How Social Media Fuels Social Unrest

The funniest thing about this piece at Wired is that I read it over a week ago in hard copy while out shopping for Christmas presents at Barnes and Noble. I came home that night and logged on looking for it, but the Wired homepage hadn't updated with the January magazine information. It's the holidays, so what the heck? I still thought it strange for a tech-driven magazine to basically make a social media report available in dead-tree media and not online.

In any case, the essay, by Bill Wasik, offers pretty compelling explanation for how social media enable radicals and inflame protests. See "#Riot: Self-Organized, Hyper-Networked Revolts—Coming to a City Near You." This passage was particularly interesting:

In trying to understand how and why crowds go wrong, you can have no better guide than Clifford Stott, senior lecturer in social psychology at the University of Liverpool. Stott has risked his life researching his subject. Specifically, he has spent most of his career—more than 20 years so far—conducting a firsthand study of violence among soccer fans. On one particularly dicey trip to Marseilles in 1998, Stott and a small crowd of Englishmen ran away from a cloud of tear gas only to find themselves facing a gang of 50 French toughs, some of them wielding bottles and driftwood. “If you are on your own,” a philosophical fellow Brit remarked to Stott at that moment, “you’re going to get fucked.” This, in a sense, is the fundamental wisdom at the heart of Stott’s work—though he does couch it in somewhat more respectable language.

To Stott, members of a crowd are never really “on their own.” Based on a set of ideas that he and other social psychologists call ESIM (Elaborated Social Identity Model), Stott believes crowds form what are essentially shared identities, which evolve as the situation changes. We might see a crowd doing something that appears to us to be just mindless violence, but to those in the throng, the actions make perfect sense. With this notion, Stott and his colleagues are trying to rebut an influential line of thinking on crowd violence that stretches from Gustave Le Bon, whose 1895 treatise, The Crowd, launched the field of crowd psychology, up to Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist behind the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971. To explain group disorder, Zimbardo and other mid-20th-century psychologists blamed a process they called deindividuation, by which a crowd frees its members to carry out their baser impulses. Through anonymity, in Zimbardo’s view, the strictures of society were lifted from crowds, pushing them toward a state of anarchy and thereby toward senseless violence.

By contrast, Stott sees crowds as the opposite of ruleless, and crowd violence as the opposite of senseless: What seems like anarchic behavior is in fact governed by a shared self-conception and thus a shared set of grievances. Stott’s response to the riots has been unpopular with many of his countrymen. Unlike Zimbardo, who would respond—and indeed has responded over the years—to incidents of group misbehavior by speaking darkly of moral breakdown, Stott brings the focus back to the long history of societal slights, usually by police, that primed so many young people to riot in the first place.

Meeting Stott in person, one can see how he’s been able to blend in with soccer fans over the years. He’s a stocky guy, with a likably craggy face and a nose that looks suspiciously like it’s been broken a few times. When asked why the recent riots happened, his answers always come back to poor policing—particularly in Tottenham, where questions over the death of a young man went unaddressed by police for days and where the subsequent protest was met with arbitrary violence. Stott singles out one moment when police seemed to handle a young woman roughly and an image of that mistreatment was tweeted (and BBMed) throughout London’s black community and beyond. It was around then that the identity of the crowd shifted, decisively, to outright combat against the police.

Stott boils down the violent potential of a crowd to two basic factors. The first is what he and other social psychologists call legitimacy—the extent to which the crowd feels that the police and the whole social order still deserve to be obeyed. In combustible situations, the shared identity of a crowd is really about legitimacy, since individuals usually start out with different attitudes toward the police but then are steered toward greater unanimity by what they see and hear. Paul Torrens, a University of Maryland professor who builds 3-D computer models of riots and other crowd events, imbues each agent in his simulations with an initial Legitimacy score on a scale from 0 (total disrespect for police authority) to 1 (absolute deference). Then he allows the agents to influence one another. It’s a crude model, but it’s useful in seeing the importance of a crowd’s initial perception of legitimacy. A crowd where every member has a low L will be predisposed to rebel from the outset; a more varied crowd, by contrast, will take significantly longer to turn ugly, if it ever does.

It’s easy to see how technology can significantly change this starting position. When that tweet or text or BBM blast goes out declaring, as the Enfield message did, that “police can’t stop it,” the eventual crowd will be preselected for a very low L indeed. As Stott puts it, flash-mob-style gatherings are special because they “create the identity of a crowd prior to the event itself,” thereby front-loading what he calls the “complex process of norm construction,” which usually takes a substantial amount of time. He hastens to add that crowd identity can be pre-formed through other means, too, and that such gatherings also have to draw from a huge group of willing (and determined) participants. But the technology allows a group of like-minded people to gather with unprecedented speed and scale. “You’ve only got to write one message,” Stott says, “and it can reach 50, or 500, or even 5,000 people with the touch of a button.” If only a tiny fraction of this quickly multiplying audience gets the message and already has prepared itself for disorder, then disorder is what they are likely to create.

"BBM" is BlackBerry Messenger, the main device that helped set off the rioting in Enfield, near London, earlier this year.

But check the whole piece, at the link.

Nashville Occupy Protesters Fight on Christmas Day

Freakin' animals.

At Frugal Cafe Blog Zone, "Christmas Day Fight Among Occupy Protestors in Nashville, Including Pregnant Woman, Police Called in."

And at Blazing Cat Fur,  "Occupests In Christmas Day Cat Fight."

Nigerian Explosion: Bombs Hit Churches in Christmas Day Terrorist Attacks

At Telegraph UK, "Coordinated bomb attacks across Nigeria kill at least 40," and "Boko Haram: the group behind the Nigerian attacks."

Also at London's Daily Mail, "Bombs kills 39 at Catholic churches during Christmas Day mass as series of explosions rock Nigeria."

And at New York Times, "Churches Are Hit in a Series of Bombings Across Nigeria." (Via Memeorandum and The Other McCain.)

If You Have Time, Read This Review of Corey Robin's Book, The Reactionary Mind, at the New York Review

It's a great piece, from Mark Lilla, "Republicans for Revolution."

I'd never heard of Corey Robin until last week, when progressives online were touting his piece on the death of Hitchens, "Christopher Hitchens: The Most Provincial Spirit of All."

Lilla's review of Robin's book will make you chuckle. He writes, for example:

Robin, who teaches political science at Brooklyn College, has been writing thoughtful essays on the American right for The Nation and other publications over the past decade. The Reactionary Mind collects profiles of well-known right-wing thinkers like Ayn Rand, Barry Goldwater, and Justice Antonin Scalia, and some deserters who turned left, like John Gray and Edward Luttwak. There are also a few that look beyond our borders, including an excellent piece on Hobbes as a counterrevolutionary thinker. But the book aims to be more than a collection. It is conceived as a major statement on conservatism and reaction, from the eighteenth century to the present. And this is where it disappoints.The problems begin in the opening paragraphs, where Robin lays out his general picture of political history. It is not overly complex:

Since the modern era began, men and women in subordinate positions have marched against their superiors in the state, church, workplace, and other hierarchical institutions. They have gathered under different banners—the labor movement, feminism, abolition, socialism—and shouted different slogans: freedom, equality, rights, democracy, revolution. In virtually every instance, their superiors have resisted them, violently and nonviolently, legally and illegally, overtly and covertly…. Despite the very real differences between them, workers in a factory are like secretaries in an office, peasants on a manor, slaves on a plantation—even wives in a marriage—in that they live and labor in conditions of unequal power.

This is history as WPA mural, and will be familiar to anyone who lived through the Thirties, remembers the Sixties, or was made to read historians like Howard Zinn, Arno Mayer, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Christopher Hill at school. In their tableau, history’s damnés de la terre are brought together into a single heroic image of suffering and resistance. Their hats are white, immaculately so. Off in the distance are what appear to be black-hatted villains, though their features are difficult to make out. Sometimes they have little identification tags like those the personified vices wear in medieval frescoes—”capital,” “men,” “whites,” “the state,” “the old regime”—but we get no idea what they are after or what their stories are. Not that it matters. To understand the oppressed and side with them all you need to know is that there are oppressors.

Exactly.

And this is no doubt why Robin is gaining traction with the idiots of the progressive fever swamps.

But Lilla has some props for Robin as one who takes conservatives seriously. I'm more interested in what Lilla has to say than what Robin does, actually, especially since I think "reactionary" is a utterly misused term in political discourse.

But continue reading the review. There's some excellent clarification of what conservatives are and what they stand for. And Lilla is another author who cites the isolationist trend among the GOP base that could well emerge as a more welcomed position for the party in the months ahead, especially depending on how things turn out in the primaries coming up in a few weeks.

I'll try to come back to this topic. It's Christmas though, and it's going to be a busy morning, with perhaps a little more sleep fitted in here somewhere among other things.

Why the Left Doesn't Mourn Vaclav Havel's Passing

From Ron Radosh, at PJMedia, "How the Left sees the Life of Vaclav Havel, and why they Do Not Mourn his Passing":

PJ Media readers know why we mourn the passing of Vaclav Havel. On this site, Michael Ledeen beautifully laid out the reasons why the world knows it has lost one of its greatest leaders. Ledeen put it in these words: “he was one of a handful of people who changed the world by fighting totalitarian Communism and then, having defeated it, inspired his people to rejoin the Western world, embrace capitalism, and support democratic dissidents everywhere.”

But now that a week or more have passed since Havel’s death, some on the Western Left have decided to let their true feelings about Havel out. Despite having to give some lip service to Havel’s integrity and what he accomplished, these men of the Left quickly get to what they really think: Havel helped destroy the great ideal of Communism as a worthy goal, and for that, he cannot be forgiven.

The most egregious is the article in the British paper The Guardian. The headline to Neil Clark’s article reads, “Another Side of the Story.” Clark immediately ties Havel up with another individual who has just passed way, Christopher Hitchens, whose “consecration” he strongly objects to. For Hitchens was, he writes, “ another ‘progressive’ opponent of the communist regimes of eastern Europe who found favour with Washington’s neocons.”

Clark does not question that Havel was “a brave man” who stood up for his views. That he cannot deny. It is Havel’s views, and his anti-Communism, that he detests. For Havel, he writes, did not help make his country “and the world, a better place.” In particular, denying everything we know about the nature of Stalinism in Eastern Europe — the repression, the bureaucracy, the lack of necessary consumer goods to lead a decent life, the ever pervasive secret police — he faults Havel for the following:

Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.

Surely Mr. Clark must be kidding. Has he not read any of the scores of books revealing the nature of life under what his comrades then called “really existing socialism”? Does he not realize that all these so-called “positive achievements” were there mainly in the minds of the state and Party propaganda apparatus, and that the only people to have them were the Party’s apparatchiks? Does he really believe that communism put the needs of “the majority first”? What accounts, then, for the scores of brave crowds who swept Havel into office, and who openly taunted the regime’s spokesmen as liars and no different than the Nazis who ruled before them?

Clark does not stop with the above. In true Communistpeak, he attacks Havel as “the son of a wealthy entrepreneur,” in other words used by the Maoists of the day, a “capitalist roader.” How dare the son of a bourgeois merchant becomes a national hero? Havel, to Clark, as to the comrades who ruled for decades, had no right to power, since he came from the hated capitalist class.

Continue reading.

Also, from Darleen at Protein Wisdom, "Pining for the fjords Communism." Hammering Whoopi Goldberg's comments on communism, Darleen adds:

The base misanthropy of collectivist advocates is glaringly clear. From communism [international collectivism] to national socialism [national collectivism], these are anti-human systems that declare individuals are not sovereign beings with inherent rights, but units that live at the pleasure of the regime. A regime that decides what needs are to be met and who will be sentenced to fulfilling those needs.

Remember that as Obama and statist Democrats continue their attempts to fundamentally transform America.

Freakin' murderous asshats.

Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview: Mitt Romney On Taxes, 'Modeling,' and the Vision Thing

It's amazing that Newt Gingrich dropped back down in the polls so quickly. The negative attacks took their toll and the Newt-phoria on the Iowa campaign trailed cooled off rather decisively. Now it's Ron Paul's turn to start fading in the less-than-two weeks we have left until the caucuses. All the attention to the racist newsletters should take some of the luster off Paul's campaign, although he's got the ground game in place so who knows? If Romney can hold on for the win in New Hampshire he'll be able to match whatever momentum emerges for the Iowa winner, and with his fundraising edge he'll likely be able to compete more effectively in the number of upcoming contests through January.

In any case, an interesting interview at WSJ, at the link:

Does Mitt Romney have a governing vision, a dominating set of political principles? It's the big question many voters say they have about the GOP presidential candidate. So when the former Massachusetts governor visited the Journal editorial board this week, we put it to him squarely, if perhaps tendentiously.

Voters see in him a smart man, an experienced executive, plenty of managerial expertise, great family—but they also see someone with the soul of a consultant who has 59 economic proposals because he lacks a larger vision of where he'd take the country. What does he think of that critique?

Mr. Romney has been garrulously genial for an hour, but here he shows a hint of annoyance. "I'm not running for president for 59 ideas," he says. "I'm not running for president because the country needs a management consultant or a manager. I'm not even the world's greatest manager. There are a lot better managers out there.

"People who know me from my years at Bain Capital, Bain and Company, the Olympics and Massachusetts wouldn't say he was successful because he was a great manager. They'd say I was successful because I was a leader, that I had a vision of how to change the enterprise, any one of those three enterprises, to make it greater."And that vision is? Mr. Romney says he's running "to return America to the principles that we were founded upon." He goes on, expanding on his campaign theme, Believe in America: "We have a choice in America to be remaining a merit-based opportunity society that follows the Constitution, or to follow the path of Europe.

And I'm the guy who believes in the former. I believe America got it right. I believe Europe got it wrong. I believe America must remain the leader the world. . . . I am absolutely committed to an American century. I see this as an American century."

He concludes with even more force, "America doesn't need a manager. America needs a leader. The president is failing not just because he's a poor manager. It's because he doesn't know where to lead."

Continue reading.

Newt Gingrich Goes After Ron Paul on Newsletters

At New York Times, "With Paul on the Rise in Iowa, Gingrich Takes Aim":

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Newt Gingrich turned his fire on Representative Ron Paul of Texas on Friday, saying that his Republican opponent had to answer for political and investment newsletters that included racist, anti-gay and anti-Israel passages that Mr. Paul has disavowed.

Mr. Gingrich also sharply criticized Mr. Paul for what he said were his isolationist views on foreign policy. The pointed comments suggested a new dynamic in the presidential primary race, with Mr. Paul as a new and enticing target. His fortunes have risen in Iowa, scrambling the field as some polls suggest that Mr. Paul could pull off a victory in the caucuses on Jan. 3. But in recent days, he has come under increasing scrutiny for offensive passages in newsletters that bore his name, although he has denied writing or approving them. 

“These things are really nasty, and he didn’t know about it?” Mr. Gingrich said to reporters after a town-hall-style meeting here.

At the same time, Mr. Gingrich refrained from criticizing Mitt Romney, with whom he has frequently sparred, calling him, at worst, “a Massachusetts moderate.”

Speaking to a large and enthusiastic crowd outside the Blue Marlin restaurant here on a warm and sunny day, Mr. Gingrich mainly framed his candidacy in opposition to President Obama. But he strongly criticized Mr. Paul’s foreign policy positions. Mr. Paul’s criticism of American military involvement overseas is at odds with the views of many Republican voters who may otherwise be attracted to his strong antigovernment message.

“The only person I know who is for a weaker military than Barack Obama is Ron Paul,” Mr. Gingrich said.

“His positions are fundamentally wrong on national security,” he added. “I do not agree with him that America is at fault for 9/11, I do not agree with him that we can ignore an Iranian nuclear weapon, and I do not agree with him that it’s O.K. if Israel disappears.”

A top official with the Paul campaign, Jesse Benton, suggested that Mr. Gingrich’s comments were slanderous and an overreaction to the possibility that Mr. Gingrich might not have collected enough signatures to get on the nominating ballot in Virginia — a matter not yet resolved.

“Today was a bad day for Newt Gingrich,” Mr. Benton said in an e-mail, adding that the former House speaker had “jumped the shark trying to slander Dr. Paul.”

Continue reading.

And notice at the video how Rachel Maddow and Melissa Harris-Perry are using Paul's racist newsletters to smear not only the American right, but American society all together!

Ron Paul won't be the nominee --- indeed, he's probably in a situation akin to Herman Cain's: caught in the headlights upon emerging as the frontrunner, and even if he wins Iowa it's going to be a long primary process and Paul's scrutiny will only intensify. He'll have to answer and answer decisively at some point. But as noted, there's something of a nativist and isolationist trend that animating the primary process. That's something quite different from the small-government conservatism that drove the tea parties in 2009. All this together is extremely fascinating. And how some of these tensions are resolved over the next few months will go a long way towards determining the GOP's chances in defeating the Democrats next November.

Occupy Wall Street and the Jews

Walter James Casper III has to answer for his ugly endorsement of the hate. Walter James Casper III has endorsed the anti-Semitism of the Occupy movement. Add this on top of his anti-black racist sentiments and the sponsorship of hatred at his blog under "free speech" pretenses, and it's beyond clear the depths of evil this man will go to destroy decent people, Jews and racial minorities especially, because they don't toe the collectivist line.

Here's Jonathan Neumann, at Commmentary:

Defenders and supporters of Occupy Wall Street have tried to downplay the extent of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hostility, but it was more prevalent than their initial denials suggested or their belated statements of concern conceded.

To begin with, any conspiracy theory that connects a tiny portion (in this case 1 percent) of the population with exploitative banking practices is susceptible to taking on anti-Semitic undertones. This is especially the case when the list of supporters includes the American Nazi Party, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, Louis Farrakhan, white supremacist David Duke, Socialist Party USA, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Hezbollah, 911Truth.org, International Bolshevik Tendency, and myriad other dubious organizations and individuals. With such comrades in arms, leaders of Occupy Wall Street ought to have been much on guard against anti-Semitic talk.

Nor was the hostility a matter of undertones only. The tone, very early on, was set in part by signs and messages that were overtly anti-Semitic. “Google: (1) Wall St. Jews, (2) Jewish Billionaires, (3) Jews & FedRsrvBank,” read one sign. Another: “Nazi Bankers Wall Street.” The man holding up a sign that read “Hitler’s Bankers,” upon being pressed by passersby to explain himself, replied “Jews control Wall Street.” He was then asked whether the Fox News Channel had asked him to hold up the sign, presumably to make Occupy Wall Street look bad, and he responded, “F— Fox News. That’s bulls—t. F—ing Jew made that up.” Another protester, upon being interrogated by a skeptical elderly passerby sporting a yarmulke, brushed him away saying, “You’re a bum, Jew.”

An Occupier who had traveled from Georgia explained his anti-Jewish animus to a reporter from the New York Post by stating that “Jews are the smartest people in the world,” that “they control the media,” and that nobody is willing to point out this simple truth because “the media doesn’t want to commit suicide by losing the Jewish advertisers.” Still another Occupier expostulated in a widely circulated video: “The smallest group in America controls the money, media, and all other things. The fingerprints belong to the Jewish bankers who control Wall Street. I am against Jews who rob America. They are one percent who control America. President Obama is a Jewish puppet. The entire economy is Jewish. Every federal judge [on] the East Coast is Jewish.”

Occupy Wall Street’s group page on Facebook was littered with images of the title page of Henry Ford’s notorious pamphlet, The International Jew, as well as a picture featuring the phrase Arbeit Macht Frei, lifted from the entrance gate at Auschwitz, with the accompaniment: “We don’t work for bad money.”

At Occupy Los Angeles, one sign explained, in remarkable detail: the “[The] satanic cult called the Illuminati…represents Masonic and Jewish bankers who finagled a monopoly over government credit….Thus the people who control our purse strings are conspiring against us.” (It went on to claim how this nefarious force funded the first two world wars and is planning a third.) Another sign read “Humanity vs. the Rothschlds” [sic] as a speaker further advanced this classic trope: “How many people know that the wars, in WWII, both sides, were funded by the Rothschilds? Those are the bankers. So banking and war is [sic] very intertwined.”

To highlight such talk is to invite one predictable retort: One cannot hold an entire movement responsible for the excesses of outliers. But, despite the assertions of its advocates, Occupy Wall Street was not in fact a movement. Its ranks never numbered more than a modest few hundred people in Manhattan—which made its anti-Semitic cohort statistically significant. Its lack of structure, moreover, and near inability to repudiate sentiments by its participants meant that even a fringe was no less part of the whole.

And Neumann illustrates how the widespread anti-Zionism at Occupy Wall Street showcases the ruthless anti-Jewish eliminationism of the global left's Israel extermination industry:

And what of anti-Zionism? Naturally, given the resonance of the word occupy in association with controversial Israeli policies toward the West Bank and Gaza, the protests were a word-association game waiting to happen. On a random visit to Zuccotti Park in October, three signs were observed by this writer that related to American foreign policy, two of which pertained specifically to Israel. One read: “Obama stop giving bunker buster bombs to an extremist Israeli regime. Stop being Israel’s hit-man. AIPAC will still dump you in 2012.” The second: “USA and Israel are criminal psychopathic nations, an axis of evil, mass murderers, financial predators if not stopped no one has a future! Hands off Iran.” A small table exhibiting books for purchase was dominated almost exclusively by Marxist and Communist literature. Among the offerings, the one seeming anomaly was a book on Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS), an organization that seeks to isolate Israel on all fronts.

But the BDS book was no aberration; the policies and input of that organization seem to have been welcomed by Occupy Wall Street. On October 13, BDS issued a statement entitled “Occupy Wall Street, Not Palestine,” expressing solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and hailing the objectives of the two as analogous. After all, “Palestinians, too, are part of the 99% around the world that suffer at the hands of the 1% whose greed and ruthless quest for hegemony have led to unspeakable suffering and endless war.” A month later, Adalah-NY, an organization that campaigns in New York for the boycott of Israel, relayed a message of support for the protests from the Palestinian Arab chapter of BDS and led a question-and-answer session at Occupy Wall Street on the ‘‘growing movement for BDS against Israel until it complies with international law.’’

Last summer mass domestic protests overtook Israel—protests that attracted hundreds of thousands rather than the scant crew down by Wall Street. When an organizer of those protests came to speak in Zuccotti Park, a member of the Occupy Wall Street outreach working group, Andy Pollack, decried the appearance of “Zionist racists.”

An anti-Israel group, If Americans Knew, sustaining the conspiratorial notion of an America-Israel corporate nexus, distributed fliers headlined “Occupy Wall Street…not Palestine!” and noted that “while people are losing jobs, homes, and hope, politicians—dominated by powerful special interests—are sending more of our tax money to Israel than to any other country on earth.”

On October 28, Zuccotti Park hosted “Kaffiyeh Day at Occupy Wall Street”—the kaffiyeh being the Arab headdress associated most famously with Yasir Arafat—and protesters waved Palestinian flags and chanted “Free Free Palestine” and “Long live Palestine! Occupy Wall Street.”

Nor was this sort of thing confined to New York. At Occupy Oakland, anti-Zionist commentators were fixated on the allegation that the tear gas used by the police to break up their encampment was manufactured by the same American company that makes tear gas for the Israel Defense Forces. The left-wing Jewish poet Amirah Mizrahi wrote, “i was palestine in oakland,” and Max Blumenthal, an anti-Zionist blogger, insisted that, far from being a distraction from the essential economic concerns of the Occupy protests, the Arab-Israel issue had now become more difficult to avoid, as the protesters were being confronted with the very same weapons used against Palestinian Arabs.

No, it's not confined to New York at all.

And it is in fact a movement, and the radical extremists are working to leverage Occupy into a long-term program against the establishment. President Obama and Leader Nancy Pelosi endorsed Occupy. Today's Democrat Party is infiltrated with neo-communists who wouldn't flinch at the sight of Israel going up in flames  amid a Middle East holocaust to rival the interwar years. This is the program of the radical left.

Neumann goes on with further examples, citing the organizing magizine Adbusters, which is known for its virulent anti-Semitism:

And are the two—anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism—so easily divided? To begin with, the protests were originally a response to a call issued by the virulently anti-Zionist magazine Adbusters, a publication most noted for a short 2004 article entitled, “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?” Speculating that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was carried out to serve the interests of Israel, the essay explored the close affinity of Jewish neoconservatives for the Jewish state and emphasized the Jewish identity of several prominent neoconservatives within and without the Bush administration. In so doing, was Adbusters being anti-Zionist or was it being anti-Semitic?

What about the protester at Occupy LA who said, “I think that the Zionist Jews who are running these big banks and our federal reserve, which is not run by the federal government, I think they need to be run out of this country”? Was she being anti-Zionist or anti-Semitic? Or the Kaffiyeh Day participant at Occupy Wall Street who shouted ‘‘Occupy Yahudi!’’ and ‘‘Yahudi are kafirs!’’ (‘‘Occupy Jews!’’ and ‘‘Jews are infidels!’’) and whom the group refused to silence? Was he being anti-Zionist or anti-Semitic? Or a protester at Occupy Oakland who, reacting to a speech from a Palestinian Arab youth crying “down with Israel,” turned to his fellow attendee and commented: “F—ing Jews.” How about the aforementioned protester from Georgia at Occupy Wall Street who explained that “the reason the Arabs hate us” is because of “the Jews”? Or the founder of Occupy D.C., Kevin Zeese, who has a history of lamenting the power of the “Israel lobby” in the United States?

These do not begin to exhaust the extent or foulness of the sentiments toward Jews and Israel that emanated from the Occupy protests—sentiments so extreme as to compel even Michael Lerner, editor of the left-wing magazine Tikkun, to share his ‘‘distress at the hatred toward Israel and/or toward Jews’’ on display in Oakland.

Continue reading.

Neumann explains how Jewish social justice activists became central organizers in Zuccotti Park --- and thus gave cover to those attacking the movement for its rampant anti-Semitism.

PREVIOUSLY: "Manifesto: Occupy for the Revolution."

Also, "Continuing Lies by Cowardly Hate-Blogger W. James Casper in Left's Demonic Workplace Intimidation Campaign," and "Deranged Stalker Walter James Casper III Fires Up the Criminal Hate-Blogging for the Holidays."

NewsBusted: 'The Chuck E. Cheese pizza chain has been fined for violating federal child labor laws'

Via Theo Spark:

Obama Post-Recession Recovery Badly Lags the Reagan Recovery After the Severe 1981-82 Recession

At Investor's Business Daily, "Five Myths About President Obama Economic Recovery":

Over the past several months, President Obama has spent much time pleading for patience on the sluggish economy and ongoing high unemployment, arguing that the economic hole was so deep and the crisis so monumental that a slow recovery — now in its 30th month — was inevitable.

But in making his case, Obama appears to be perpetuating several myths about the recession he inherited and the slow recovery over which he's presided. Among them....

2) The country had to dig out of a historically deep hole. Obama often explains the length of the recovery by noting how deep the recession had been.

But while the so-called Great Recession lasted 18 months and sent unemployment to 10.1%, the 1981-82 recession was comparable in length and severity. That one lasted 16 months, and pushed unemployment even higher, to 10.8%.

The difference is that today unemployment is still at an historically high 8.6%, and it's only that low because the labor force has declined. Real GDP is a mere 0.04% above its pre-recession peak. At the comparable point in the Reagan recovery, unemployment had plunged to 7.3%, while the economy had grown 12% above its pre-recession peak, and was still climbing fast.

RTWT at the link.

PHOTO CREDIT: The White House, "President Barack Obama talks with a patron at Reid's House Restaurant in Reidsville, N.C., during a lunch stop on the American Jobs Act bus tour, Oct. 18, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza).

Niccolo Caldararo, Lecturer in Anthropology, San Francisco State, Hails North Korea as 'Ripe for Capitalism'

Well, I was waiting to see something like this. The U.S. leftists are falling in behind the Communist Party of Canada in support of the Kim regime in totalitarian North Korea --- and publishing their pro-communist agitprop at the anti-Semitic hate blog Daily Kos. See NewsBusters, "Daily Kos Comes to Defense of North Korea; No Worse Than South Korea, USA."

Following the link takes us to the diary at Daily Kos, "North Korea & Hysteria, Madness." I love this passage:

We have to realize that much of what is written about North Korea is for popular digestion regarding potential invasion. Let's face it, North Korea is ripe for capitalism, there are millions of potential workers who will work for near nothing. The hope is that the regime will crumble like the Soviet Union and give way to massive investment opportunities.

Right.

Millions of potential skeletons, but check the post. I can see where Professor Caldararo is coming from. He cites some political science literature on Cold War international politics, and he places North Korea in the framework of a besieged state surrounded by hostile powers. This is something of a realist take, but realism has been perverted by the academic left to demonize Israel as a detriment to U.S. security interests. This Caldararo piece is another application of such abstract analysis in furtherance of the far-left agenda. In particular, this piece is noteworthy for its extreme moral equivalence between North and South Korea, and thus their respective patron systems, communism and capitalism. But while Caldararo is quick to point out the authoritarian politics of the South Korean state, he omits that today Seoul is a democratic regime and perhaps the most successful developing economy in the world today. He also leaves out the enormous human rights abuses and North Korea's threats to international security and regional order, such as state-sponsored terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Inconvenient facts, I guess.

In any case, see Doug Bandow at American Spectator, "Otherworldly Defense of North Korea":

There is much to complain about South Korea under military rule. But, in case the professor didn't notice, the South Koreans escaped repression and achieved freedom. It turns out that nasty dictator Park Chung-hee (and he was nasty!) followed economic policies which allowed his people to avoid famine and escape poverty. And dictator Chun Doo-hwan responded to mass protests by holding an election. Silly fellow. He was later convicted and originally sentenced to death for his crimes. His successor, a former general and ally named Roh Tae-woo, allowed another election in which former dissident Kim Young-sam was elected. Roh also later was convicted and sentenced to prison.

These guys were amateurs compared to the Kims.

See what I mean?

But this is the progressive left for you. "No enemies on the left," and all that. It's the evil U.S. imperial system that's the real problem, to hear it from these idiots. And of course, the hate trolls of the progressive fever swamps won't be inundating the administration at San Francisco State with demands that this guy be fired. No, that's reserved especially for people who dare to indicate a believe in God and moral decency.

It's pretty messed up. But this is just one more example of the upside-down world we live in where good and decency are deemed as evil and real evil is championed as the saving grace of humanity.

The Number of Squatters Nationwide is Rising

These are just people without homes. Not to be confused with the Obama-endorsed Occupy freaks expropriating property for the revolution.

At Los Angeles Times, "Squatters say foreclosed homes beat homeless shelters":

Slips of paper are pasted to the broken door of the corner row house, violations for the garbage piled near the front steps. The stench of trash wafts up the dark interior stairway, where an ashtray filled with cigarette butts sits like an abandoned potted plant on the second-floor landing.

Nobody lives here, at least not officially.

But as you climb the narrow stairs to the top floor, a door opens into an airy apartment that is home to Tasha Glasgow, who is part of a largely invisible population of squatters occupying vacant homes across America. Given their clandestine lives, it's impossible to say how many people are squatting in this country, but with more than 1.3 million homes in foreclosure and hundreds of thousands of people homeless, advocates say it's safe to assume the number is growing.

"You have these abandoned dwellings that are sitting there vacant, sometimes for many months," said Patrick Markee of the Coalition for the Homeless in New York, where shelters are reporting record numbers of residents. "It's not an issue of whether squatting is right or wrong. The fact is that people are desperate for places to live, and they're going to do what they need to do."

RTWT.

Thank the Obama-Dems for the Depression-like conditions in this country. Squatting is illegal, but the administration doesn't give a Flying V one way or the other. For example, "Taxpayers Will Pay for President’s Hawaiian Vacation Whether He Goes or Not."

Harsh: Wall Street Journal Slams GOP's 'Circular Firing Squad' on Payroll Tax Debacle

It's a devastating indictment, and depressing if you're a conservative.

See: "The GOP's Payroll Tax Fiasco."

And the story's trending at Memeorandum. No doubt progressives are eating this up, since they live for the deception.

Ann Counter Interview with Brian Lilley of Sun TV

At BCF, "Brian Lilley Interviews Ann Coulter":

Claire Potter, Radical Lesbian History Professor at Wesleyan, Can't Comprehend Shot of 'Veritas' Between the Eyes

This lady broadcasts her proud lesbianism, which is used to explain how she failed to "comprehend" this epic one-liner from Althouse's comments:

The commenter who wins the prize (trigger warning for real this time!!!) also lets you know — in case the others on Althouse allow you to forget — why we still need feminism. Here goes: “There is the question of whether one would want someone like Claire Potter for a friend, unless of course there’s a prospect of sex as a reward for mutely enduring the unendurable. The solution is to wait for the full and complete BJ then give her the unvarnished veritas right between the eyes.” It took me a minute to comprehend this, me being a gold star lesbian and all, but this commenter is fantasizing out loud about taking a money shot in my face. Nice, Althouse. Nice. Love your friends.

Now, what's interesting is the post is published at the "Tenured Radical" blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education. I didn't know they had a "Tenured Radical" blog! And boy, they don't kid around with their radicalism! Here's the biographical info for Professor Potter:

I am Claire B. Potter, Professor of History and American Studies at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. My specialties are feminism, political history and cultural criticism.

Translation: "My specialties are racism, sexism, post-colonial gender studies, Marxism, and cultural relativism." It's a wonder if any Wesleyan students actually learn American history. (And a quick Google search confirms it.)

Althouse has the response, and she's not pleased with this "sister": "'But why would anyone — much less a law professor — leave a comment like that up on her blog...'"

And here's Althouse's original post with the offending comment, which she has now removed: "'Feminist blogging is definitely not for wimps, which is why the vast majority of us do it pseudonymously'."

And note something: Althouse hadn't read the ostensibly offending comment, but she removed it when she found that Professor Potter thought it offensively sexist. And that's because Althouse is a good and decent woman. Progressives, on the other hand, are not decent. These sick f-king racists routinely attack conservatives with the most vile bigotry, and they twist contortions to deny the patently obvious racism spouted in their own comments. They sponsor racism, hatred, workplace harassment and intimidation, and make personal threats against those whom they despise. Yeah, progressives suck like that, and the news is spreading.

Three Cheers for PolitiFact!

I don't normally pay attention to the fact-checking websites, but if PolitiFact managed to piss off half the progressive job-killing entitlement-state blogosphere, it must be doing something right.

See: "Lie of the Year 2011: ‘Republicans voted to end Medicare’" (at Memeorandum).

PolitiFact debunked the Medicare charge in nine separate fact-checks rated False or Pants on Fire, most often in attacks leveled against Republican House members.

Now, PolitiFact has chosen the Democrats’ claim as the 2011 Lie of the Year....

With a few small tweaks to their attack lines, Democrats could have been factually correct, said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. "I actually think there is no need to cut out the qualifiers and exaggerate," he said.

At times, Democrats and liberal groups were careful to characterize the Republican plan more accurately. Another claim in the ad from the Agenda Project said the plan would "privatize" Medicare, which received a Mostly True rating from PolitiFact. President Barack Obama was also more precise with his words, saying the Medicare proposal "would voucherize the program and you potentially have senior citizens paying $6,000 more."

But more often, Democrats and liberals overreached:

• They ignored the fact that the Ryan plan would not affect people currently in Medicare -- or even the people 55 to 65 who would join the program in the next 10 years.

• They used harsh terms such as "end" and "kill" when the program would still exist, although in a privatized system.

• They used pictures and video of elderly people who clearly were too old to be affected by the Ryan plan. The DCCC video that aired four days after the vote featured an elderly man who had to take a job as a stripper to pay his medical bills.

"Both parties use entitlements as political weapons," Ryan said in an interview with PolitiFact. "Republicans do it to Democrats; Democrats do it to Republicans. So I knew that this would be a political weapon that the other side would use against us."

Liberal bloggers and columnists contend it's accurate to say Republicans voted to end Medicare. Left-leaning websites such as Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, and The New Republic said PolitiFact's analysis was wrong, as did New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

Well, that's a who's who of the America-hating market-killing left.

And sooner than you can scream, LIAR!, Paul Krugman is off the blocks to smear PolitiFact as "useless and irrelevant."

And Krugman links to one of the left's premiere dishonest spin masters and lie merchants, Steve "Buttfreak" Benen, "PolitiFact ought to be ashamed of itself."

Right.

That's just the kind of faux outrage we can expect from the morally bankrupt losers of the left, now screaming like stuck pigs at being called out for their epic dishonesty and fear-mongering.

Three cheers for PolitiFact.

Tyranny and Indifference

A great piece, as usual, from Bret Stephens, at Wall Street Journal (and Google):

The power of indifference is something I first understood from Havel himself after interviewing him, over a beer, in the gardens of Prague's Czernin Palace. The occasion was a June 2007 conference of international dissidents that he co-chaired with Israel's Natan Sharansky. I asked him about his views on the war in Iraq. He had once supported it, but now he was more tentative. The rationale, he said, had not been "well-articulated." The timing of the invasion was "questionable." As in the 1960s, the U.S. risked becoming an emblem of William Fulbright's "arrogance of power."

Then Havel stopped himself and, as he seemed wont to do, put the train of his thought in reverse. "The world," he concluded, "could not be indifferent forever to a murderer like Saddam Hussein."

Here was the nub of the matter when it came to the invasion of Iraq. Never mind the faulty human or technical intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction: The real WMD, better known as Saddam Hussein, was always hiding in plain sight. Over the course of 25 years he and his henchmen gassed, assassinated, machine-gunned and otherwise murdered somewhere between one million and two million people. That's a big number, the equivalent of a dozen or so Hiroshimas.

Yet because most of the victims were Kurds, Shiites, marsh Arabs, Iranians and Kuwaitis, the question was why it should matter to the West—anymore than, say, the butcheries in the Congo matter. Opponents of the war argued that it should not: that there was no emergency; that no supreme national interest was at stake; that humanitarian interventions needed to be carried out consistently or not at all. Failing those tests, they concluded, guaranteed that the war was folly from the start.

If Havel's now-celebrated career means anything, however, it is to beware that facile conclusion. In his great 1978 essay, "The Power of the Powerless," written just as his career as a dissident had begun in earnest with his signing of the Charter 77 manifesto, he warned against "the attractions of mass indifference" and the "general unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity." Havel feared that one's indifference to the question of the freedom of others would ultimately result in a well-fed indifference to the question of one's own freedom.

"A big danger of our world today is obsession," he told the conference the day of our interview. "An even bigger danger is indifference."

All this was Havel's way of saying that political extremism—whether of the Leonid Brezhnev, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden variety—would flourish if free people did not actively resist the temptation to acquiesce to it in the name of "peace," or some other go-along-to-get-along slogan.

And remember, while progressives praise folks like Havel, he's right up there with Christopher Hitchens when it comes to standing down progressive terror enablers.

'You are a pyromaniac in a field of straw men...'

George Will decimates Robert Reich, with humor no less, via Big Journalism:

Suspect Burned 73-Year-Old Doris Gillespie Over Debt

This is literally grisly.

At Los Angeles Times, "New York man says he set woman on fire over debt":

NEW YORK — As Deloris Gillespie went up the elevator to her fifth-floor Brooklyn apartment, her killer was waiting.

Surveillance video from inside the small elevator shows that he looked something like an exterminator, with a canister sprayer, white gloves and a dust mask perched atop his head like a pair of sunglasses. The sprayer was full of flammable liquid.

When the elevator opened Saturday afternoon, the man sprayed the 73-year-old woman, who crouched to the floor to try to protect herself, New York Police Department spokesman Paul Browne said. The attacker sprayed Gillespie in the face and continued to spray her "sort of methodically" over her head and parts of her body as her bags of groceries draped off her arms, Browne said.

Then, Browne said, the attacker pulled out a barbecue-style lighter and ignited a rag in a bottle. He waited a few seconds, then backed out of the elevator and tossed in the flaming bottle.

Also at London's Daily Mail, "Pictured: Woman, 73, who was doused in gasoline and burned to death in elevator 'over handyman's $2,000 debt'."

The Basis of Left and Right, Part 4

The series continues at Power Line, "THE BASIS OF LEFT AND RIGHT, PART 4: MORAL REASONING (OR KANT VS. ARISTOTLE AGAIN)":

Here we come close to affirming the practical notion that the left and right need each other as a counterweight or completing factor. But on closer look their positions are asymmetrical: the postulates of liberalism will always make it the initiating force in political life, while conservatism will always be its cautionary handmaiden. While liberals are congenitally discontent with the pace and extent of reform, they always have a general sense of what should come next, best expressed in Samuel Gompers’ famous one-word policy: “More.” More reform, more legislation, more equality. Conservatives, by contrast, do not have a clear or uniform outline of the good society; instead, conservatives have serious divisions among themselves about what the good society should be. It is not simply a matter of opposing “less” to the liberals’ “more.” Conservatives have deep theoretical differences over the relationship of liberty and virtue, and while liberalism has a similar theoretical argument (between “communitarians” and individualists), it is not as pronounced and politically relevant as the split on the right. I’ll add here that the theoretical and practical tensions within conservatism are a source of the movement’s strength; conservatism’s infighting leads to a certain amount of self-renewal that is largely missing in liberalism.

Well, there's certainly some self-renewal in the left's practical politics in the post-Cold War age. Communism as a goal is pushed more aggressively than ever, among people who had normally been the institutional foundation of what previously was the mainstream liberalism of John F. Kennedy and others. That is, to the extent that the left is seeking a revival of the animating revolutionary ideologies of the early twentieth century, there appears certainly a renewal. Indeed, it's the resurrection of the most murderous ideological developments in the history of mankind. And now there's the added malevolence of the left's accommodation to fascism with its support for millenarian Islamist fanaticism and the shift of historic anti-Semitism from the right to the left of the spectrum in the manifestation of the "new anti-Semitism." These are developments that Hayward might want to address in his continuing iterations of the series.

My previous entries in the series are here.