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	<title>Samson Blinded &#187; leftism</title>
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	<description>A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict</description>
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		<title>Anarchy is not anti-Israeli</title>
		<link>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/anarchy-is-not-anti-israeli.htm</link>
		<comments>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/anarchy-is-not-anti-israeli.htm#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 29 Nov 2011 07:20:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Obadiah Shoher</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[leftism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://samsonblinded.org/blog/?p=3077</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[	Anarchism is unrelated to pacifism. Anarchy is a means while pacifism a goal. Democracy, likewise, works just as well in pacifist Switzerland as it did in militant Ancient Rome.
 	Anarchy can be highly repressive, as it is in communes, and arguably in Rousseau’s Utopia. The only example of a large-scale anarchist movement, Nestor Makhno’s, was [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>	Anarchism is unrelated to pacifism. Anarchy is a means while pacifism a goal. Democracy, likewise, works just as well in pacifist Switzerland as it did in militant Ancient Rome.</p>
<p> 	Anarchy can be highly repressive, as it is in communes, and arguably in Rousseau’s Utopia. The only example of a large-scale anarchist movement, Nestor Makhno’s, was militant, with little concern for liberal human rights.</p>
<p>	Even the most liberal anarchic society would have to fight initially against government resistance.</p>
<p>	Anarchist communities might infringe on the private ownership of the land they take. Near-anarchic wild-west towns were founded on land expropriated from the exterminated peoples. In light of anarchist theory, there is nothing wrong with Jewish pioneers taking the land from the Arab inhabitants. Anarchy is an intra-societal policy. It only works among the consenting people and does not preclude repression of opponents. </p>
<p>	The litmus test of any action&#8217;s compliance with anarchism is whether it could be carried out absent of government. On many occasions, tribes with no governmental structure have cleared land for themselves. Left to themselves and armed reasonably, Jewish pioneers would take over the West Bank just like stateless Jews did in 1947. </p>
<p>	Indeed, an argument can be constructed that Palestinian Arabs rely on governmental support to resist the Jews. Their terrorism was made possible by the support of several Arab governments, and since the Oslo accords –has been abetted by the EU&#8217;s quasi-governmental groups. Unlike Jews before 1948, Palestinian Arabs rely almost exclusively on governmental funding rather than private money, which fact condemns their struggle as anarchic enterprise.</p>
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		<title>Anti-Israeli stance is not anti-Semitism &#8211; but worse</title>
		<link>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/anti-israeli-stance-is-not-anti-semitism-but-worse.htm</link>
		<comments>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/anti-israeli-stance-is-not-anti-semitism-but-worse.htm#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 26 Jul 2011 07:31:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Obadiah Shoher</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[leftism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://samsonblinded.com/blog/anti-israeli-stance-is-not-anti-semitism-but-worse.htm</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[	The equation of anti-Israeli stance with anti-Semitism runs into a very similar attitude toward the apartheid South Africa and the US involvement in Vietnam. Since anti-Semitism did not motivate those two areas of liberal activism, perhaps the hatred of Israel is also not Jew-hatred. This conjecture is buttressed by the fact that many leftists, vile [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>	The equation of anti-Israeli stance with anti-Semitism runs into a very similar attitude toward the apartheid South Africa and the US involvement in Vietnam. Since anti-Semitism did not motivate those two areas of liberal activism, perhaps the hatred of Israel is also not Jew-hatred. This conjecture is buttressed by the fact that many leftists, vile and hateful as they are toward our country, are not anti-Semites; they count a significant number of Jewish do-gooders among them.</p>
<p>	The liberal opposition to Israel, South Africa, and Vietnam is unrelated to colonialism because it implicitly accepted Sino-Soviet colonialism in Vietnam. Though the Soviets were wary of direct involvement in Asia, their contacts with the Vietnamese date to at least 1924, when Ho Chi Minh posed with Trotsky for a photo. Similarly, Vietnamese colonialism in Laos did not concern the leftists. To speak of European colonialism in South Africa was likewise odd after the Boers had lived there for three centuries, longer than some African tribes.</p>
<p>	Nor was the liberal struggle related to humanistic concerns.  The communist regime in Vietnam and the corrupt black government in South Africa are more oppressive than the US-sponsored and Boer governments, respectively. while the leftists screamed against Western policies in Vietnam, much bigger atrocities were going on elsewhere unnoticed, whether in Africa or the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>	The right to national self-determination was hardly an issue: neither Jews nor Basques ever enjoyed leftist support, and the Boers, a centuries-old nation, were entitled to a state of their own without the black natives.</p>
<p>	We can get a clue from the fact that leftists verbally attack those who heed their assaults, but not the atrocious communist or Muslim states who ignore their accusations. So at least in part, leftist movements against the Vietnam war, apartheid, and Israel serve as saber-rattling to show and reinforce the left’s power.</p>
<p>	Also, the “anti” movements are about money. That should not come as a surprise to those who see the massive collections for Darfur resulting in the delivery of no more than a few sacks of rice after administrative and advertising expenses have been paid. Look at the considerable protests against Iraqi invasion versus the near-silence about Afghanistan, where per-capita losses among the locals are much higher. Protest fashion, like any fashion, chooses arbitrary objects; Iraq rather than Afghanistan in this case. But there is also the issue of well-paying special interests: the USSR pumped money into the anti-Vietnam war movement, Muslim regimes sponsor anti-Iraqi war campaigns, and there are plenty of Muslim entities and rich Jew-haters to finance anti-Israeli activities.</p>
<p>	Leftist protest movements are best understood as anti-systemic endeavors. Their only aim is subverting the established system, and they seek weak spots to pound on. The causes advocated are not goals in themselves: a US evacuation from Iraq would mean more bloodshed and the absence of a separation barrier would increase both terrorist losses among Jews and retaliatory losses among the Arabs. The protests are means to a single end: subverting traditional governments and the rule of law.<br />
	Marx’s prediction that socialism would take over the capitalist system relatively peacefully has been borne out. Just like in Ancient Rome, democracy and economic might have combined to create a welfare state, and to make people economically—and therefore politically—dependent on the state, resulting in the fall of a society which has grown utterly irresponsible and inefficient. Socialism took over Europe, and has now taken over the United States. Corporations support the arrangement as they also get their cut in the form of government contracts and bailouts. This need not be the end of time: historically, welfare state have always failed, and left the field for new, more efficient states which rose up from the shambles. Smaller cycles also exist: Britain is less socialist today that in the late 1940s, though the overall trend is toward increasing welfare.</p>
<p>	Welfare states usually fall to hordes of barbarians, and the current cycle is no exception: Muslims now swarm Western cities.</p>
<p>	And leftists are their fifth column.</p>
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		<title>The State of Irresponsibility</title>
		<link>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/the-state-of-irresponsibility.htm</link>
		<comments>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/the-state-of-irresponsibility.htm#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 24 Jun 2011 07:58:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Obadiah Shoher</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[leftism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://samsonblinded.com/blog/the-state-of-irresponsibility.htm</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[	Affluent societies are inherently irresponsible. They duck even the most challenging issues rather than confronting them. People with many possessions have many attachments, and cling to them for as long as they can while closing their eyes to real dangers. The behavior seems irrational: why not deal with the problem, remove the threat, and return [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>	Affluent societies are inherently irresponsible. They duck even the most challenging issues rather than confronting them. People with many possessions have many attachments, and cling to them for as long as they can while closing their eyes to real dangers. The behavior seems irrational: why not deal with the problem, remove the threat, and return to enjoying one’s possessions? The answer is, cowardice is contagious. Once people are afraid of something, they will be afraid of everything. They hysterically embrace worthless solutions if only the solutions will make them safe in the short run. Americans thus eagerly sent their army to remote Afghanistan to fight an imaginary threat rather than to Mexico to stop illegal immigration and drug trafficking.</p>
<p>	Enter the proliferation of proxy wars. American society clung to its affluence and the Soviet gerontocracy clung to its power. Too cowardly for an open war, the two societies clashed on the periphery. The United States fought in Vietnam for a single reason, to stop Soviet expansion. An honest and manly way of deciding such a conflict would be to attack the Soviet Union. Instead, the Americans killed millions of Vietnamese who had little to do with Soviet imperial ambitions. The USSR responded in kind by arming the Arab states against their American client, Israel.</p>
<p>	Today, Syria arms Hamas and achieves its aim of fighting Israel while remaining safe. Why does not Israel retaliate against Iran, the Hezbollah state of Lebanon, and Syria for the terrorist attacks? Fifty years ago, Israel routinely retaliated against Egypt for fellaheen attacks from Gaza. Nothing has changed legally or geopolitically: the Jews are in the same state of ceasefire with Lebanon as we have been with Egypt. The real change came from affluence; having matured, the society grew cowardly.</p>
<p>	The trend toward irresponsibility is all-encompassing. Take bankruptcy, a legal way to steal and defraud. Or corporate limited liability: any number of people can form a company, damage others through defaulted loans or factory pollution, and close down the company with no harm to themselves. </p>
<p>	Governments are happy with this irresponsibility. Democratic politicians want their short terms of office to be marked by welfare. They have no problem with the unfortunate fact that welfare now often comes at the cost of delaying solutions, making them much more painful later. What happens later is not the incumbent politicians’ problem. </p>
<p>	Having irresponsible subjects is still better. They shirk personal responsibility and pass all their responsibilities onto the government. Just think of it: the state took upon itself such a basic responsibility as that of an individual to care for his family. A wife knows that she depends for her income not on her husband but on the welfare office. Retirees depend for their livelihood on social security rather than on their children. In only a century, states totally changed the societal framework: they cut family ties and short-circuited what used to be family connections with government institutions. Attachment is a matter of dependence; people used to depend on family members, but now they depend on politicians and bureaucrats.</p>
<p>	Who can imagine such a state will persist?</p>
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		<title>From welfare to political defeat</title>
		<link>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/from-welfare-to-political-defeat.htm</link>
		<comments>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/from-welfare-to-political-defeat.htm#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 28 Dec 2010 14:10:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Obadiah Shoher</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[leftism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://samsonblinded.com/blog/from-welfare-to-political-defeat.htm</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[        Providing education for the children of illegal immigrants is akin to allowing a bank robber to bequeath stolen money to his children because they did not participate in his robberies. Children of immigrants might not be criminals like their parents, but neither should they benefit from their [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>        Providing education for the children of illegal immigrants is akin to allowing a bank robber to bequeath stolen money to his children because they did not participate in his robberies. Children of immigrants might not be criminals like their parents, but neither should they benefit from their parents’ crime.</p>
<p>	Immigrants come here because generations of law-abiding taxpayers have built public facilities, from roads to universities to welfare funds. They built them for their children and compatriots, not for Kenyans. The problem arose strictly because of government intervention in such matters as welfare and minimum wage: In a fully privatized, free society poor immigrants wouldn&#8217;t be able to survive for a week if housing and public appearance standards were enforced. </p>
<p></p>
<p>	Citizenship is a profitable franchise which must be sold by the government. Existing citizens who wish to emigrate must be able to sell their citizenship. Illegals immigrants commit theft by claiming residence or citizenship benefits which do not belong to them. Governments do not like to set up a market for citizenship because it would remove arbitrariness from the immigration process. Citizenship and residence are among the most important, defining rights in nation-states, and ruling elites are not about ceding them to market forces.</p>
<p>	The government not only refuses to charge immigrants the high cost of a citizenship franchise, but also forces local entrepreneurs to pay them minimum wage. In case of illegal immigrants, minimum wage is a tax on law-abiding citizens for the benefit of criminals. Astonishingly, many people support minimum wage laws. They do not realize that it is the largest tax they pay, and dishonest at that: rather than ask clearly whether efficient workers are willing to massively subsidize their inefficient peers, governments opt for hidden redistribution through overpriced consumption. Sovereign governments have a right to impose any tax on their subjects, but they do not have a right to deceive them.</p>
<p>	Minimum wage laws and social welfare produce massive political repercussions. Though latent unemployment runs at double-digit percent, the economy needs foreign workers. Some of them come illegally, some stay illegally, many become permanent residents and eventually change the society’s face—literally. Government subsidizes local spongers while consumers subsidize foreigners who are allowed to work here at artificially high wages. Society thus loses on both ends. If the minimum wage paid to local workers is a huge and deceitful redistribution, minimum wage requirement for foreign workers tests the limits of common sense. What possible ethical reason is there for a society to pay foreign labor migrants more than the least they would accept? Billions of people live in countries with $30-a-month wages; why should we pay laborers here fifty times more? They would accept $200 per month with gratitude if employers provided them with food and minimal housing. They have no meaningful medical facilities in their countries; why give them health insurance in our country? They are neither born here nor transported here forcibly. We set the terms, and out of billions of people out there a few hundred thousand will always be ready to accept them. Working in our country is a huge economic privilege for them, and there is no reason to effectively tax local consumers for their benefit. On the contrary, it is a government’s obligation to seek the best terms for its citizens rather than for anyone else. The government must work to bring migrant laborers here on the best possible terms, for the lowest possible pay.</p>
<p>	A society without long-term welfare benefits would require far fewer foreign workers. The government has already brought here a hundred thousand able-bodied Ethiopians and closed its eyes to the infiltration of another twenty to forty thousands working-age Africans. They are so unskilled that in economic terms they stand below Thai workers. Absent the government benefits which allow them to stay perpetually unemployed, the Africans would take the lowly agricultural jobs. Somewhat more skilled construction jobs should go to the unemployed Jews of the development towns, who likewise must lose the welfare sustenance. It is a crime in Judaism to rely on community support if one can feed oneself.</p>
<p>	The idea of society subsidizing immigrants is bizarre. Citizenship is a valuable franchise, and immigrants must pay for the right to enter the country. It can be either a fixed fee or higher taxation, but some payment must be there because the immigrants receive important goods from the society: safety, infrastructure, social services, and the ability to earn higher wages than in their home countries. Citizens enjoy those facilities by the virtue of inheritance: they were paid for with their parents’ taxes. Immigrants leech off the previous generations’ taxes. Even the United States generally bars immigrants who are likely to become a burden on the society within the first four years. Much less Israel should admit the immigrants who drain our resources from the day one. </p>
<p>	Nation states turned themselves into their societies’ reason for existence. Instead of states servicing their societies, societies serve national ideology. States thus resist inequality of their residents: for the state, they are all equal because they are equally obliged to the state, they are similar pawns regardless of their origin. No. Immigrants must prove themselves feasible to existing citizens who own the country. No benefits should be provided to immigrants, but in line with the Torah, “tribute and servitude” must be charged them.</p>
<p>	Far from implicitly subsidizing foreign workers, the government must charge for the privilege of working here. All migrant visas must be auctioned off.</p>
<p>	Not a single work visa must be issued to our Palestinian enemies. It is a political objective of the utmost importance to force their emigration from Judea and Samaria. Some 400 to 600 thousand Palestinians work in Israel. Practically the entire West Bank Arab population relies on Israel for income in some way. When Israel refused jobs to Gazans, that pitiful territory slipped into the Bronze Age within two years. Not a single Palestinian worker must be allowed here. Hiring them is high treason, as it allows them to stay in Judea and Samaria. lacking a job here, their working-age population would start leaving in droves and depopulate the area within a generation or two.</p>
<p>	Welfare economics leads to defeatist politics.</p>
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		<title>Not so liberal liberals</title>
		<link>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/not-so-liberal-liberals.htm</link>
		<comments>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/not-so-liberal-liberals.htm#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 14 Sep 2010 06:51:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Obadiah Shoher</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[leftism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://samsonblinded.org/blog/?p=3905</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[	America’s past takes the credibility out of its current liberal attitudes. Nations do change, and modern Swedes, for example, are nothing like their lance-toting ancestors of four centuries ago. But not even two centuries have passed since the Trail of Tears, and Oklahoma land grabs and re-settlements are only 140 years behind us. The expulsion [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>	America’s past takes the credibility out of its current liberal attitudes. Nations do change, and modern Swedes, for example, are nothing like their lance-toting ancestors of four centuries ago. But not even two centuries have passed since the Trail of Tears, and Oklahoma land grabs and re-settlements are only 140 years behind us. The expulsion of Mexicans from California during the Great Depression and the instigation of a civil war in Afghanistan in the 1980s leave no doubt that distaste for aliens is endemic to Americans, just as in all peoples, and only glossed over by political correctness. Thus the forced assimilation and Christianization of Native Indians. It was only in 1993 that the Native American Free Exercise of Religion Act legalized their religious practices.</p>
<p>	Americans have not become tolerant toward aliens. They objected to even a temporary influx of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, and imagine what their reaction would be to an influx of gypsies today. Rather, blacks and Mexicans have become Americanized, and thus provoke less resentment.</p>
<p>	It is a fundamental human right to be left alone. There is no point in arguing whether national differences are cultural or genetic. Suffice that all people view others as different. The lines between “we” and “they” are certainly arbitrary and rarely justified, but they are lines nonetheless. People are entitled to have opinions, even mistaken opinions. But make no mistake: the fact that aliens strive to enter America suggests their admiration for American ways and their desire to join the ranks of the American people. The aliens want to transform themselves into Americans, and thus recognize the cultural difference between America and their own communities. The divide is even stronger in Israel, where Jews and Arabs sensibly detest each other, and Jews and Ethiopians have little in common apart from both being two-legged.</p>
<p>	Governments tend to admit aliens for a profound ideological reason. In nation-states, there are no groups or nationalities, just the state-forming nation. All citizens of France, regardless of their origin, are of the French nation. By allowing immigration, nation-states assert their definition of nationality as congruent with citizenship. For them, closing immigration would be tantamount to the admission that citizenship does not confer nationality, and that implies a very dangerous conclusion: their existing citizens belong to different national groups, and are not alike. Once the homogeneity of voters is thus destroyed, democracy is falls apart; how can a majority decide matters for qualitatively different minorities? Obviously, the minorities will be always discriminated against. On other hand, why should the majority give way to insignificant minorities with contrarian interests? In culturally heterogenous societies, democracy becomes inoperative. A similar case can be made for economically heterogenous societies, but in free-market economies wealth is fluid, and a person of modest means can meaningfully hope to become rich. Cultural differences are less fluid because the state-imposed equality of all citizens removes incentives to adopt the majority’s culture.</p>
<p>	The free market solves the problem of immigration. In a free society, employers would be free to refuse employment on whatever grounds, including ethnic or cultural. Jewish consumers would be able to boycott Arab suppliers, schools—all of them private—could shut their doors to underperforming aliens, and private communities would be free not to rent housing units to them. Immigrants wouldn’t be able to enjoy welfare that neither they northeir ancestors had funded. Faced with high costs of living and enforced community standards regarding housing, public appearance and behavior, and education, immigrants just wouldn’t be able to survive. The situation would be even better if all the infrastructure were private: city buses not subsidized, city roads all toll roads, government services outsourced and payable. Economically and culturally different aliens would stay clear of such a society.</p>
<p>	The US supreme court rejected “separate but equal” based on the technical difficulty of ensuring equal quality of education. In other areas, especially those which do not require public funding, the “separate but equal” idea remains sound.</p>
<p>	Shouldn’t we “love a stranger?” Not at all. No one can love a stranger; that’s why he is called a stranger. The Torah speaks about ger, a de facto convert who has embraced our ways. It is highly questionable whether the requirement to love means supporting him or just not oppressing him, but a more important consideration is whether he can embrace our ways. One immigrant among a sea of locals would surely assimilate. The situation changes when they are many. In such cases, they interact among themselves and resist assimilation. The situation is simpler in the United States, a cultural blank slate of a society. Immigrants are easily Americanized within two or three generations because Americanization is empty: they just shed their old culture without acquiring any new one. The Israeli situation is much more difficult because immigrants must acquire Jewish culture, ethics, religion, and work ethics—a complex mix. It was not for nothing that rabbis said that we banned conversions at the time of King Solomon and will ban them again once messianic development creates a proper Jewish state.</p>
<p>	Sizes matters. A large country like America is a land monopoly, and monopolies cannot arbitrarily reject consumers—citizens, in this case. Small Israel is another matter. She can refuse cultural and religious aliens like the Vatican does without meaningfully infringing on their rights. In a world of competing jurisdictions, every jurisdiction has a right to exclude any group, just as individuals can exclude any guests from their homes. Public land belongs to people like a house to its owners, and they can close their country to newcomers just as a house can be closed to trespassers.</p>
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		<title>Libertarian is not just</title>
		<link>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/libertarian-is-not-just.htm</link>
		<comments>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/libertarian-is-not-just.htm#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 06 Jul 2010 07:44:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Obadiah Shoher</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[leftism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://samsonblinded.com/blog/libertarian-is-not-just.htm</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Libertarianism is a blank-slate society. Everyone is entitled to anything. Looks like a nice freedom until we realize that absence of value is itself a value. The libertarian value is: You shall have no values. Israeli secular schools are honest in the libertarian sense: they don’t indoctrinate children with religion. But in doing so, they [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Libertarianism is a blank-slate society. Everyone is entitled to anything. Looks like a nice freedom until we realize that absence of value is itself a value. The libertarian value is: You shall have no values. Israeli secular schools are honest in the libertarian sense: they don’t indoctrinate children with religion. But in doing so, they automatically indoctrinate them with atheism. Teachers tell them the scientific truth that Judaism in some ways resembles other Middle Eastern religions (and we, as two-legged beings, resemble kangaroos), and refrain from asserting the scientifically unproven thesis that Jewish law was given word-for-word on the Sinai. Even-handed? You bet. But children leave Israeli schools brainwashed into atheism. Even in the cosmos there is no absolute vacuum, and certainly not in human society. Blank-slate libertarianism does not exist. What poses as a blank slate is hardcore nihilism, militant and ignorant of the other side’s arguments.</p>
<p>Libertarian societies lack values. They proclaim freedom to be their value, but freedom is the absence of restraints, while values are restraints. Freedom is the opposite of values.</p>
<p>Libertarian societies abrogate values, and then abandon responsibility. They become quasi-socialist welfare states.</p>
<p>Libertarianism is not an honest intellectual position, but a rationalization of fear. No human being enjoys alien practices. Affluent people want to make the most use of their wealth, and reject values along with other behavioral restrictions. Affluent people fear for their wealth, refrain from violence, and don’t want to repress deviants. Encountering no resistance, deviants take over societies.</p>
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		<title>Leftism against Judaism</title>
		<link>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/leftism-against-judaism.htm</link>
		<comments>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/leftism-against-judaism.htm#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 07:11:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Obadiah Shoher</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[leftism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://samsonblinded.org/blog/?p=957</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The left are inherently inimical to Jewishness. Leftism is about rationalism, changing societies, and questioning dogmas. Judaism is unchangeable, dogmatic, and irrational. What rational person would believe that God spoke from a mountain? What rational man would cling to three-thousand-year-old rules merely because tradition attributes them to God?
Really, our Jewish views are indefensible. It is [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The left are inherently inimical to Jewishness. Leftism is about rationalism, changing societies, and questioning dogmas. Judaism is unchangeable, dogmatic, and irrational. What rational person would believe that God spoke from a mountain? What rational man would cling to three-thousand-year-old rules merely because tradition attributes them to God?</p>
<p>Really, our Jewish views are indefensible. It is so easy to ridicule them on rational grounds. That what faith is about—unquestioning belief.</p>
<p>Jewish faith passes the test of a scientific theory: a hypothesis is offered, and accepted if it is simpler than other hypotheses to that end and doesn’t contradict the observed facts. Jewish monotheism is the most straightforward religious doctrine in existence, and no commandment contradicts the observed facts of human mentality or social processes. An honest leftist would accept Judaism as a policy.</p>
<p>The left does not care about ends; they mostly enjoy the means. Note how the Western leftists changed their sympathies from Nazis to Communists to Vietnamese to Arabs to endangered species. The only thing common among those attachments is the desire to change the existing order of things, and preside over the introduction of a new one. Leftism is about power, and power is best demonstrated by repression, whether of entrepreneurs in leftist Russia or religious Jews in Israel.</p>
<p>Once Judaism is rejected, Zionism becomes racism and robbery. Jews believe themselves different from others due to Judaism; if there is no Judaism, the baseless assertion of one’s difference amounts to racism. If Jews have no right to Hebron, where Abraham purchased a land plot and a burial place, where David had his capital before conquering Jerusalem, then what is the Jewish right to Tel Aviv? The left’s policy of giving up Hebron but holding on to Tel Aviv amounts to this: we’re moral people because we steal only a little; we steal from Arabs in the Tel Aviv area but not Judea. According to Judaism, we’re the rightful owners of this land in its entirety; according to the left, we’re small-time robbers at best.</p>
<p>There is  no way leftism can be reconciled with Jewishness. Which of them should we ban in Israel?</p>
<p></p>
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		<title>Anti-Semites are not anarchists</title>
		<link>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/anti-semites-are-not-anarchists.htm</link>
		<comments>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/anti-semites-are-not-anarchists.htm#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:56:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Obadiah Shoher</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[leftism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://samsonblinded.com/blog/anti-semites-are-not-anarchists.htm</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Classical anarchists wouldn’t have recognized the leftist hooligans who commit outrage in the West Bank as their own. Anarchy is, above all, about responsibility. Those who refuse government-imposed order have to impose order on themselves. Absence of law differs from lawlessness. Anarchism wisely considers others&#8217; interests in order to avoid confrontations.
	In our case, the Jewish [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Classical anarchists wouldn’t have recognized the leftist hooligans who commit outrage in the West Bank as their own. Anarchy is, above all, about responsibility. Those who refuse government-imposed order have to impose order on themselves. Absence of law differs from lawlessness. Anarchism wisely considers others&#8217; interests in order to avoid confrontations.</p>
<p>	In our case, the Jewish settlers of Judea and Samaria act in the best traditions of anarchism: rifles in hand, they take over small patches of land, wall them away, and live there. The Jews meet several paramount anarchic qualifications: they distance themselves from relatively friendly governments (Israel) and staunchly oppose hostile ones (the Palestinians). They rule their communities with a very significant degree of autonomy in religious, educational, and administrative matters. They take over only the  villages and farming land they need for living; they do not make the kind of empty land-grab characteristic of states expanding their jurisdiction. They don’t oppress the native population unnecessarily by something like mass expulsion; on the contrary, Jews take empty lands, and the Arabs who despise their new neighbors can move a few miles into Jordan. Bizarrely, the hooligans who pose as anarchists demand the most un-anarchic thing: Palestinian sovereignty over the empty land—or the land which had been empty before Jews built their villages. Normative anarchists would never participate in inter-state disputes, such as a conflict between Israel and the would-be Palestinian state.</p>
<p>	Settlements practice textbook anarcho-syndicalism: a group of people own their settlement just as they would own a factory. Just as they are entitled to prevent anyone else from working at their factory and enjoying the fruits of their prior investment, so they can exclude anyone from the settlement which they have built. The criteria can be entirely arbitrary: syndicated factory owners can exclude non-unionized or foreign workers, and the settlers are entitled to exclude Arabs.</p>
<p>	There is a right to be offensive: many anarchists insist on their right to dress and behave contrary to traditional norms. Xenophobia is a human right like any other. The settlers don’t have to argue that Arabs constitute a security threat: suffice that the Jews want to maintain cultural homogeneity. Just as anarchic factory owners can refuse employment to communists, just as atheist Jews might not welcome the odd-looking ultra-Orthodox crowd in their kibbutzim, so the settlers can exclude newcomers through any criterion, ethnic or religious included.</p>
<p>	Traditional anarchists were militant and incidentally friendly to Jews. Modern hippie-type anarchists are also militant, but anti-Semitic. The difference is due to the fact that modern anarchists are fake. In the early twentieth century, anarchists believed they could achieve their goal of a societal order without compulsive power. They sought to build a society—and society-building is always violent, as the previous order must be dealt away with. They used violence, but also respected others’ right to violence. Doubtlessly, Nestor Makhno would see dear comrades in Jewish settlers, as he cared about principles rather than natives’ rights. He would have admired the settlers’ principles and wouldn’t care a bit about their cost.</p>
<p>	With the triumph of state socialism, traditional left-wing anarchism became doomed. Leftists, both the working class and the intellectuals, saw the Soviets as the embodiment of their dreams. To insist on anarchism’s ethical superiority to socialism was to betray the leftist ideal. Bank robberies, a historically standard source of anarchist financing, became problematic in the West; in the East, communists suppressed their ideological opponents. Lacking clear goals, financing, or a home base, anarchism all but disappeared.</p>
<p>	It was reinvented in the 1960s as the hippie-peacenik movement. American hippies did not want to describe themselves as communists, though their economic goals were close to it. At the time, communist affiliation was still considered indecent. They hijacked anarchism; even the circled A symbol of anarchy became a symbol of peace.</p>
<p>	Fake anarchists find themselves in the position of lacking any positive goals. Realistically, they cannot hope to create autonomous communities; even the hippie communities fell apart. They cannot dismantle the state or fight civil wars to that end. The traditional anarchist movement took the moral high ground: it believed in the ultimate goodness of human beings and their ability to guide themselves in the absence of state power, and realistically hoped to achieve that society soon. Modern leftist anarchists build nothing, and negate everything. They are bereft of hope, full of hatred. As such, they converge with other haters against the traditional objects of hate, Jews.</p>
<p>	Their anti-Semitism does not stem from opposition to capitalist society. Hardly any people are farther from capitalist enterprise than dirt-poor Jewish settlers, driven by their ideals to live in a dangerous land. In the West, leftist anarchists commonly side with national manufacturers and trade unions to enforce mercantilist policies aimed at protecting their home markets; that’s the worst nineteenth-century capitalism in action. The anarchists hate for the hatred’s sake, but are especially hateful toward traditional values and enemies; both are epitomized as Jewish. The anarchists converge with other hateful, antisocial groups, such as neo-Nazis and Western right-wing radicals.</p>
<p>	It is easy to prove that fake anarchists do not seek justice. They hold anti-separation-barrier demonstrations in Israel, but not anti-terrorism rallies in Gaza. No anarchists fight in Darfur. They protest Israel protecting her borders against illegal African immigrants, but not Egypt doing the same.<br />
Ultra-left inciters in the West Bank are not legitimate members of the anarchic ideological movement, but mere hooligans who have made anti-Semitism a cover for their discontent.</p>
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		<title>Paternalism or racism?</title>
		<link>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/paternalism-or-racism.htm</link>
		<comments>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/paternalism-or-racism.htm#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:11:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Obadiah Shoher</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[leftism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://samsonblinded.org/blog/?p=2994</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[	Speaking to an otherwise very sensible American I was astonished by a viewpoint which appears to be widespread: the government must aid the defaulting homeowners because they did not comprehend the consequences of taking on a mortgage.
	The argument that eight million American families suffer from clinical idiocy, unable to comprehend what the A.P.R. clause in [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>	Speaking to an otherwise very sensible American I was astonished by a viewpoint which appears to be widespread: the government must aid the defaulting homeowners because they did not comprehend the consequences of taking on a mortgage.</p>
<p>	The argument that eight million American families suffer from clinical idiocy, unable to comprehend what the A.P.R. clause in their mortgage contracts means, seems to me rather racist, or at least madly paternalistic. If this is true, then such people endangered their children&#8217;s livelihood by gross negligence and must be stripped of parental rights rather than awarded subsidies. Certainly they cannot be allowed to vote in elections: those who cannot read a straightforward mortgage contract obviously cannot choose between political platforms. That’s besides the fundamental corruption of allowing subsidies-takers to elect subsidies-dispensers. </p>
<p>	Even assuming rather improbably that widely different strata—blacks, single mothers, poor white families, and Hispanics—similarly ignored the A.P.R. clause, they could not but realize that the principal had to be paid. So at most, the paternalistic argument can call for government assistance in paying the interest. Since the government insured many of those defaulted mortgages, charging the debtors the currently very low Fed rate makes economic sense. But look at the injustice: working families bend over backwards to pay their mortgages while the bankrupt receive society’s assistance. Instead of sending them to jail either for stealing the bank’s money (the depositors’ money, actually) or at least for gross negligence, the government rewards their patently irresponsible behavior, assuring a new wave of irresponsible borrowing and still larger default. After seeing the current bailout, who could be stupid or honest enough to refrain from borrowing with the expectation that the government will step in? That’s besides the banks&#8217; interest in inflating the next mortgage bubble to make it sufficiently big that the government cannot afford for it to burst.</p>
<p>	Allowing the bubble to burst is both just and economically beneficial. By preventing mass defaults, the government keeps house prices artificially high, thus increasing mortgage payments for working families. Drastically decreased prices and mortgages would make houses affordable for honest poor families without state intervention. Nor would defaulting greatly afflict the debtors. Most bought their houses with close to zero downpayment and have next to no equity in them. They simply return to their pre-bubble situation; in fact, the banks will usually be happy to rent the houses back to their defaulted owners after repossessing them. Since owning a house is only more profitable than renting it if the family writes it off on their taxes, the typically unemployed defaulting families have no rational reason whatsoever to prefer owning to renting their houses. The government has the best of the two worlds: it supports loyal voters (defaulted homeowners) and banks (the corporate interests behind the election campaigns). The American corruption was not unavoidable; when hit by the current crisis, Japan allowed a lot of people to lose their rented apartments, let alone the ones they owned. Tokyo parks are saturated with homeless who are nevertheless clean, groomed, and go to work each morning. In America, the citizen’s question, “What I can do for my country?” long ago gave way to the country’s, “How can I subsidize you?” Afro-Americans, Iraqis, Ukrainians… Martians are the only people around who don’t take the working Americans’ money.</p>
<p>	Why is it that middle-class liberals support the bailout even though it wastes their tax money? Alienation from the state is one reason: the subjects feel their tax payments are wasted anyway and don’t mind wasting them on the pet projects. “Pet” is a key word: the liberals wouldn’t support a similar bailout of lower-middle class white families, but they laud the extension of paternalism over blacks and white paupers; as a bonus, they won’t riot and do away with suburban liberals. Economic paternalism is a part of an across-the-board government strategy for subduing its population: twelve-year school education in which pupils learn nothing of practical importance is another example. They enter adulthood obedient to their teachers and dependent upon them, and they remain obedient to the state and dependent upon it.</p>
<p>	The bailout debate consistently ignores the most important issue: personal responsibility. The  state should only help those who positively cannot help themselves; any other arrangement, regardless of its political and economic merits, is immoral.</p>
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		<title>Arabs are not even black</title>
		<link>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/arabs-are-not-even-black.htm</link>
		<comments>http://samsonblinded.org/blog/arabs-are-not-even-black.htm#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Aug 2009 07:50:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Obadiah Shoher</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[leftism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://samsonblinded.org/blog/?p=1298</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Israel&#8217;s problem with her Arabs is similar to America&#8217;s troubles with blacks forty years ago. A generation of Jewish-American civil rights advocates, Israeli politicians, and American voters was raised on the notion of desegregation. The notion itself is questionable: it is not self-evident, as the US Supreme Court has repeatedly asserted, that “separate but equal” [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Israel&#8217;s problem with her Arabs is similar to America&#8217;s troubles with blacks forty years ago. A generation of Jewish-American civil rights advocates, Israeli politicians, and American voters was raised on the notion of desegregation. The notion itself is questionable: it is not self-evident, as the US Supreme Court has repeatedly asserted, that “separate but equal” is a form of discrimination. There is no reason why schools for black children (negro, as the politically correct Supreme Court decisions called them in those days) should be innately worse than schools for whites. Even so, the alleged difference could be rectified with higher per-pupil budgeting of black schools. Instead, the activist Warren Court ordered an exceedingly intrusive mixing of white and black children. White parents, as private persons, had every right to refuse mixed schools for their children, but the government forced desegregation in public schools as a matter of equal opportunity in accessing public benefits. That reasoning was later salvaged in favor of a sweeping “public interest” interpretation, which banned segregation even in private schools and clubs. It is quite impossible to find any concept in political philosophy which would ban private individuals from exercising their own tastes in private environments, such as private schools. The court’s hypocrisy is all the more evident on the background of pushing private rights in the sphere of moral abominations: the same Supreme Court which banned segregation in private schools allowed pornography in private movie theaters and sexual deviations in private life. While desegregation was pushed from the public into the private sphere, the opposite process took place with moral issues: the legalized immorality was expanded from the private into the public sphere, from the right to homosexual relations to the state recognition of homosexual marriage. The court acted not out of concern for blacks or homosexuals, but in a determined effort to enforce homogeneity, to destroy moral barriers and other private preferences.</p>
<p></p>
<p>A similar effort is traceable in Israel. Her High Court is a bastion of leftism. After the leftists lost their grip on political power in the early 1970s, they consolidated judicial power. The High Court is an unelected body which appoints its own members. It is thus able to perpetuate its original leftist composition. The court has evolved into alternative parliament and government: it annuls laws, orders amendments to laws, and micromanages military and civil affairs down to the separation barrier’s route.</p>
<p>Israeli leftists were hard on the Arabs to an extent unparalleled among the right. It was the leftists who perpetrated and whitewashed the Kfar Qasem massacre, kept Arab villages under curfews for weeks, and imposed collective punishment on them. The suggestion that the Israeli High Court is somehow concerned with Arab rights tests the limits of credulity. Rather, its decisions on Arab and homosexual rights are of the same stock as its American counterpart, destroying the fabric of traditional Jewish society. Where the Torah explicitly commands Jews to “dwell alone,” the High Court affirms the sabotage by Jewish nihilist organizations, including the Ministry of Education, which promote Jewish-Arab integration, explicitly rejecting the Jewish state’s <em>raison d’etre</em>. If anything, I would prefer integration with Australians and Canadians rather than with Arabs.</p>
<p>Being rejected is of course humiliating. I can sympathize with the Arabs whom the Jews refuse to hire. It is, however, in the nature of man to draw boundaries; that’s how nations persist. We have been Jewish for 4,000 years; should we abandon our Jewishness and intermingle because some barbarian conference, the UN, included hordes of Arabs in our boundaries? Arabs have twenty-two states of their own, including Jordan, a state carved out of the Jewish homeland by treacherous Brits. They can move thirty miles and enjoy unsegregated equality. In our state, we reject them.</p>
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