The left's playbook:
1. Identify an activity that most people do not engage in, but most do not object to.
2. Do the activity in such a manner, and to such a degree, so that it becomes objectionable.
3. When people do object, scream "BIGOT!" and play the victim to garner sympathy, protections, and special privileges.
4. Repeat.
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Leftists are committed to a worldview where they see everyone else as ignorant, hate-filled racists. This flatters their own self-regard (because you can always look good by comparison to the other guy if you set the bar low enough) and rationalizes their sense of authoritarian entitlement.
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If you really care about making life better - for one person, or for many people, or for the world - what you care about is results. You care that the person is actually better off after you have helped them, and you do everything in your power to make sure that your help is really helping. If you're not doing that, then you are just pursuing the feeling of "doing good".
People say "but they have good intentions!" I say BS. If you care about helping people, then you care about the outcome, and if you care about the outcome, you are constantly, obsessively, checking to see whether what you're doing is making people's lives better. And if you're not doing that, then I say it's questionable how good your intentions were in the first place.
Humility means being willing to learn from others - specifically, to learn what you could be doing better.
2025-06-11
Notes.
2025-02-03
Circles of Love
We can best help those people whose needs we know best, which is to say the people closest to us. This is the deep meaning of "charity begins at home" and it is the rational basis for the idea of loyalty. Your duty to those closest to you is greater, not because they are more precious in G-d's sight than the stranger, but because they are the ones you know best how to help, and they are the ones who will hold you accountable if you fail.
And because people are complicated, "helping" often means more than just giving them stuff and doing stuff for them. People need respect, dignity, self-determination. If you watch a mother teaching a small child to walk - the mother wants to help the child, but she knows that she has to let the child learn to walk unaided, even if that means falling down once or twice. And that's really the paradigm for all of parenting - and, broadly, for love, because that mother would sacrifice anything for the child, even as the child must learn to stand on its own two feet.
If you have a family member who struggles with alcohol, or drug addiction, or mental illness, it may be difficult to know how to help, or even if you can help at all. JD Vance - the author of 'Hillbilly Elegy' - certainly knows this. (And I speak from some amount of experience here myself.)
It's good to want to help people, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to feel good about helping people. But sometimes we get stuck pursuing the feeling of "doing good" just so we can feel good about ourselves. That's narcissism.
If you really care about doing something, you care about results. If you care about another person, you care about making that person's life better. That means that you are making sure the help you're giving is really helping them. And if you're not doing that, then I say it's questionable how good your intentions were in the first place.
The left's strategy is to get us to outsource our moral decision-making, and to devote all our energy and all our caring to the service of some Great Cause that is dictated to us by our masters. If the object of your "caring" is far away and unknown to you, so much the better - your moral sense can be more easily manipulated, untroubled by questions of "is this actually making people's lives better?"
Vice President JD Vance spoke age-old wisdom when he said: "... You love your family; and then you love your neighbor; and then you love your community; and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country; and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world." When we start with our inner circles of family and community, we develop the strength and judgement to put our care and love into sound practice. This is exactly what the left seeks to destroy, to further its own grandiose schemes. We must not let this happen.
2025-01-26
The make-believe battle against made-up nazis.
Most recently, we've seen this in the case of the literal nazi salute that was supposedly given by Elon Musk.
And that's the appeal of modern left-liberalism. It's an appeal to vanity. If you convince yourself that the other guy is a nazi, then you only have to be one percent better than a nazi to be the good guy. If the other guy is Hitler, then you can be Stalin.
The left only pretends to care about anti-Semitism when it wants to smear its enemies as anti-Semites. They will make great noises of outrage, and pose and posture and portray themselves as "fighting nazis", just so long as those "nazis" can be connected to the people they don't like anyway - conservative, largely Christian and European-descended people.
The enlightened intelligentsia, the laptop liberals and timid technocrats who form the governing class and who deem themselves our moral and intellectual superiors, fancy themselves akin to the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy; when in fact they are fighting imaginary nazis in a fantasy battle that is about as dangerous as playing Call Of Duty.
Ask these folks to stand up for Israel - or stand against the keffiyeh-clad nazis who stage rallies daily in Europe, Britain, and North America, extolling Hamas and Hezbollah and calling for the massacre of Jews and the conquest of the West - and they'll pee their panties and bleat about "islamophobia".
The same people who cheered the global lockdowns and the forced medical experimentation on billions of humans; who praised censorship of social media and called for mass surveillance and suppression of dissenters; who support the jackbooted black-shirts of antifa and the islamo-fascists of Hezbollah and Hamas; who look forward to the glorious day when the world will bend the knee to the dictatorship of the UN and the WEF - these are the people who want to tell me who I'm supposed to be scared of because they're a "nazi"? Yeah, no. [353]
Genesis - Parashath VaYechi.
ALIYAH 1 [47:28 - 48:9] - JACOB NEARS DEATH.
After 17 years in Egypt, Jacob sees the end of his days approaching. He asks Joseph to swear to bury him in the Land of Israel, not in Egypt; and he grants Joseph's sons, Menasseh and Ephraim, equal status with his own sons. He summons Menasseh and Ephraim to bless them.
ALIYAH 2 [48:10-16]; ALIYAH 3 [48:17-22] - THE BLESSING OF MENASSEH AND EPHRAIM.
With his eyesight failing, Jacob blesses the two sons of Joseph, with a moment of seeming confusion that recalls the tangled tale of Jacob's own acquisition of blessing and birthright from his nearly blind father Isaac.
ALIYAH 4 [49:1-18] - BLESSINGS OF THE SONS OF LEAH, AND BILHAH'S SON DAN.
Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Zebulun, Issachar, and Dan are blessed.
ALIYAH 5 [49:19-26] - BLESSINGS OF THE SONS OF ZILPAH, BILHAH'S SON NAPHTHALI, AND JOSEPH.
ALIYAH 6 [49:27 - 50:20] - BLESSING OF BENJAMIN; JACOB'S DEATH.
ALIYAH 7 [50:21-26] - JOSEPH DIES AND IS BURIED IN EGYPT.
The Bible is not a story of perfect families; the Bible is one big long book of messed-up families. In Genesis, from the very beginning, we have seen troubled family relationships: Cain and Abel, Abraham and his household, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Rachel and Leah, and now Joseph and his brothers. What kept them going was their faith that there was a place for them in G-d's plans. [243]
2025-01-26
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-kristi-noem-confirmed-as-department-of-homeland-security-secretary
Governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem was confirmed as President Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security Secretary on Saturday morning with a vote of 59 to 34 in the Senate.
LOS ANGELES: PALISADES RESIDENTS VISIT HOMES AFTER TRUMP VISIT.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/01/25/trump-effect-some-palisades-residents-visit-homes-for-first-time-since-fire-after-presidents-visit/
Residents of the Pacific Palisades flocked home on Saturday after President Donald Trump’s visit the day before, with many gaining access to their property for the first time since the Palisades Fire more than two weeks ago.
ISRAEL: LIRI, NAAMA, DANIELA, AND KARINA RETURN HOME.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/402842
Four of the five IDF lookouts kidnapped from the Nahal Oz military post during the October 7 massacre are returned to Israel.
ISRAEL: HOSTAGES RETURN HOME (VIDEO).
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/402843
Daniella Gilboa, Liri Albag, Naama Levy, and Karina Ariev are re-united with their parents.
TIM BLACK AT SPIKED: THE SINISTER RISE OF THE ISLAMO-LEFT.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/11/19/the-sinister-rise-of-the-islamo-left/
How the Western Left allied with the islamo-fascists.
Jeremy Corbyn's reluctance to denounce Hamas is only the latest manifestation of a process that has been in the works at least since the 1990s, when the collapse of Communism forced the Western Left to find new allies. While Tim Black's article deals mainly with events in Britain, the same dynamics were at work in Europe and North America.
2025-01-05
Genesis - Parashath VaYigash.