“A Serious Man” Revisited

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Larry Gopnik

I don’t have much use for light comedies, but I love dark ones. Thus I have been a fan of the Coen brothers ever since their first movie Blood Simple, which I regard as a masterpiece. But not all of their movies succeed. The Coens are at their best when they are working with tight and ingenious plots. Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, The Hudsucker Proxy, and No Country for Old Men (no comedy that) come immediately to mind. However, when they stray from tight plotting, their movies tend to fail. But one still has to grant that films like Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? are at least interesting failures.

At first viewing, I thought A Serious Man was just another interesting failure. But my mind kept coming back to it, like a tongue seeking a sore tooth, until I broke down and watched it again. This time, I think I got it. And I like it. I am going to summarize pretty much the whole story, so if you have not watched it, bail out here. Read more

Paying their share? Jewish-American Military losses in the “War on Terror”.

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Paul Wolfowitz, neocon architect of the Iraq war, consoles Andrew Buehring, 9, during a funeral ceremony for his father, Lieutenant Colonelt Charles Buehring, Monday, November 17, 2003 in Arlington National Cemetery.

With the American campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq about to have their 10th and 8th anniversaries The Jewish Daily Forward has published Profiles of Our Fallen By Maia Efrem February 09, 2011. This is a series of profiles of the “37 American Jewish Service Members Who Died Fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Like all similar collections — of which the English-speaking nations have generated far too many in the last century — this article offers a powerful combination of pathos, gallantry and drama. No one with sons can read it unmoved.

But being moved is exactly the wrong way to approach thinking about these weird public policy disasters. Viewed objectively the article is analytically useful. The Forward says

The Department of Defense reports that, as of February 7, 5,775 members of the U.S. armed forces have been killed in these theaters of war. Read more

Mind Wars: Raising Healthy White Children in a Subversive Environment

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Above all, a White child must be raised to exhibit White behavior: to strive towards truth, honor, and a virtuous life.  Exemplary White men and White women from the past and present provide guidance for behavior expected in the future.  Familiarity with admirable White role models will help protect a developing mind from poisonous, nonsensical, cowardly, and traitorous ideas.  The alternative is the loss of yet another young White mind and spirit, overwhelmed from all sides in today’s twisted and subversive society.

Popular music and professional sports are teeming with African themes of criminality, cruelty, misogyny, egotism, and debased and debauched behavior.  Television, movies, and advertising are infected with a virulent strain of anti-White propaganda.  Academia, mainstream news, politicians, and pundits provide a persistent message of White guilt, racial nihilism, and shrill condemnation of any manifestation of White pride or White identity.  Jewish ownership and control of the media is so pervasive that Jewish media figures feel secure enough to boast thereof.  Yet to an untrained observer, the subversion towards Jewish interests or anti-White propaganda can be difficult to spot because it is designed to permeate the unconscious brain.  The viewer, or victim, is supposed to feel and absorb, not think and reflect.  Conscientious White parents must prepare their children with the analytical tools to see through the façade. Read more

Abstractions Are a Weak Source of National Identity

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Alex Kurtagic has a nice comment at VDARE.com on British PM David Cameron’s multiculturalism-is-a-failure speech. He notes,

A strong national identity is perforce traditionalist, particularist, and inegalitarian. It is dependent on localization, specificity, and uniqueness, as this is stabilized into a tradition over many generations, what differentiates the indigenous from the alien, then native from the foreigner.

A strong national identity, therefore, implies that what is indigenous takes priority over what is alien. It is incompatible with multiculturalism or diversity.

Surprisingly, Gregory Rodriguez, your basic Latino activist as affirmative action op-ed writer with a lofty perch in the mainstream media, makes a complementary point—that the proposition nation idea is not psychologically compelling:

“Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality,” Cameron said, would provide “a clear sense of national identity that is open to everyone,” especially to young Muslims who are caught between cultures.

The only problem is that the freedoms Cameron champions, worthy as they are, hardly constitute firm “roots.” Anglo American liberalism is essentially a collection of abstract ideas, and abstractions simply aren’t as effective as bloodlines and religious ritual when it comes to bringing people together as a nation. Read more

Ancient Resistance in Red, Black and White: The “Anti-Semitism” of Grimm’s Fairy Tales

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Fairy tales, for me, have always evoked powerful feelings of the mysterious and mist-shrouded history of European peoples.  Both before and after coming to White racial consciousness, there was always something “enchanting,” to use a word, about the tales and their faraway castles, strange creatures and ever-present dark woods.  Like a non-Jewish version of the Old Testament, they were filled with sex, violence and the occasional morality lesson. Read more

More on Jonathan Haidt’s Tribal Moral Communities

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The video of Jonathan Haidt’s talk on tribal moral communities (see here), has some interesting additions to the NYTimes report. He says that when scholarly articles that contravene the sacred values of the tribe are submitted to academic journals, reviewers and editors suddenly become super rigorous. More controls are needed, and more subjects. It’s not a representative sample, and the statistical techniques are inadequate.

This use of scientific rigor against theories that are disliked for deeper reasons is a theme of Chapter 2 of The Culture of Critique where it was also noted that standards were quite lax when it came to data that fit the leftist zeitgeist. Read more

Express Group now openly promoting the English Defence League

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The promotion which the billionaire Zionist Jew Richard Desmond is giving to the English Defence League via the Express Group component of his ever-growing media empire would seem to challenge the ‘official’ position of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and its Community Security Trust that Zionist-Jewry in Britain is firmly opposed to the EDL and its ‘Islamophobic’ policies. An article in Desmond’s Daily Star (“EDL to go political“), touts the electoral prospects of the EDL and reports results of a phone poll finding that 98% of Daily Star readers agree with EDL policies.

Desmond has always been a bit of a maverick. He built his fortune on pornography before selling up to raise the capital to buy the Express Group, which includes the Daily Express, the Sunday Express and the Daily Star. Last year he bought Channel 5 TV. Recently he withdrew his publications from the Press Complaints Commission, to which all major national and small local newspaper groups belong.

But his backing of the EDL should not be seen a genuine split within the Jewry.

Throughout history, wherever they have settled, the Jews have notbeen bothered by the concept of a principled, unified and consistent approach to any issue — except one: the survival and advancement of the Jews. In all other matters they are are entirely morally pragmatic and often deliberately contradictory. Read more