Before Netanyahu It was codenamed Operation Opera — Israel’s daring and successful air attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor at Tuwaitha. On June 7, 1981, fourteen Israeli fighter jets (F-16s and F-15As) plus other aircraft flew from Etzion airport more than 600 miles over hostile countries into Iraqi airspace. To avoid radar detection, the fighters flew low, and when they reached the reactor each fighter jet released its bombs. The attack  partially destroyed the reactor and killed ten Iraqi soldiers and a French engineer. (Iraq had purchased the reactor from France on the condition that it be used for “peaceful” purposes). Netanyahu’s greatest fear is a nuclear armed Iran, and he will do whatever he deems necessary to prevent that from happening. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had been warned by Israeli intelligence that the reactor would become operational sometime between July and November of 1981, and that after that Saddam Hussein would be able to extract plutonium from spent atomic fuel to manufacture an atomic bomb. As John Correll wrote in Air Force Magazine, “If Israel was going to act, it had to be soon. Once the reactor was in operation and … fueled with uranium …. a bombing attack would spread radioactive fallout across Baghdad,” which was only 12 miles away. Begin’s advisors were not of one mind regarding an attack on the reactor. Begin wanted to disable the reactor, and he was supported by then Agricultural Minister Ariel Sharon, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, armed forces chief of staff Lt. Gen. Rafael Eitan, and air force commander Maj. Gen. David Ivy. (READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: A Conservative Realist Foreign Policy for the Twenty-First Century) All of the Israeli fighters returned to Etzion after the three-hour mission. World reaction was hostile. United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim characterized the attack as a “clear contravention of international law.” The New York Times called Israel’s attack “an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression.” Even the Reagan administration initially criticized the attack, temporarily suspended deliveries of F-16s to Israel, and voted to condemn the Israeli strike in the UN Security Council. But Prime Minister Begin, as the Jerusalem Post later noted, “would not allow nuclear weapons in the region to threaten Israel.” On September 5, 2007, in an air strike ordered by then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert codenamed Operation Out of the Box, Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighters destroyed Syria’s nuclear reactor near Deir Ezzor and, thereby, prevented the Syrians from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Israel only publicly admitted that it carried out this operation in 2018. Israel’s intelligence minister Yisrael Katz tweeted that the raid “sends a clear message: Israel will never allow nuclear weapons to countries like Iran who threaten its existence.” Netanyahu Here and Now With those two precedents in mind, and with a current Israeli Prime Minister who, like Begin and Olmert, understands that Israel has no margin for error when it comes to its enemies acquiring nuclear weapons, we may be approaching another Osirak moment. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has often praised Menachem Begin’s political legacy. Netanyahu once remarked that “Begin understood that security comes first,” noting Begin’s attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor and Begin’s pledge to not allow Israel’s enemies to acquire nuclear weapons. It is inconceivable that Netanyahu would allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Iran is Israel’s most dangerous enemy. It is currently waging war against Israel by proxy (Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis) and directly with the recent Iranian ballistic missile attack on Israel. Despite the cautionary mumblings of a mentally frail American president, Netanyahu will do whatever is militarily necessary to protect Israel from a nuclear threat. Recently, the historian Niall Ferguson and Jay Mens compared Netanyahu to Germany’s Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Netanyahu, they wrote, is Israel’s “Iron Prime Minister,” who exercises “Machiavellian mastery of the dirty game of politics, domestic and international.” Like Bismarck, Netanyahu is a political survivor in the rough and tumble of Israeli politics. Like Bismarck, Netanyahu looks at a map to envision Israel’s security. And Netanyahu’s map shows Israel “tiny and surrounded by foes.” He has focused “relentlessly on the Iranian threat,” which has improved Israel’s diplomatic position in the region because other Gulf states also fear Iran. Netanyahu is a foreign policy realist. Bismarck was known for his devotion to Realpolitik. Bismarck fought three short, limited wars in the 1860s and early 1870s to unify Germany, then spent the rest of his career forging alliances and conducting diplomacy to avoid wars and provide for Germany’s security. (READ MORE: Endless War Champions Back Harris for President) Both leaders looked to history and geography, not ideology, to ensure their country’s survival. Bismarck’s greatest fear was that Germany would be faced by an alliance between France and Russia — his wars and diplomacy prevented that until he was dismissed from office by Kaiser Wilhelm II who led Germany to ruin. Netanyahu’s greatest fear is a nuclear armed Iran, and he will do whatever he deems necessary to prevent that from happening. And he knows that the nuclear clock is ticking. The post Is Netanyahu Facing Another Osirak Moment? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Millions of voters remain on the fence about Donald J. Trump v. Kamala Harris. Everybody knows President Trump. Frankly, many dislike his personality, particularly his frequent name calling. But most honest people also acknowledge that they were better off during Trump’s presidency. Harris argued, “It is status quo thinking to believe that putting more police on the streets creates more safety. That’s wrong. Conversely, many of these conflicted Americans know little about Vice President Harris or her policies. Harris’ historical statements shed light on both:   In 2019, GovTrack, a non-partisan organization that rates congressional votes, ranked California Democrat Kamala Harris as the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate. On a scale of 0.00 (most liberal) to 1.00 (most conservative) Harris scored a perfect 0.00. This placed Harris even further Left than Socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont (0.02) and Democrat Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts (0.26). While serving as San Francisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris cavalierly dismissed gun owners’ Second and Fourth Amendment rights. In 2007, she declared: “Just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean that we’re not going to walk into that home and check to see if you’re being responsible and safe in the way you conduct your affairs.” In April 2017, Senator Harris rejected Trump’s border wall as “just a stupid use of money. I will block any funding for it.” She also dismissed it as a “vanity project.”  While running for President in 2019, Harris displayed contempt for the First Amendment, vowing to “double the Civil Rights Division [of the DOJ] and direct law enforcement to counter [free speech] extremism. We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy. And if you profit off of hate, if you act as a megaphone for misinformation or cyber warfare, if you don’t police your platforms we are going to hold you accountable as a community.” What could possibly go wrong if we allow government to define “misinformation”? In response to Jake Tapper’s 2019 question on CNN about whether Harris wished to eliminate private health insurance while creating a “Medicare for  All” system, Harris responded: “Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.” While running for president in 2020, Harris announced: “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” Days after the death of George Floyd and the ensuing riots in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and other  major U.S. cities,  Harris promoted defunding the police: “I applaud [Los Angeles] Mayor Garcetti for doing what he’s done,” namely cutting the Los Angeles Police Department’s 2020-2021 fiscal budget by $150 million. Harris argued, “It is status quo thinking to believe that putting more police on the streets creates more safety. That’s wrong. It’s just wrong.” Harris raised money for the Minnesota Freedom Fund to post bail for the rioters who destroyed downtown Minneapolis during the Floyd riots. Several of those whom the MFF bailed out went on to beat and even murder people.  In September 2019, Kamala Harris declared: “I do believe that we need to do [mandatory gun] buybacks.” Asked in 2018 by an MSNBC reporter whether ICE should be abolished, Kamala Harris opined: “We need to probably think about starting from scratch.” The Biden/Harris DOJ just released alleged golf-course shooter Ryan Routh’s  manifesto promising to pay a $150,000 bounty to anyone who assassinates  Trump, incentivizing yet another attempt on the president’s life. Kamala Harris and Her Party Kamala Harris is also a proud member of a political party whose leaders do not hesitate to violate the U.S. Constitution: For the past eight years, Democrats successfully have coerced social media platforms to censor politically conservative speech, including deplatforming President Trump. The 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign spied on the Trump campaign and fabricated a three-year-long Russia-collusion hoax. In August 2022, President Biden’s DOJ raided his political opponent’s Mar-a-Lago home in search of classified records that the former president is permitted to possess. Biden’s DOJ has colluded with various Manhattan and Georgia prosecutors and private parties to pursue criminal charges and litigate civil claims against President Trump. Democrat secretaries of state across the country tried to pry President Trump from the 2024 primary ballot. Harris’ running-mate, Governor Tim Walz (D – Minnesota), revealed his disdain for the First Amendment in August: “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” Hillary Clinton believes that Americans who post “propaganda” as she defines it, should be punished: “I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda. And whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrence.” Finally, immediately after the second assassination attempt against Trump on September 15, Rasmussen polled 1,000 registered voters and asked them if “America would have been better off if former President Trump had been killed last weekend?” Shockingly, a majority of Democrats wish that President Trump had been murdered (28 percent) or do not know how they feel about it (25 percent). If unlimited government, dwindling constitutional rights, and deadly political violence are your cup of tea, then please vote for Kamala Harris. Otherwise, the alternative could not be clearer. READ MORE from Mark Sonnenklar: Arizona Election Snafus: We Won’t Get Fooled Again READ MORE: Kamala Harris’ Economic Program: Export US Jobs Mark Sonnenklar, Esq. is a business transactions attorney who practices in Los Angeles and Phoenix. He is also a Maricopa County, Arizona, precinct committeeman. The post Still Unclear About Kamala Harris? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Foolsburg: The History of a Town By Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (Vintage, 304 pages, $17) In the spring of 2022, as Russian armored columns plunged into the Ukrainian heartland, and as 152 mm artillery shells and Iskander missiles rained down upon Ukrainian towns and cities, the Odesa-based artist Igor Gusev began a series of mixed media artworks entitled “Третя світова війна,” or “Third World War.”The History of a Town, however bizarre its flights of fancy, is at all times rooted in Russian facts on the ground.   Conceived of as a form of “rapid reaction art,” Gusev’s series responded to the brutal invasion primarily through the parodical transformation of famous Russian paintings, so that Vasily Perov’s Hunters at Rest becomes a depiction of “Special Military Operation” participants lounging in the grass, dreaming of looted kitchen appliances, and Aleksei Venetsianov’s Sleeping Peasant Boy is presented bound to a tree by (possibly illusory) white cords alongside the caption “We are Russians! We have Stockholm Syndrome!” Other surrealistic images draw from Slavic folklore and Soviet history, like the memorable portrayal of Lenin’s Mausoleum striding forth on blood-soaked Baba Yaga chicken legs — “the Russians are coming” — thereby casting the Russian onslaught as a sort of moral monstrosity born out of the dark forces of mytho-history. (READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky: The Vatican–China Pact Has Proved to Be a Catastrophe) Some of Gusev’s works are all the more poignant for being relatively understated, like his sketch of Odesa’s Duc de Richelieu Monument, shown encased in protective sandbags as a Russian missile streaks overhead. And then there is Gusev’s trompe-l’œil representation of a copy of an imaginary Russian book given the title War and Punishment, and authored by a certain “Tolstoyevsky,” a literary amalgamation that crops up elsewhere in contemporary Ukrainian art. Around the same time that Gusev was churning out his “Third World War” paintings and drawings, the Kyiv-based digital artist Oleksiy Say produced his own print series that included Tolstoyevsky (2022), wherein the double-headed eagle of the Muscovite coat-of-arms is given the faces of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy, and the legs of a ballerina, with which the ghastly chimera undertakes a grand jeté over the smoking rubble of a Ukrainian city. Igor Gusev’s War and Punishment and Oleksiy Say’s Tolstoyevsky both critique the cynical weaponization of so-called “great Russian culture,” which the Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Rafeyenko has acidly described as “a stillborn set of occasionally truly distinguished works of art that proved to be incapable of transforming biological beings into humans.” Igor Gusev would certainly agree; his reworking of Vasily Perov’s portrait of Dostoyevsky, folded so as to eliminate the novelist’s eyes, is given the legend “A Society of Informationally Disabled People,” and it should be abundantly clear by now that the effect of Dostoyevsky’s Christianity or Tolstoy’s pacifism on those Russians launching cruise missiles at children’s hospitals, or dropping guided aerial bombs on nursing homes, or starving, torturing, and executing Ukrainian civilians and POWs, is essentially non-existent. Mockery of the two-headed figure of “Tolstoyevsky” likewise serves to draw attention to the outside world’s superficial understanding of Russia’s literary legacy, given that to the extent that non-Russians are familiar with Russian literature, it is typically through the lens of the Tolstoyevskian realism of War and Peace and Crime and Punishment.  David Brooks, in his 2015 essay “The Russia I Miss,” contrasted the cultural sclerosis of Putin’s Russia with the supposed “unmatched intensity,” the “depth of soul,” and the “vision of total spiritual commitment” of Old Russia as epitomized by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, who in the Russian cultural Golden Age “addressed universal questions in their most extreme and illuminating forms.” We will set aside for the time being the fact that any nostalgia for the Russia of Tolstoyevsky is nostalgia for a despotic Asiatic empire which partitioned Poland, introduced serfdom to Ukraine, committed outright genocide against the Circassians and other captive nations, and established the inhuman Siberian exile system. And we will ignore for the moment that non-Russian contemporaries of Tolstoyevsky — writers like Hugo, Flaubert, Fontane, Melville, Prus, Machado de Assis, &c. — were perfectly capable of addressing questions pertaining to the human condition in any number of enlightening ways.  The cult of Tolstoyevsky blinds its adherents to the grotesqueries of Russian history, and all too often represents a misguided form of ethno-narcissism (first-hand or vicarious), but it also has the unfortunate tendency to leave deserving Russian language writers languishing in obscurity. With Tolstoyevsky and perhaps Pushkin firmly atop the league table of Russian literary history, and with Gogol (Hohol), Turgenev, and Chekhov trailing in their wake, far too many brilliant Russian Golden Age writers — Goncharov, Leskov, Khvoshchinskaya, Pavlova, and others — remain buried in the cultural relegation zone. It is for this reason that the recent publication of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s English language translation of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s satirical 1870 novel Foolsburg: The History of a Town is so welcome. Whereas the profoundly antisemitic and xenophobic Dostoyevsky grandiosely envisaged Russia’s historical mission as one of ushering in a state of universal brotherhood through the diffusion of the spirit of Christian love, despite the fact that precious few nations on earth are less suited to such a task, the satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin more accurately treated Russian history instead as a deeply troubling object lesson. The works of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-1889), a civil servant-turned-satirist who found himself arrested and exiled to Vyatka during the reign of Czar Nicholas I, are sadly seldom read today. Gary Saul Morson, in his heartfelt but flawed meditation on Russian literary history, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (2023), mentions him three times and only very much in passing. Naturally he is somewhat better remembered inside Russia, mainly for The Golovlyovs (1880), which the literary historian D. S. Mirsky called “the gloomiest [book] in all Russian literature,” a tremendous triumph given all the competition, and for his innumerable aphorisms, which are still in common use in the Russian-speaking world, including  Российская власть должна держать свой народ в состоянии постоянного изумления. [The Russian government must keep its people in a state of constant amazement.] and Строгость российских законов смягчается необязательностью их исполнения. [The severity of Russian laws is mitigated by the non-binding nature of their implementation.] and, perhaps most famously, Многие склонны путать два понятия: «Отечество» и «Ваше превосходительство». [Many people seem to confuse the two concepts: “Fatherland” and “Your Excellency.”] In Istoriya odnogo goroda, or The History of a Town, Saltykov-Shchedrin served up a madcap, burlesque fictional chronicle of public and private life in the provincial town of Glupov (the Russian word for “stupid” being глупый, glupyy) from medieval times to the mid-nineteenth century. It was arguably his finest work of satire. Ivan Turgenev, in his 1871 review of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s masterpiece, declared that the author of The History of a Town “knows his own country better than any man living,” adding that There is something of Swift in Saltykoff [sic]; that serious and grim comedy, that realism — prosaic in its lucidity amidst the wildest play of fancy — and, above all, that constant good sense — I may even say that moderation — kept up in spite of so much violence and exaggeration of form. I have seen audiences thrown into convulsions of laughter by the recital of some of Saltykoff’s sketches. There was something almost terrible in that laughter, the public, even while laughing, feeling itself under the lash. I repeat that the History of a Town could not be translated as it stands, but I think that a selection might be made out of the different forms of its Governors which pass before the reader’s eyes, sufficient of give an idea to foreigners of the interest excited in Russia by a strange and striking book — one which, under a form necessarily allegorical, offers a picture of Russian history which is, alas! too true. That The History of a Town, however bizarre its flights of fancy, is at all times rooted in Russian facts on the ground surely stands as one of the great indictments of that country’s sordid history. In the town of Glupov we find the residents engaging in the widespread, infamous, and unfortunately very real practice of snokhachestvo, in which the Russian paterfamilias would systematically sexually prey upon his daughter-in-law (snokha). We find the authorities congratulating themselves on “having killed and drowned a lot of people, [so that] they had reason to conclude that now there was not a whit of sedition left in Foolsburg.” We find a government that at every stage in its history has been inclined “to build an edifice on sand today, and tomorrow, when it collapses, to start erecting another edifice on the same sand.” And at all times we find a herd-like populace completely passive in the face of every official indignity imaginable. Under the influence of Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin engaged in absurdist satire in order to make his political points. (READ MORE: A Sacred Peace: The Promise and Perils of Localism) One of Glupov’s mayors, Dementy Brudasty, for example, has a special mechanical device, a sort of music box, installed in his skull to replace his brain. It becomes a running gag that Brudasty and his fellow mayors tend to meet increasingly outlandish untimely ends. Amadei Manuilovich Klementy has his nostrils torn out and is sent into exile. Foty Petrovich Ferapontov, who was “such a lover of spectacles that he did not allow any floggings unless he himself was present,” was “torn to pieces by dogs in the forest.” One mayor is found “in his bed bitten to death by bedbugs.” Another dies “from strain, trying to comprehend a certain Senate decree.”  And through it all the good people of Foolsburg, “exhausted, maligned, and annihilated,” try to survive as best they can, rioting only “in the name of potatoes,” a reference to the mass rebellions in 1834 and 1840 that resulted from the forced introduction of potato cultivation to the Russian countryside, and the curious peasant belief that “potatoes are a rebirth of that cherished apple, for which the original man lost his bliss, and that when it was with curses thrown on the earth, then potatoes were born from it and, therefore, this seed is the Antichrist’s.” If the truth is stranger than fiction, life in Russia can be stranger than even the most vicious satire. Another case in point: Saltykov-Shchedrin’s chronicle builds to a crescendo with the arrival of the last governor of Glupov, a certain Ugryum-Burcheev, “in whose face,” wrote Turgenev, “every one has recognised the sinister and repulsive features of Arakcheeff, the all-powerful favourite of Alexander I during the last years of his reign.” Yet Ugryum-Burcheev’s totalitarian reign, in which war is waged on nature itself, pales in comparison to that of the later Soviets, who murdered tens of millions and waged not just war but total war on nature, seeking to reverse the south-to-north flow of Siberian rivers, and leaving behind a noxious legacy of desertification and pollution, all predicated on the communist slogan “We can’t wait for charity from nature, we must conquer it.” “If I were to fall asleep and wake up in a hundred years,” Saltykov-Shchedrin once wrote, “and they were to ask me what was happening in Russia right now, I will answer: drinking and stealing [p’yut i voruyut].” The author of Foolsburg: The History of a Town would hardly be surprised at the current state of the Russian Federation. In the last few days alone we see reports of Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine being punished in various kinds of “correctional pits,” including “wet pits” that are open to the raging elements, and “phone booth pits” that have limited internet access. Those who do not wish to serve their time in the pits are sentenced to “nullification” in the form of physical abuse or inclusion in suicidal “meat assaults” against Ukrainian positions. Meanwhile, back on the home front, we see a deadly shoot-out at the headquarters of Wildberries (Russia’s equivalent to Amazon), with gunfire exchanged between Wildberries security and forces loyal to Vladislav Bakalchuk, ex-husband of current Wildberries CEO Tatiana Bakalchuk. It is said that Vladislav has sought the backing of the Chechen gangster-warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, while Tatiana is supported by Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Anton Vaino and the oligarch Suleiman Kerimov. Somehow none of this nonsense would look one bit out of place in the pages of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s only seemingly outlandish satirical chronicle of Glupov. Thanks to the assiduous work of the husband-and-wife literary translating team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, this long-lost masterpiece of Russian literature is finally available to a wider international audience. By venturing beyond the confines of the Tolstoyevsky complex, and beyond the well-thumbed pages of what the painter Igor Gusev calls War and Punishment, readers can benefit from the wisdom of a writer who knew his country better than any man living, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy included, and understood that behind its “enormous” and “all-vanquishing force” was all too often “nothing but boundless idiocy.” Saltykov-Shchedrin ended his chronicle of Foolsburg with the town being destroyed by a mysterious force he dubbed “It,” which caused the sun to darken and the earth to tremble and history to “cease its course” entirely. His contemporaries, discomfited by the satire’s razor sharp edge, chose to ignore its lessons, and the book promptly fell into obscurity, Turgenev’s fulsome praise for it notwithstanding. The Soviet authorities, imagining themselves to have been the “It” that brought an end to Russian history, briefly resuscitated it, only to realize that the story of Foolsburg, and Ugryum-Burcheev in particular, was hardly an endorsement of utopian socialism, and indeed served as a timeless indictment of Soviet as well as of czarist tyranny, and so the book was once again consigned to the cultural dustbin. Having survived its years in the shadows, Foolsburg: The History of a Town now reappears in the western world as an important literary document, bridging as it does the gap between the Voltairean and Swiftian satires of the Enlightenment and the twentieth century dystopias of Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell. More importantly, it reminds us that Putin’s regime is part of a continuum of folly that stretches back centuries. In another one of his celebrated aphorisms, Saltykov-Shchedrin noted that “idiots are generally very dangerous, and not even because they are necessarily evil, but because they are alien to any considerations, and always go straight ahead, as if the road on which they find themselves belongs to them alone [Идиоты вообще очень опасны, и даже не потому, что они непременно злы, а потому, что они чужды всяким соображениям и всегда идут напролом, как будто дорога, на которой они очутились, принадлежит им одним].” As Putin and his junta continue down that very road, the rest of us are fortunate to have a handy roadmap in the form of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s bloody and burlesque (and decidedly un-Tolstoyevskian) chronicle of the hapless Russian town of Glupov/Foolsburg. The post War and Punishment: Saltykov-Shchedrin’s <i>Foolsburg</i> appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. — Aristotle There is a dichotomy of thought present when tolerance is the subject. Thomas Mann asserted that “tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.” Then there is Bertrand Russell’s comment, “Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.” Among academic, political and social elite classes, those who most advocate “tolerance” are themselves frequently and fervently “intolerant.” The vast majority of people look at tolerance somewhere between those extremes. Moreover, when asked, they seem quite convinced of the lack of tolerance in the world, except when it relates to them, personally. Perennially, modern liberals have complained about intolerant conservatives. This view is ever present in the news. On the other hand, the latter point the finger at modern liberals as being afflicted with the same “malady,” and who use the strictures of political correctness and “wokeness” as a weapon of oppression. So, which side of the political divide is right?  For years, sociologists have told us that in developed countries, such as the U.S., conservative populations (including fundamentalist Christians) exhibit characteristics that tend to predispose people toward being less “open-minded.” For example, this group is oriented towards tradition and believe in objective truth. Modern liberals (including agnostics, atheists, and those with no religious interest) are more open to relativism and new interpretations of correctness, and many truths — traits ostensibly associated with being more “open-minded.” Thus, one could surmise that conservatives and Christians should be given to prejudice more than our modern liberal. How Left and Right See Tolerance More recent psychological research regarding prejudice has some unexpected results. Some of it, presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, reveal some striking characteristics about “left” and “right.” Research papers published in Social Psychological and Personality Science asked a variety of Americans about their political ideologies. Liberals were found to be as discriminatory toward conservative groups as conservatives were toward liberal groups. And these findings have been echoed elsewhere: Independently and concurrently, the work of John Chambers at St. Louis University and Jarret Crawford at The College of New Jersey have also found essentially equal prejudice among conservatives and liberals. We Tolerate People Similar to Us None of this, of course, explains why liberals’ open-mindedness doesn’t better protect them against prejudice as psychologists expected. One theory is that the effects of liberals’ unique traits and worldviews on prejudice are swamped by a simple fact about humanity: We like people similar to us. There’s a long line of research showing that we prefer members of our own group. Social identity is strong — stronger than any inclination to seek or suppress novelty. Thus, apparently the openness-related traits of liberals defined by psychologists are not an antidote against prejudice. Education Teaches Us to Cover Up Prejudice Knowing all this, since prejudice and discrimination apparently exists across the political divide, is it possible to alter one’s degree of tolerance for an “other”? One might expect that the presumed mind-expanding enterprise of education would reduce prejudice (i.e. increase tolerance). But according to another presentation at the SPSP meeting, it does not. It does, however, teach people to cover it up. Researchers at the University of Kentucky, asked people if they would consider voting for a presidential candidate who was atheist, black, Catholic, gay, Muslim, or a woman. When asked directly, participants with a formal education beyond high school reported a greater willingness to vote for these groups than did those with less post-secondary education. But when asked in a more indirect way, with more anonymity, the two groups showed equal prejudice. Thus, higher formal education seems to instill an understanding of the appropriate levels of intolerance to express (i.e. what you can and can’t say so as to appear less prejudiced and thus more tolerant). Thus, education does not necessarily reduce prejudice or provide any increased degree of tolerance. Education’s suppression of expressed prejudice suggests a culture of political correctness in which people don’t feel comfortable sharing their true feelings for fear of reprisal—just the kind of intolerance conservatives complain about. Liberals, of course, try to make the argument that conservative intolerance does more harm than liberal intolerance, as it allegedly targets more vulnerable people. According to the research, there is liberal pushback when it is suggested that prejudice towards Christians and conservatives is prejudice. It seems that, to those who identify as liberals, many say it’s just standing up to bullies. Conservatives, however, don’t view it that way, and this has been going on for some time. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, remarked to a reporter: “We are on the losing side of a massive change that’s not going to be reversed, in all likelihood, in our lifetimes.” Context apparently is critical. Secularism, the circumstance in which all the above research was carried out, and to which the issue of tolerance is inextricably linked, is not a neutral governance structure; rather it has its own interests and strives to protect and perpetuate itself. Moreover, through the state, the education system, and the media, secularism exercises awesome disciplinary power and control mechanisms to achieve its agenda. It authorizes (i.e. tolerates) certain kinds of subjectivity, truths, and behaviors while marginalizing others (in today’s woke world that translates as censoring). Secularism, therefore, is coercive through its means and frequently disguises this under the name of “tolerance.” Among academic, political and social elite classes, those who most advocate “tolerance” are themselves frequently and fervently “intolerant.” In the early part of this essay, we observed how and in what ways different groups are less than tolerant of each other. But what is apparent is that irrespective of one’s political views, education or socioeconomic status, the lack of tolerance for the “other” remains an intractable problem that remains unremitting. So, why is that? If one approaches the question from a purely philosophical perspective, the answer may lie in the concept of tolerance and with its character as a virtue. People today often are intolerant, because they have no idea what it means to actually be tolerant. Said another way, according to the research, people often behave in ways completely inconsistent with their claimed intentions. To accomplish what we, ostensibly at least, intend — thought, word and deed must serve that purpose. To understand why this does not happen today with regard to tolerance, one must understand what tolerance really is (a virtue) and its fundamental interrelatedness with the other virtues. Tolerance Isn’t the Only Virtue A huge concern in today’s society is that the virtue of tolerance is often attempted in isolation and promoted apart from other traditional virtues such as justice, temperance, courage, and, of course, wisdom. The result is a society populated by individuals who single mindedly extol tolerance, but who clearly lack the wisdom necessary to avoid the extremes of too-tolerant and not tolerant enough. Those who fall into the latter extreme — of suppressing what should be put up with — are those “intolerant” people who are so self-assured of their own tolerance. The former are those who are “intolerant” of almost any degree of intolerance. Dr. Montague Brown, Saint Anselm College Professor and Thomistic scholar, spoke of the stark choices for us, today in society, regarding tolerance: “Tolerance accepts some inappropriate behavior for the sake of the common good.” “Relativism denies that good has any universal meaning and so accepts all behavior.” This state of affairs should be a warning to us all. We cannot compensate for the collapse of tolerance in society by solely advocating tolerance as an end in itself. This is the mistake to which academics and social critics seem oblivious. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle proposed that humans are social, rational animals that seek to “live well.” To that end, he proposed a system of ethics designed to help us reach eudaimonia, a state that means living well or flourishing. Eudaimonia is reached by living virtuously and building up your character traits until you don’t even have to think about your choices before making the right one. Aristotle sees virtues as character traits and tendencies to act in a particular way. This student of Plato and tutor of Alexander the Great was clear regarding the virtues and how they influence each other to form character traits. Absent temperance, courage and justice, there can be no wisdom, and without the latter – tolerance or ‘practical wisdom’ is just a word we use to make ourselves feel better – about who we say we are – in relation to others. READ MORE from F. Andrew Wolf Jr.: Kennedy Endorses Trump, Media Endorses Kamala Is Donald J. Trump Channeling Pat Buchanan? The post Tolerance Is Just One of Many Important Virtues appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from Candace Show Podcast: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Jim Quinn, The Burning Platform: Via Chris Martenson This needs to go far and wide to put pressure on the government to do the right thing and save lives.  This evening, from a Peak Prosperity member to me via PM at my site: Them: I can’t post this online because it’s not quite public yet, […]

In today's most heartwarming story, Marta and Frankie from School of Rock have got engaged in real life

For over three decades, Nasrallah led this terror organization responsible for numerous attacks, including the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 Americans. Nasrallah’s Hezbollah is notorious for its war against Israel and unwavering support for Islamic jihad. Yet, in Dearborn, participants at the vigil glorified him and his violent aspirations, […]

CHAPTER 38: BigBrain, BICAN, and “The Evil Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism” Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is* Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate ruled by the globalist elite. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. […] The post CHAPTER 38: BigBrain, BICAN, and “The Evil Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism” appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.