Jordan Peterson on Evil

1) The next part is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikp8StSFBZQ 2) The last part (is here): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdP1jlxHibc

The worst leadership class of all time

With China and tariffs in the news the last few days, the headlines have been driving the market.  On the whole, I think that working for a level playing field vs-a-vs our trading partners is long over-due.

The US has been running huge deficits domestically and corporate America has been outsourcing manufacturing to low labor-cost countries for decades.  The stock market cheered each time a company announced layoffs and outsourcing.

 It has devastated a large part of the country that once thrived as manufacturing centers, left millions unemployed, and lots of American cities and town - like Detroit, once the world's auto capital - hollowed out. 

All the while radical environmentalists in and out of government suppressed domestic energy production and made us increasingly vulnerable to foreign despots and petro-sheiks.

There is a great deal of anger at the leaders who allowed this ... no, made it happen.  They bragged that they were the "Best and the Brightest."  They preened about their superior sophistication and morality.  Instead, they were the worst and the dumbest, and they were evil.  

The Middle East Is Red With The Blood Of Christians

The Middle East Is Red With The Blood Of Christians. “The beheading of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya by forces sympathetic to Islamic State over recent days is sadly not an isolated case. On the contrary, it is the latest of countless outrages perpetrated against Christians in or near the Church’s Biblical heartlands over many years.”

Go kill yourself

It all starts with a discussion of what you see as your personal preference. Then some reasons why it should be a general preference. Then it’s published as a thumb sucker in a publication read by movers and shakers. Denial, of course, that it’s a policy prescription designed for the general public. And heaven forbid that it should become government policy. But for Zeke Emanuel, famed atheist, and architect of ObamaCare, Soylent Green is not a dystopian movie but a really neat Final Solution to the financial problems of government funded health care.  Death Panels will be known as SeniorCare brought to you by those lovable Liberals who are looking out for you.

Bud Norman has some further thoughts. (read the whole thing)

A recurring theme in the spate of dystopian futurist movies popular in our youth was that someday the government would start killing off all the old people. The notion provided a memorable scene in “Soylent Green” where Edward G. Robinson shuffled off to the local suicide center where the aged were treated to soothing music and images as they ceased to be a burden, and the entire plot of “Logan’s Run” was based on a society that maintained its perfectly organized order by offing anyone over the age of 30. In the late ’60s and early ’70s audiences found this plausible, with the younger and hipper movie-goers smugly assuming it was just the sort of thing that President Richard Nixon and his right-wing buddies would love to do, but it’s not been until the era of hope and change and the left-wing ascendancy that we’ve started to worry about it.

Our worries were heightened by the once-venerable Atlantic Monthly’s recent publication of an article by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel in which he expresses his desire to die at age 75 and urges the rest of us to do the same. This morbid advice would ordinarily be easy to ignore, but Emanuel is the brother of former Obama White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, has served as a special advisor to the Obama White House’s Office of Management and Budget, and is currently a fellow at the Obama White House-affiliated Center for American Progress.

Obama's White House Guest List

Bud Norman comments about the selective outrage of the Left. Hot and bothered about the Israelis defedning their homes against a rain of rockets aimed at their women and children, a ho-hum pass for the Arabs and Islamist thugs offing Christians and each other in far greater numbers. In fact you will have to go to specifically Christian sources to find more than the occasional brief mentions of the "ethnic cleasing" of Christians in the Middle East and Africa. We get the sneaking suspiction that Liberal/Left America really approves of it.

Turning to Obama's White House

The guest list at that fancy White House gathering of African leaders is a similarly curious example of selective outrage. Among those getting the red carpet treatment and presidential promises of massive wealth redistribution are Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Oblang Nguema Mbasago, fresh from a killing spree that left all of his prominent political opponents dead, and Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh, who advocates a policy of beheading homosexuals, along with the usual assortment of seedy Afro-Marxist thugs who have made such a mess of post-colonial Africa. These elegantly embossed invitations to the White House were handed out by the same administration that routinely derides its domestic political opponents as extremists bent on dirty air and dirty water, and who are implored in faux-hip-hop fashion to “Just stop hatin’,” and it strikes us as odd. Even the most stubborn American adherents of the millennia-old notions about same sex-same marriage draw the line well short of beheading homosexuals, and thus far even the kookiest musket-weilding and tricorner-hat-wearing “tea party” types haven’t offed anybody.

Are Women Better at Being Cruel than Men?

Richard Fernandez:

Alex Coe, writer for the Los Angeles Times, raises an age-old question without quite answering it. She reviews Wendy Lower’s book Hitler’s Furies, in which we are told to prepare ourselves for the thunderous news that many of the most brutal killers of the Holocaust were women; creatively cruel and sedulously murderous women — and most of them got away.

But to return to the question, why are women cruel? The answers offered in the review appear to be cast in the standard framework of sexual politics and male domination. “Violence, as Lower points out, was often entangled with both intimacy and recreation for women in the Nazi East. It was not uncommon to pass mass graves while taking a lover’s stroll in the forest, or picnic near a concentration camp within visible range of smoke rising from a crematorium.” It was all kinky sex control of some sort we are told.

But I have another theory. The Nazi women were so apt to cruelty because they were “good and obedient” citizens. It wasn’t that they were all sex slaves of some sort. They were just good farm girls who would go and slaughter the chicken while the men sat around and yarned. Of course it’s not that simple, but the link between what is regarded as exemplary behavior and cruelty has been known for a long time.

The people who are most apt to kill you for the greater good are intellectuals.

My first glimpse into the connection between the qualities of earnestness and cruelty was during the anti-Marcos underground years. I observed that the communist ideology took deepest root in people I had heretofore regarded as clean-living and pious people, the seminarians and religious, the properly brought up, college educated, hard-studying youth. Fanaticism seemed to have a special appeal to them. By contrast it took less of a grip on petty thieves, crooks and rogues precisely because they were incurably sly, undisciplined and weak.

I asked someone once why the hard core communists were so humorless. The answer was memorable and succinct. “They take themselves too seriously.”

For there is nothing so lethal as a young man — or woman — who is completely convinced that he or she is engaged in saving the world. It is probably no coincidence that some of the worst and most pitiless men in the world are either academics or consider themselves religious. Abimael Guzman, for example, is a great favorite of that other revolutionary academic Jose Maria Sison, and is almost mind-bogglingly cruel. Sison’s other favorite is Kim Jong-un a man who will machine-gun his girlfriend or execute his uncle if it serves the cause of the party.

Of course they are largely academics, before they become mass murderers.

There are no greater hotbeds of leftist fanaticism today that the academe. That the academe has become increasingly the province of women is not coincidental.

There may have been more cruel women than men because girls are more serious than boys. Every tyrant knows this and makes a special effort to recruit the intellectuals, the women and the earnest. The people who dot their i’s, make sure the faucet is turned off and always tie their shoelaces. Dictators don’t do very well by and large, among weepy, “unreliable” and lumpen who are irredeemably riddled with human vice.

Don’t take my word for it, taken Lenin’s.

The Realities of Evil

Theodore Dalrymple's 2006 book review is particularly apt today when freedom and good is under siege.

In his introduction, Professor Hollander quotes Solzhenitsyn. According to Solzhentitsyn, the sine qua non of mass murder as a way of life, or as an industry, is ideology. Before the advent of ideology, people only did harm within a relatively restricted circle, for example in the ruthless furtherance of their own careers. Macbeth is a very bloody play, but only those who in some way stood between Macbeth and the throne had much to fear from him. Ordinary people, at least, could stand aside in the conflict.

There was no standing aside in the ideologised state: either you were for the government, the leader and the ideology, or you were against them. Indeed, once dialectics became the master science, being personally in favour of them was not enough; you had to be objectively in favour of them, that is to say to have no blemish on your record, such as a bourgeois birth, knowledge of anyone with such a birth, or intellectual interests. (An interesting history could be written of the murder or imprisonment during the twentieth century of people who wore glasses, merely because they wore glasses. Communists in particular were inclined to believe that people who wore glasses were their enemies, because – despite their own materialist conception of history, according to which the driving force of history is economic relations rather than ideas – shortsightedness is particularly prevalent among intellectuals, and intellectuals, at least outside the humanities of departments of western universities, have ideas that might cast doubt on the ultimate truth of communist ideology: a backhanded tribute to the fact that ideas ultimately rule the world. An interesting exception among eyeglass-phobic dictators was Macias Nguema, the first, democratically elected, president of Equatorial Guinea, subsequently overthrown by his nephew, the current president, who killed or drove into exile a third of the population, and who had a special animus against those who wore eyeglasses. His animus probably arose more from his uncertain personal claims to intellectual distinction than from the mixture of paranoia and gimcrack ideas about neo-colonialism that he picked up third-hand, which was the nearest he came to ideology.)

Where the means justify the end, as they do for most ideologies, mass murder becomes more likely, perhaps even inevitable in ideologised states. The capacity for cruelty, and the enjoyment of cruelty, that lies latent in almost every human heart, then allies itself to a supposedly higher, even transcendent purpose. Original sin meets social conditioning. A vicious circle is set up: and eventually, viciousness itself is taken to be a sign both of loyalty and of higher purpose.

It is curious how even now, after all the calamities of the twentieth century, the lengths to which people are prepared to go to pursue an end is taken by others as a sign of the worthiness if not of the end itself, at least of the motives of the extremists. The fact that people are prepared to blow themselves up in an attempt to murder as many complete strangers as possible is taken as proof of the strength of their humanitarian feelings and outrage at a state of injustice.

And this:

Psychopaths there are, of course, in every time and every place. They are always dangerous, but in some circumstances they are more dangerous than in others. The very qualities that are loathsome at one time are praised as diligence, fervour, loyalty, honesty and so forth at others. Here is a description from the Professor Hollander’s book, written by a Cambodian physician who lived through the three years of Pol Pot’s regime:

… a new interrogator, one I had not seen before, walked down

the row of trees holding a long, sharp knife. I could not make

out their words, but he spoke to the pregnant woman and she

answered. What happened next makes me nauseous to think

about. I can only describe it in the briefest of terms: He cut the

clothes off her body, slit her stomach, and took the baby out. I

turned away but there was no escaping the sound of her agony,

the screams that slowly subsided into whimpers and after far

too long lapsed into the merciful silence of death. The killer

walked calmly past me holding the fetus by its neck. When he

got to the prison, just within the range of my vision, he tied a

string round the fetus and hung it from the eaves with the

others, which were dried and black and shrunken.