Who Gets to Name Whom?
November 6, 2023
In a time when Jewish university students are hiding in the library attic from pro-Hamas mobs and N4 insurrectionists are battering at the gates of the White House our noble rulers are worrying about Islamophobia. Can you spell anti-Semitism, dear liberal friends?
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Is it possible that our liberal friends, who have had a chokehold on The Narrative for the last century, are losing their grip? It could happen, historians agree.
And by the way, what is the difference between a “cease-fire” and a “humanitarian pause?” Experts agree that more research is needed.
I tell you what I am worried about: all those BLACK LIVES MATTER yard-signs in my liberal neighborhood that are almost as common as subsidized EVs in the driveway recharging from their subsidized charging stations intermittently powered by subsidized solar panels on the roof. Perhaps it is time for devoted activists to start taping those over with an anti-Semitism Alert in the interest of “safety.”
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But why? Why are our lefty friends so dumb, from BLM to Palestine? I am reading Michael McConkey’s A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars, from his “Circulation of Elites” Substack. He reduces everything to Space vs. Time: Spatials vs. Temporals. What’s that? Just this:
The Left worldview has a space bias, “focused on administration, centralized control, and commerce.” The right worldview has a time bias, “focused on organic community, concrete institutions, and tradition.”
Let’s make it real simple: the Left’s world is Abstract World, and the right’s world is Life World.
Life World? That’s the German notion of Lebenswelt, or lifeworld, developed by Husserl.
In the real world some lefties have swung towards the center, like Jürgen Habermas in his Theory of Communicative Action. La Wik:
[Habermas] focuses on the lifeworld as consisting of socially and culturally sedimented linguistic meanings. It is the lived realm of informal, culturally-grounded understandings and mutual accommodations.
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And really, although we like to think of science as about nothing but abstract logic and reason, it is also a process of “culturally-grounded understandings and mutual accommodations.” I like to illustrate this with a Narrative of modern physics. First, physicists started with “atom,” which comes from the Greek “indivisible,” and demonstrates that We Scientists are classical scholars. But when it turned out that the atom was divided into parts, scientists ran out of Greek words with proton and electron. Neutron is fake-Greek. But then quantum mechanics blew up the atomic world. What to do? Physicist Murray Gell-Mann dubbed the tricky sub-sub-atomic particle-waves “quarks” from James Joyce and Finnigan’s Wake. I say that Gell-Mann is making a mutual accommodation between physics and poetry.
Naming names: it’s the name of the game.
In our time it has always been the Left that gets to name names — except during the existential horror show of McCarthyism. The Left gets to say who’s a racist and who’s an Islamophobe. The Left gets to say who’s a J6 terrorist and who’s a BLM mostly peaceful protestor.
But how shall we name Saturday, November 4, 2023? I say that it is a day that will live — in infamy — as N4 insurrectionists stormed the White House gates. Is this the modern equivalent of the Storming of the Bastille? Or the Boston Massacre? Or the Kronstadt rebellion? Not to worry. Political analysts agree that the protestors were not anti-Semitic Hamas-supporting Frankensteins but devoted activists attempting to discover just how mentally compromised our President Biden really is. Experts are unsure whether the District of Columbia government will soon replace the 16th Street BLM mural with “From the River to the Sea.”
Anyway, back to McConkey. He reckons that, naming no names, the American Empire is reaching its sell-by date, and the following experts agree: Sir John Glubb of The Fate of Empires, Strauss and Howe of The Fourth Turning, and Peter Turchin of War and Peace and War and the “overproduction of elites.” They say that politics and empires go in cycles: the three generation 85-year cycle, or the 250-year cycle.
And wouldn’t you know: the USA is about 250 years old and the FDR Democrat Ascendancy is about 90 years old.
But who is to blame for the Hamas massacre? Michael Ben-Gad, IDF veteran and London economics professor, names Netanyahu and the West Bank religious settlers. Because of Netanyahu and the settlers the IDF is stretched too thin guarding West Bank settlers while also defending the border with Gaza. Says Ben-Gad:
Netanyahu and his cabinet of Twitter warriors, sycophants and fixers need to go.
This is serious! You mean to say that Israel is governed by social-media addicts and a modern version of the corrupt 19th century U.S. “spoils system?” Who are these monsters? Let us name names.
By the way, what sort of a name do you put on President Obama’s “all of us are complicit to some degree” comment on the Israel Question?
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Image: Beny Shlevich
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