spectator. “The late Charles Manson seems to have gotten a more sympathetic press” than Republican Roy Moore, complained former human events editor Allan H. Ryskind in the Washington Times. “The real reason for a situation that allows the Roy Moores and Donald Trumps of the world to rise above mere laughingstock status,” opined former George W. Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer in Politico, “is that the media has totally lost its connection with a large portion of the nation.”

Meanwhile, the media’s been congratulating itself on scoring a victory in Alabama. Welch is intrigued by this disconnect, which he chalks up to insider and outsider criticism:

All political media criticism — whether it was the more left-leaning alternative and New Journalism of the ’60s and ’70s, the right-leaning AM radio revolution of the ’80s and ’90s or the social media cacophony we see today — begins as a necessary and bracing reminder to the big media fish that they, too, swim in water, even if they don’t feel it.

But soon, the outsider critique brushes up against the first iron law of media criticism: Partisan skepticism inevitably drifts toward media illiteracy. What starts out as a tool for more sophisticated news consumption eventually degrades into an excuse for those who choose not to believe inconvenient journalism.

Welch’s report triggered a slightly different train of thought in my brain: Trump is extraordinarily adept at baiting the media into intemperate behavior that shows the media at its worst — even if there’s some underlying virtue underlying the media’s position. And what does this remind me of? A Georgette Heyer novel, of course.

The novel, one of my favorites, is The Nonesuch. The book’s plot is the usual comedy of manners that Heyer handles with a touch as deft as Jane Austen’s, tempered only by a more modern sensibility. Here’s the quick rundown:

Ancilla is an intelligent, accomplished young gentlewoman with a strong sense of self worth and a good sense of humor (making her more empowered than the American women born of the Women’s Liberation Movement). Owing to her family’s impoverishment, instead of becoming a charge on her family, she’s chosen to work as a governess. Ancilla has two charges: her employer’s daughter and her employer’s niece. The niece, Tiffany, is an extremely wealthy, staggeringly beautiful, selfish young woman who is charming when happy and a termagant when crossed. It takes very little to cross Tiffany.

Sir Waldo Hawkridge comes into the town to set up an orphanage, as he is charitably inclined. He’s quite modest, so he keeps secret the reason for his coming. The gentry in the town have no interest, in any event, in exploring his motives for visiting. He is “The Nonesuch,” meaning that, when it comes to looks, wealth, athletic ability, and charm, there is none such as Sir Waldo. The only person unimpressed is Ancilla, who erroneously believes him to be a dissolute gambler, which he is not. The meat of this delightful story involves Sir Waldo’s efforts to woo Ancilla.

One of the engines driving the romance is the fact that Sir Waldo’s cousin Lord Lindethl a sweet-natured young man, has accompanied him. Unfortunately, Lord Lindeth spots Tiffany in a charming moment and falls head over heels in love with her. Both Ancilla and Sir Waldo wish to nip this passion in the bud, because both understand that Tiffany is poison for any man unlucky enough to marry her, notwithstanding her wealth and beauty.

Of course, the easiest way to end the affair is for Tiffany to show her worst side to Lindeth. Ancilla, though, struggles with this notion. On the one hand, she wants to save Lindeth from a terrible fate; on the other hand, Tiffany is in her charge and it goes against the grain for her to encourage bad behavior. Fortunately, Sir Waldo has no such constraints . . . and this is the point at which I finally bring the story back to Donald Trump.

Sir Waldo deliberately baits Tiffany by “sort of” flirting with her, which is very bad behavior coming from an older man of the “ton” (i.e., Britain’s uppermost class). Not only that, he blows hot and cold, alternately plying her with fulsome compliments and dismissing her with subtle, but vicious, put-downs. Tiffany, unaccustomed to being played, cannot control herself. She becomes both vicious and hysterical, even though it should be obvious to her that she is shattering her reputation in the eyes of the young men around her, including Lindeth.

Trump, believe it or not, rude, crude, Trump, is playing the role of handsome, suave, talented Sir Waldo. Those who are not blinded by hate know that Trump, a savvy businessman and reality-TV star, is perfectly capable of controlling himself if he wishes. When it comes to the media, that’s not his wish. [Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 9/8/17 — the Hurricanes Are Normal edition

September 8, 2017 by Bookworm 16 Comments

Hurricanes are normal, but Trump Derangement Syndrome obscures that fact. Of course, those subject to TDS are deranged in other ways as well. Just look….

Hurricanes are normal. It’s just bad luck this year that they’re making landfall in heavily populated areas of the U.S.

Before I get to the meat of this post — or, because it’s a round-up, the various meats of this post — I want to remind everyone that America has always been subject to ferocious hurricanes. They just seem worse today because we have more population in a hurricane’s path, especially when it’s an Irma-like hurricane, and because we have a 24 hour media that makes everything seem local.

In other ways, though, we’re better off when faced with hurricanes because we can prepare. In 1900, Galveston, Texas, residents did not see their Cat 4 hurricane coming. It killed 6,000 – 12,000 people, making it the deadliest natural disaster in American history. For a list of other major hurricanes in the last 400 years, the bulk of which predate “climate change” and struck out-of-the-blue, go here. You’ll see that America was especially hard hit in the 1700s, long before CO2 was an issue.

Obviously, I don’t mean to downplay our two latest hurricanes, Harvey and Irma, both of which are or will be responsible for staggering property damage and, always, the loss of too many lives. I just want to amp down the usual climate change hysteria that’s accompanying this latest display of Nature’s normal.

And with that, let me turn my attention to all the other interesting things I’ve gathered, many of which reflect poorly on those most deeply lost to TDS.

Hillary admits her incompetence. Hillary has been on the warpath with her new book, blaming everything and everybody for her loss. She’s also admitted that she was incapable of speech on election eve because she was so devastated and that it was male advisers who caused her to react less strongly to both Trump and Bernie than she thinks in retrospect that she ought to have done. (Oh, and Trump “creeped” her out.)

So Hillary has just admitted that she’s incompetent in a crisis and incapable of standing up to men. Most of Hillary’s opponents at home and abroad would have been men, men like Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, or Bashir al-Assad. Her latest book is just another reminder that we dodged a serious bullet when Trump won.

Europe’s Muslim future. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, sees which way the wind is blowing and he understands that, not only is Eurabia fast approaching, but that Western Europe leaders are hastening its inevitability:

Europe’s leaders seem to have neither the will nor the means to oppose the incoming waves of millions of Muslim migrants from Africa and the Middle East. They know that terrorists are hiding among the migrants, but still do not vet them. Instead, they resort to subterfuges and lies. They create “deradicalization” programs that do not work: the “radicals,” it seems, do not want to be “deradicalized.”

Europe’s leaders try to define “radicalization” as a symptom of “mental illness”; they consider asking psychiatrists to solve the mess. Then, they talk about creating a “European Islam“, totally different from the Islam elsewhere on Earth. They take on haughty postures to create the illusion of moral superiority, as Ada Colau and Carles Puigdemont did in Barcelona: they say they have high principles; that Barcelona will remain “open” to immigrants. Angela Merkel refuses to face the consequences of her policy to import countless migrants. She chastises countries in Central Europe that refuse to adopt her policies.

European leaders can see that a demographic disaster is taking place. They know that in two or three decades, Europe will be ruled by Islam. They try to anesthetize non-Muslim populations with dreams about an idyllic future that will never exist. They say that Europe will have to learn to live with terrorism, that there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Pat Condell is another prophet who is being ignored:

Meanwhile, Britain prepares its citizens for dhimmitude. Several of my gay Leftist Facebook friends proudly posted a WaPo op-ed announcing that all the grim prophecies preceding legalizing gay marriage failed to come true. It is true that heterosexual marriage is cratering at pretty much the same rate as before, so one can’t say that same-sex marriage killed it. The article also essentially claims that America is better than ever because Christian bakers are being put out of business.

It’s that last point, of course, that’s the giveaway about the real target of gay marriage. Gay marriage, as I’ve said over and over, was never about competing with straight marriage and it was unlikely to affect straight marriage. What it was about was undercutting traditional values, especially if those values came from the church. Kill the traditional church (and the synagogue) and you kill the West. It’s heart goes out of it.

(Before I go further, let me say again, that I have no trouble whatsoever with same-sex civil unions. If states want to legalize same sex partnerships, that’s fine with me. I support people who enter into stable relationships. It’s the way the whole issue was framed as gay “marriage” that disturbs me deeply. Doing that made these unions the basis for a concerted attack against traditional Western values as a whole.)

If you really want to see where gay marriage leads, check out this Australian Spectator article detailing the way in which gay marriage has been used to attack core Western values, not to mention to destroy the integrity of our biological selves. I’ll focus on the gender and children sections, but you should read the whole thing: [Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 8/31/17 — another “Leftist insanity” edition

August 31, 2017 by Bookworm 24 Comments

There’s so much Leftist insanity that one Bookworm Beat wasn’t enough to contain it all. It takes two posts to grasp what’s really going on.

An un-retouched photo of Lynn Yaeger, the fashion writer who criticized Melania Trump’s shoes.

The craven FBI refuses to stop Leftist insanity. Although the mainstream media is silent, the conservative media is appropriately outraged that James Comey had already decided in April or May of 2016, in the very early stages of the investigation into Hillary’s national security violations, to clear her of wrongdoing. That is, his decision came about far in advance of the evidence — and nobody in the FBI called him on it.

I’m disgusted but not surprised that the FBI’s employees would do nothing about their head’s manifest violation of his duty to Americans. You see, I already predicted this outcome in early April 2016:

No matter how principled they’d like to think they are, most middle-class people will turn a blind eye to corruption in their midst rather than run the risk of being unable to pay their mortgage or fund all of the other payments necessary to support a middle-class lifestyle. They don’t think of themselves as dishonest or complicit in dishonesty. They think of themselves as cautious people who aren’t going to risk their children’s future for some grand-standing that, rather than resulting in applause, could leave them unemployed and desperate.

This episode from my past makes me doubt very strongly that Hillary Clinton will be indicted. I know that the rumor mill keeps saying that FBI agents, from Comey on down, will quit if Loretta Lynch lets Hillary walk. Some of the FBI agents whispering this to friendly reporters may even believe that they’ll quit.

Mostly, though, this is a bluff. Why? Because the people talking about quitting are middle-class people with mortgages, and school fees, and insurance, and all the other expenses that keep us in the middle-class living up to our own expectations. If Hillary really does walk, 99% of those “I’ll quit if she’s not indicted” agents will manage, very quickly and easily, to convince themselves to stay in their jobs, and get their salaries and pensions.

Was Jim Crow a cruel but necessary reality? David P. Goldman couldn’t writing something boring if he tried. His most recent post riffs off the fact that the North allowed the South the illusion of victory for almost 100 years after the Civil War. According to Goldman, this was an unpleasant necessity required to protect America against foreign threats and analogizes it to the West’s necessary decision to absorb former Nazis to protect against the Communist threat.

I’m not familiar enough with America’s foreign policy in the years between the Civil War and WWI to judge critically what Goldman wrote, but it’s an interesting argument. Certainly America needed its Southern fighters in WWI and WWII. Indeed, we still need them today.

Some Leftist Jews are catching on to the Left’s antisemitism. Lately, I’ve been totally obnoxious on Facebook. Every time my Facebook friends goes off about neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and antisemitism, I’ve stated in bold language that I don’t take them seriously because they’ve completely ignored the fact that, for well over a decade now, I’ve made them aware of the vile, pervasive, normalized antisemitism in the Democrat party and, especially, on American campuses.

Thankfully, a few Leftist Jews are figuring out that their Leftist cohorts are not feeling the love. At Forward, a Leftist Jewish publication, Benyamin Moalem says what I’ve said forever, which is that antisemitism (and racism) on the right consists of a few bottom feeders, while antisemitism on the Left is large, mainstream, and very dangerous. After discussing Roger Waters (who revels in antisemitic imagery the Nazis would have loved) and the aggressive antisemitism on campuses, Moalem has this to say: [Read more…]

[VIDEO] Pat Condell: “This [election] is a genuine fork in the road.”

October 25, 2016 by Bookworm 1 Comment

Pat Condell places American politics in the larger context of European versus American style governance. As he says, Obama has already pushed America very close to the European model, whether one looks at economic issues, social issues, national security issues, or immigration policy. Condell’s clarity is enormously helpful in understanding what I’ve been pushing: This is not a Hillary versus Donald election: This is a “European one-world government” versus “Constitutional America” election. Again, I recommend not only watching this video but also sharing it if you can:

The Bookworm Beat 9/19/16 — the “we’re still singing” edition and open thread

September 19, 2016 by Bookworm 4 Comments

The miserable sexism of Hillary’s supporters. I’ve agreed with myself to disagree with Jonah Goldberg about Donald Trump, while still greatly respecting and deeply appreciating Goldberg’s take on just about everything else. In the wake of Hillary’s 9/11 collapse, followed by her dehydration, followed by the media castigating as sexist anyone who dared suggest the woman is ill, followed by her “oh, it’s just pneumonia,” followed by the entire media admiring Hillary for the strong female way in which she “powered through” things, Goldberg had this to say:

But here’s the thing. After weeks of bleating that it was sexist to raise questions about Hillary’s health, the immediate response from the very same people was an irrefutably sexist argument. Men are just a bunch of Jeb Bushes, low-energy shlubs laid low by a hangnail. But women are the Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Bangas of the species. (For non-longtime readers, this translates from the original Ngbandi, “The warrior who knows no defeat because of his endurance and inflexible will and is all powerful, leaving fire in his wake as he goes from conquest to conquest.”)

This raises a subject of much fascination to “news”letter writers who are fascinated by it. I don’t want to go too far out on a limb, because you never know if you’ll fall into raging torrent of angry weasels, but I gather that the word “sexist” is supposed to have a bad connotation. That was the sense I got taking women’s studies courses at a formerly all-women’s college. I’ve also drawn this conclusion from a fairly close study of routine political argle-bargle.

The problem is we don’t really have a word for observations and statements that simply acknowledge that men and women are . . . different. Not better or worse. Just different. If I said that dogs aren’t the same as cats, no one would shout, “Dogist!” Everyone would simply say, “Duh.” In fact, if I said to about 90 percent of normal people, of either sex, that men and women are different, the response would be “duh” as well.

[snip]

The frustrating thing is that feminist liberals like to have it both ways (and not in the way that Bill pays extra for). Women are “different” when they think it means women are “better,” but when you say women are different in ways that annoy feminists — for whatever reason — they shout, “Sexist!” Lena Dunham rejects the idea that women should be seen as things of beauty, and then gets mad when she’s not seen as a thing of beauty. Women should be in combat because they can do anything men can do, but when reality proves them wrong, they say the “sexist” standards need to change. And so on.

Hillary Clinton is like a broken Zoltar the Fortune Teller machine shouting all sorts of platitudes about being the first female president, cracking glass ceilings, yada yada yada. She openly says that we need a first female president because a first female president would be so awesome. But she also wants to say criticisms that would be perfectly legitimate if aimed at a man are in fact sexist when directed at a woman. That is a sexist argument.

No campus safe spaces for Jews. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’m happy to report that when it comes to the aggressive special snowflakes on America’s college campuses, consistency is never a problem. You see, it turns out that the whole thing about safe spaces and microaggressions and triggers and political correctness doesn’t apply to Jews:

But little has been said about how the idea of “intersectionality” — the idea that all struggles are connected and must be combated by allies — has created a dubious bond between the progressive movement and pro-Palestinian activists who often engage in the same racist and discriminatory discourse they claim to fight. As a result of this alliance, progressive Jewish students are often subjected to a double standard not applied to their peers — an Israel litmus test to prove their loyalties to social justice.

You and I have been tracking this problem for years, but I’m hoping that Jewish parents will start realizing that there’s a problem on American campuses. As it is, in today’s world, I would have to say that the single biggest reason that American Jews are so hard left is that they are so likely to go to college, which they get exposed to the pernicious disease that is Leftism. This has been going on for at least 40 years — I was exposed in Cal, although I was eventually able to build an immunity — but it’s gotten worse of late.

[Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 4/21/16 — a round-up and open thread

April 21, 2016 by Bookworm 7 Comments

My take on the decision to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 in place of Andrew Jackson? I find all this change and revisionism both silly and expensive but, having said that, here’s my position: They’re replacing the racist, slave-supporting, Indian-killing founder of the Democrat party with a gun-toting, Republican black woman — what’s to dislike? I think it’s great. And now on to the collected news of the day.

Blame Democrats for today’s nasty politics. Politics has always been a rough-and-tumble business. After all, the people playing aren’t just winning cupcakes; they’re winning power. Nevertheless, for most of America’s history, there’s been a tacit agreement to conduct politics in a civil manner — fight hard, but attack your opponent’s politics, not his person. This year, that unwritten rule has vanished. One can point fingers at specifically nasty politicians, but the real story isn’t that nasty people do nasty things; instead, it’s that the American public is willing to accept that behavior. Andrew Klavan blames the Left for this cultural degradation:

As a proud right-winger, I’m appalled and disgusted by Donald Trump. Nonetheless, I feel a certain schadenfreudean glee at watching leftists reel in horror at his unbridled incivility. They truly don’t seem to realize: he is only the loud and manifest avatar of their own silent and invisible nastiness. In a veiled reference to Trump at a recent lunch on Capitol Hill, President Obama declared he was “dismayed” at the “vulgar and divisive rhetoric” being heard on the campaign trail. “In America, there is no law that says we have to be nice to each other, or courteous, or treat each other with respect,” the president said. “But there are norms. There are customs.”

Are there? When I hear this sort of thing from Obama and his fellow leftists, what I wonder is: Have they not listened to themselves for the past 50 years? Do they really have no idea how vicious, how low, how cruel, and how dishonest their attacks on the Right have been?

No, they haven’t; and, no, they don’t. The Democrat-monopolized media, which explodes with rage at any minor unmannerliness on the right, falls so silent at the Left’s almost ceaseless acrimony that leftists are never forced to confront what despicable little Trumps they often are.

American immobility. I’ve commented multiple times about the fact that Americans are less willing to relocate than they once were. The entire essence of America for several hundred years was people’s willingness to leave their homes, whether in the old country or the new, and to head south, east, north, or west in search of better opportunities.

Today, though, the combination of being weighted down by possessions (even the poor today own more than all but the rich owned in the past) and having welfare to turn to (no matter how minimal that welfare is) means that people in economically dead areas can stick around. It’s not a nice life, but it’s the life they know, and they can always make themselves feel better about things with a bit of meth or heroin.

Kevin Williamson got a lot of flak for saying that we as a nation need to stop expending energy and money on dying communities and should, instead, focus on the vital communities. Obviously, I agree. Now, Williamson, in the face of that flak, has doubled down and I still agree:

My answer is that if there’s nothing for you in Garbutt but penury, dysfunction, and addiction, then get the hell out. If that means that communities in upstate New York or eastern Kentucky or west Texas die, so what? If that’s all they have to offer, then they have it coming.

Mixed in with that common sense you’ll find some hard-hitting attacks on those who challenged Williamson. And I still agree with him.

The bottom line is that,while dying towns are sad and forcing people to leave their roots is sad too, at a societal level, that’s not a reason to keep functionally dead towns on taxpayer-funded life support.

(Incidentally, the same goes for Europe, which in its effort to preserve its past has calcified, making it less of a charming place, and more of a bizarre and frequently unpleasant place. I totally understood what Robert Avrech’s friend was talking about when he said that Eastern Europe, even without the Soviets, is “oppressive.”)

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Europe’s dystopian present — and why, because I’m helpless to stop it, Schadenfreude overwhelms me

February 14, 2016 by Bookworm 53 Comments

Beginning on September 11, 2001, and with increasing speed since January 2009, I’ve had a very strong sense that the world — not just America, but the whole world — is unraveling. At home, venerable and often cherished institutions and ideas are falling into disrepair or being perverted beyond all recognition. Abroad, the Pax America that stabilized the world for so many years, with America acting not as a conqueror but as ballast, has broken down. I’m afraid of the world into which I’m launching my children. The dystopian future that become a stable of countless young adult novels seems to have become the dystopian present.

In many ways, the worst thing about watching the passing spectacle is that I’m helpless to do anything. Sure, I blog, but I recognize (and I don’t mean this with any disrespect, dear readers) that I’m mostly preaching to the choir. I’d be delighted if my words changed one mind, swaying one person from unthinking Progressivism to thoughtful conservatism, but I’m pretty sure that the best I can do is offer comfort and comradeship to people who share my values and my concerns. There’s nothing wrong with binding people together, but I don’t see what I’m doing as effecting any real change.

I’ve also tried to help my children understand that the Leftist political pieties forced upon them in their schools and through their media are false. Mostly, I’ve been successful — my children, when they’re willing to think at all about politics, seem to have absorbed my conservative world view, one that fears big government, believes in strong borders and self-defense, and is fanatic about a free market and the virtue for able-bodied people of self-reliance. I don’t know, though, if I’ve done them any favors. Their values clash with the world they’re entering and put them at odds with their generation. Maybe they could face their socialized, possibly Islamic, future with some equanimity if they didn’t believe in the alternative.

On my Facebook page, I politely tweak my Leftist friends by subtly inserting conservative ideas into their Feeds, but I’m not kidding myself. Even the most open-minded of them are open-minded only to the extent that they don’t “un-friend” me or get nasty. I can practically feel the pity radiating across the feed as they think “She was smart once. What the heck happened? Early dementia perhaps?” None think, “She has always been a really smart, well-informed person. Maybe she’s on to something.” Sigh.

Faced with a domestic scene that saddens me and an international scene that frightens me, I’ve come to a necessary conclusion if I’m to continue functioning — and I must continue functioning. After all, even as things come down around my ears, I still have meals to prepare, laundry to wash, bills to pay, and people (and dogs) dependent upon me for their care. I can’t allow existential anxiety to make me useless.

So here’s my philosophy: To the extent I can bring about change, I’ll fuss and try to come up with solutions that make a difference. However, when there’s nothing I do or say to make a damn bit of difference, I’m going to sit back and get whatever pleasure I can out of the show. I’ll only make myself crazy if I continuously bang my head against walls to no effect.

My lemonade-out-of-lemons philosophy applies strongly to Europe. If there were any way I could save it from its present existential collapse, I actually believe I would. However, because there is absolutely nothing I can do, I’m opting for the pleasures of Schadenfreude as I watch Europe’s passing parade.

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Is Europe worth saving? UPDATED

February 6, 2016 by Bookworm 22 Comments

Commentary Magazine ran a post asking “Can American Save Europe Again?” It seems to me that the better question is should America save Europe again? Europe is certainly a repository of some of the world’s greatest art and architecture, not to mention some damn fine food, but I am not feeling the love for Europeans, who always seem to learn the wrong lessons from history.

The problem, as I see it, with continental Europe is that it has absolutely no tradition of individual liberty. It is statist to the bone. Whether Europeans are indulging in garden-variety-dictatorships, medieval/Renaissance theocracies, monarchies, aristocracies, oligarchies, socialist parties (communist or otherwise), or rule by bureaucrat (i.e., the EU), the European model is always directed at total state control. That’s why there is no conservative movement in Europe, as we in America understand conservatism.

To Americans, conservativism means small government, free markets, and maximum individual liberty, a belief in the common man’s energy, imagination, and initiative that paved the way for America’s dynamic emergence on the world stage in the 20th century. To Europeans, being “right wing” or “conservative” still means total government control — it just means total government control with varying degrees of nationalism, as opposed to all those other -isms, thrown in. The European “right-winger” still wants his government checks and government regulations. It’s just that he just doesn’t want the “other,” whomever that other happens to be (sometimes Muslims, sometimes Roma, sometimes Italians or Greeks, and always Jews) to live with him under that tight government control.

Europe’s obsession with citizen control, whether it comes through the socialist party, the communist party, the church, the bureaucracy, the aristocracy, or the monarchy, may go some way to explaining Europe’s endless hostility to the Jews — the Jews have never and will never yielded to state control. They can be confined to ghettos or forced into a narrow range of professions or even routinely slaughtered, but they still insist on being Jews. They refuse to bow down to anyone but their God.

How frustrating for control freak nations to have these stubborn people living among them. If they are that stubborn, they must be dangerous. And in a total control society, when something appears dangerous, you must destroy it.

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The Bookworm Beat 1/26/16 — the “race heating up” edition and open thread UPDATED

January 26, 2016 by Bookworm 7 Comments

It wasn’t just women who were attacked on New Year’s Eve in Cologne. When I first read about the hundreds of sexual attacks that Muslim immigrants perpetrated against women in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve, I only vaguely recorded the fact that the Muslims were also setting off fireworks. It was only in the back of my mind that I asked myself “Are over-the-counter fireworks part of the European New Year tradition?” It turns out that, whether or not they’re part of the New Year tradition, they were definitely fired as part of the “We are Muslims and we don’t allow any other religions to function around us” tradition:

Barbara Schock-Werner, who served as cathedral architect between 1999 and 2012, was present at the well-attended religious service along with several thousand other worshippers. Shock-Werner told the German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine, that the cathedral experienced an unprecedented and massive rocket and ‘banger’ fireworks barrage that lasted the whole service.

“Again and again the north window of the cathedral was lit up red, because rocket after rocket flew against it,” she said. “And because of the ‘bangers’, it was very loud. The visitors to the service sitting on the north side had difficulties hearing. I feared at times that panic would break out.”

Cardinal Rainer Woelki, who presided at the New Year’s mass, also complained about the “massive disruptions.”

“During my sermon loud ‘bangers’ could be heard,” Woelki said in the paper, Die Welt. “I was already annoyed beforehand about the loud noises that were penetrating into the cathedral.”

Shock-Werner believes the religious service was deliberately “targeted for disruption” due to the attack’s timing. The mass took place between 6:30 p.m. and 7:45 p.m., which, she said, “is actually no time to be already shooting off New Year’s rockets in such great volume.”

If anyone tells you that more Muslims mean less violence, don’t believe them. That’s a fable that belongs in the “Lies, damn lies, and statistics” category. While nations under the jackboot of theocratic Islam may have less violent crime between Muslims within a given Muslim nation’s borders, the reality is that Muslims don’t play well with others (and “others” means everyone else in the world, including women, Jews, Christians, Hindus, gays, the wrong kind of Muslims, etc.).

Rome goes full dhimmi. Iranian president Rouhani is heading to Italy and, in his honor, the Italians are temporarily wiping out their culture (or, at least, for now the wipe-out is temporary). Here it is, the grandeur that once was Rome:

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The Bookworm Beat 10-29-15 — the spindle overload edition and open thread

October 29, 2015 by Bookworm 11 Comments

So much to share with you (23 separate articles at last count) and so little time. I’ll therefore get right down to business and you might want to give yourself some time to review all these fascinating articles at your leisure:

Another pundit figures out Cruz might be the man

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I support Ted Cruz, and have done so since he took a stand on Obamacare. Ross Douthat (whose writing I respect) has suddenly realized that those of us who support Ted Cruz might be on to something.

Ted Cruz makes sense on taxes

Certainly Ted Cruz’s flat tax plan ought to help people realize that he’s offering genuine change for the better, not just platitudes and painful socialism. Heck, you’d think that all Americans would support a candidate who wants to deep six, or at least severely de-fang, the IRS and, in doing say, make our tax system fairer and make doing business in America more tempting for both American and foreign corporations.

Daniel Greenfield waxes eloquent on the heckler’s veto that is Islam’s stock in trade

After clearing his throat about the Obama administration’s despicable pandering to Palestinian terrorists, along with its sickening chastisement of Israel (this from an administration that would never dare blame the victim if a drunk woman walked naked through a biker’s bar), Daniel Greenfield gets to the real point, which is the fact that the West lets the mere threat of Islamic anger paralyze it.

The world’s one billion Muslims, whose delicate emotions are always infuriated by something, enforce an Islamic status quo in which no non-Muslim dares to violate the Muslim superiority complex.

[snip]

Some might say that the billion Muslims are just looking for things to get angry at… but that would just make a billion Muslims angry.

When buildings fall or buses blow up, when people are stabbed, shot or exploded by the unofficial representatives of the bilious billion, we go right past the crime to the anger that motivated it. “Why do they hate us?” becomes the question and Muslim anger becomes the pivot of national security policy.

Since Muslim anger causes violence, we stop terrorism by tiptoeing around anything that might make them angry. Minor things mostly like freedom of speech or freedom of religion. If you’re a Coptic Christian who makes a YouTube video about Mohammed, you can be sent to prison when some of the moderate Muslim Brotherhood/Al Qaeda locals murder four Americans while shouting, “Allahu Akbar.”

After weeks of brutal Muslim murders, Kerry has gotten Israel to reinforce a ban on Jews praying at the holiest site in Judaism because it offends Muslims. Next up, maybe Jews will be restricted to the seventh step of the Cave of the Patriarchs again. Because that was the “Status Quo” under the Muslim conquest.

As my lengthy quotation in this “quick hits” round-up reveals, Greenfield’s article falls into the must-read category.

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