The case for Obama: Why four more years may be less disastrous than unrestrained GOP rule

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Shortly after Mitt Romney locked up the GOP nomination, tried-and-true political axioms fell right into place. With the state primaries over and the August convention looming, Romney’s presidential campaign moved Left, a common window-dressing tactic intended to appeal to “moderate” and independent voters.

GOP insiders, primarily advocates of the “Big Tent” Republican Party, believe that this superficial move — intended to capture the political “center” — is a successful tactic that will pay off in November. The attempt is to peel off disaffected independent voters, who were a key voting bloc for Obama in 2008.

So where does the Romney campaign focus their attention? Latino activists, the NAACP, and Israel! Three well-organized ethnic lobbies and key constituencies that form the core of the Democrat’s base. As soon as any Republican candidate secures the nomination, one of the first priorities is to visit Tel Aiv or Jerusalem and placate the neoconservatives and organized Zionist groups. Romney is reportedly planning to host a fundraiser and charge “$60,000 or more per plate” in a scheduled visit to Israel later in July. Right on schedule!

Republicans never tire of trying to out democratize the Democrats. The ruling elites in the GOP establishment continue to take for granted their core constituency: Middle American Whites. As a potential voting bloc, White voters could make a substantial difference in this year’s election. However, the Romney campaign, much like other Republican presidential campaigns, assumes that this bloc of conservative White voters will remain loyal to a political party at odds with their own group interests. Read more

“Flight”: Denzel Washington’s New Movie, Part II

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Now comes a truly sardonic confirmation that I am right. A good part of my teaching involves showing the changing images of a high-level American vocation that has not changed much racially over the last century: that of the pilot. Few careers have for so long captivated the imaginations of American boys and men. See Joseph Corn’s wonderful book The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation or read anything about flying by the peerless Ernest Gann to capture this romance. Gann’s 1953 novel The High and the Mighty became a film featuring that stalwart American actor, John Wayne. Read more

“Flight”: Denzel Washington’s New Movie, Part I

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I find myself in a conflicted position. While I enjoy being right as much as the next guy, it hurts to be right about something with negative consequences. Imagine, for example, that you are convinced you have a serious malady, yet your stubborn doctor pooh-pooh’s your concerns. As a result, you conduct a grueling online search and eventually pin down your ailment to an obscure but quite harmful degenerative disease.

You take these results to a more accommodating doctor, who indeed confirms your suspicious. You, then, are left congratulating yourself for outwitting your original doctor — but you have also confirmed that your quality of life is inextricably going to erode. Mixed emotions, right?

I suffer from a parallel syndrome. For well over a decade I’ve been parsing Hollywood films and finding in them a pronounced bias against straight White European-derived males. To be sure, we still have traditional fare with White male stars as the lead — think George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, even Mel Gibson now and again. But we also find so many films in which only the White guy is bad.

What really troubles me is the fact that so much of this imagery is counterfactual. We race realists know that it is White males who have built so much of civilization over the last five centuries and that now it is we who bear the brunt of the anti-White multicultural onslaught. The cultural Marxists have cleverly used women and minorities against White males, and we see this imagery many times a day now. Go to your bank’s website, for instance, and I’ll bet you’ll see a parade of non-White faces and smart White women staring back at you. Try, however, to spot the White males. It’s often not easy. Read more

Social sciences under attack!—despite supporting liberal ideology

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Timothy D. Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, is concerned about the fact that the social sciences are not getting any respect from Congress (“Stop bullying the ‘soft’ sciences“; LATimes, July 12).

 Skepticism about the rigors of social science has reached absurd heights. The U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to eliminate funding for political science research through the National Science Foundation.

But it gets worse. Wilson cites opinion writers from the Washington Post and the New York Times who go so far as to say that the social sciences aren’t really sciences at all because they don’t have rigorous methodologies.

When it’s a bunch of cranky Republicans who don’t like the social sciences, that’s one thing. But when the liberal media establishment starts complaining, that’s a whole other ballgame. Deeply disturbing to all those social scientists who thought they were doing their best to promote the liberal agenda.

So how best to sell the social sciences to the liberal elites? Show that they support their most cherished beliefs. Some of Wilson’s examples of rigorous social science do just that, and he does not include any examples that would in any way challenge the dominant liberal zeitgeist. Read more

Manny Friedman: Jews “own a whole freaking country”; and yes, that includes the media

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Well, it turns out after all that Jews do control the media—and a whole lot besides. So says Manny Friedman, writing in the Times of Israel (“Yes, Jews DO control the media“).  Of course, we at TOO have known this for quite a while, but it’s nice to hear it from a Jew, even though it’s in a Jewish publication and intended to be part of a Jews-only dialog. The thing is, it’s okay for someone like Friedman to say it (or Joel Stein, writing in the LATimes and linked by Friedman). But it’s definitely not okay for someone like me. In fact, Friedman is typical of Jewish writers who inhabit a completely Jewish universe when they talk about anything relating to Jews. Friedman is well aware that non-Jews who talk about such issues should prepare for a wall-to-wall, no-holds barred, 24/7 campaign against them:

The funny part is when any anti-Semite or anti-Israel person starts to spout stuff like, “The Jews control the media!” and “The Jews control Washington!” Suddenly we’re up in arms. We create huge campaigns to take these people down. We do what we can to put them out of work. We publish articles. We’ve created entire organizations that exist just to tell everyone that the Jews don’t control nothin’. No, we don’t control the media, we don’t have any more sway in DC than anyone else. No, no, no, we swear: We’re just like everybody else! Does anyone else (who’s not a bigot) see the irony of this?

I don’t see any “funny parts” to this, and I rather doubt that “irony’ is the right word here. How about “ethnic strategizing,” as in “Does anyone else (who’s not a bigot) see the ethnic strategizing of this?” Read more

Traditional Jewish Ethics

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A recurrent theme here is the contrast between the moral universalism of the West versus Jewish moral particularism. Moral universalism is a corrollary of individualism: Groups have no moral standing. Stealing doesn’t become right depending on what group the victim belongs to.

But Jewish ethics is based fundamentally on the group status of perpetrator and victim. It’s okay if the victim is from a different group. And within the group, ethics is structured so that the group as a whole benefits: What’s good for the Jews.

Dennis Praeger has a nice column on traditional Jewish moral particularism (“Can Halachah ever be wrong?“).

Suppose you ordered an electric shaver from a store owned by non-Jews, and by accident the store sent you two shavers. Would you return the second shaver?

Nine said they would not. One said he would.

What is critical to understand is why they answered the way they did. The nine who would not return the second shaver were not crooks. They explained that halachah (Jewish law) forbade them from returning the other shaver. According to halachah, as they had been taught it, a Jew is forbidden to return a lost item to a non-Jew. The only exception is if the non-Jew knows a Jew found the item and not returning it would cause anti-Semitism or a Khilul Hashem (desecration of God’s name). The one who said he would return it gave that very reason — that it would be a Khilul Hashem if he didn’t return it and could be a Kiddush Hashem (sanctification of God’s name) if he did. But he, too, did not believe he was halachically bound to return the shaver.

The nine were not wrong, and they were not taught wrong. That is the halachah. Rambam (Maimonides) ruled that a Jew is permitted to profit from a non-Jew’s business error.

Traditional Jewish law had different penalties for a variety of crimes—theft, taking advantage of business errors, rape, and murder (reviewed in Ch. 6 of A People That Shall Dwell Alone, p. 148ff). Even proselytes who had converted to Judaism had a lower moral standing than other Jews—a fact that has doubtless weighed heavily with prospective converts. Read more