Outright fraud, lying, faking test results is horrible and should be severely prosecuted — that appears to be at the heart of the scandal. No tolerance for that — period. Using contacts, donating money, hiring tutors, putting your kids in the best college feeder schools, taking advantage of legacy status, arranging résumé-building internships — those are the consequences of inequality compounding and amplifying over time, from one generation to another. Does it dilute the pure concept of meritocracy, the level playing field where everyone has an equal shot? Of course.
There is no perfect analogy for Brexit, the surreal, game-theoretical political divorce that was slated to conclude on March 29 at 11 P.M. London time.
Well if “there is no perfect analogy for Brexit”, perhaps “decapitating an iceberg” doesn’t really work either?
The lexicon of Brexit, the United Kingdom’s buffoonishly mismanaged effort to leave the European Union, includes technical terms such as “backstop” and “customs union,” as well as a fanciful but revealing one: “unicorn.” It has come to be a scornful shorthand for all that the Brexiteers promised voters in the June, 2016, referendum and cannot, now or ever, deliver.
Magical Thinking ? Unicorn?
**
Numbers count:
the whole of New Zealand, a remote island nation of about 4.9 million people that had only thirty-five murders in all of 2017, was in a state of deep shock
Religious supporters walk across the embers of a large fire at the Mount Takao Hiwatari fire-walking festival. Mount Takao is close to Tokyo, and this well-known festival attracts a large crowd of worshippers and tourists. A large pyre is built on the grounds of Yuki-ji Temple, and after it has been burned, Yamabushi (mountain monks) and practitioners of the Shugendo sect of the Buddhist religion walk over the still-smoldering embers in a purifying ritual
The caption reads:
Religious supporters walk across the embers of a large fire at the Mount Takao Hiwatari fire-walking festival. Mount Takao is close to Tokyo, and this well-known festival attracts a large crowd of worshippers and tourists. A large pyre is built on the grounds of Yuki-ji Temple, and after it has been burned, Yamabushi (mountain monks) and practitioners of the Shugendo sect of the Buddhist religion walk over the still-smoldering embers in a purifying ritual
I was here myself in 1972, and the most impressive part of the ritual was the distribution to all comers of little slips of wood — the kind on which you write the name of the plants in a garden row or a pot — on which we were invited to write our sins of the past year, and which were then tossed by monks into the fire path —
— so that the monks can tread the embers of our sins beneath their feet —
— in robes comparable to the ceremonial robes of Catholic or Tibetan Buddhist monks:
[ by Charles Cameron — switching between my comparative religion and cultural anthropology hats, while reading of Christian and indigenous mass graves in Nigeria — and the fear of a Rwanda-scale genocide ]
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Villagers stood at a mass grave in Dogon Na Hauwa, Nigeria, in 2010. | (Photo: Reuters/Credit Akintunde Akinleye)
The church leaders said that “over 6,000 persons, mostly children, women and the aged have been maimed and killed in night raids by armed Fulani herdsmen,” which is prompting their cry to the government of Nigeria “to stop this senseless and blood shedding in the land and avoid a state of complete anarchy where the people are forced to defend themselves.”
That last phrase, to “avoid a state of complete anarchy where the people are forced to defend themselves”, is a telling one with an implication of considerable restraint on the part of Christians thus far..
**
Reading the piece carefully, the question arises as to the interwoven influences of tribal, religious, and cultural differences..
Consider the Catholic bishop’s comment as reported:
“Please don’t make the same mistake as was made with the genocide in Rwanda,” he pleaded, referring to the massacre of Tutsi people in Rwanda, where close to 1 million were killed in 1994.
To what extent can this conflict and slaughter be characterized as tribal?
Consider also the clash of religions — indigenous / ancestral tribal religions included — implied by the reference to Boko Haram, and the Intersociety comment:
Nigeria is drifting to [a path of] genocide through killing, maiming, burning and destruction of churches and other sacred places of worship, and forceful seizure and occupation of ancestral, worship, farming and dwelling lands of the indigenous Christians and other indigenous religionists in Northern Nigeria
Or — and this one’s of terrific importance, as implied by the comment:
raids carried out by the herdsmen on local area farmers
To what extent is the conflict one of (mobile) herdsmen vs (settled) farmers?
Fulani vs one or more other tribes
Islam vs Christianity & indigenous religions
herdsmen vs agriculturalists
**
Please note that there are two feared outcomes here, the first of which touches my heart in its implication of Christian non-violence in the face of terrible violence, while the second addresses a significant increase in the scale of that violence:<
to avoid a state of complete anarchy where the people are forced to defend themselves
the same mistake as was made with the genocide in Rwanda
Tragedy is seldom simple. If we are to avoid the worst, we need both to understand the drivers in all their subtle diversity, and to avoid the paralysis that comes from overthinking — not an east task, but a necessary one.
CNN’s Situation Room first, because I see it while waiting for my seat in the dialysis clinic:
**
Melber:
I’m crowding the Melber chyrons &c up at the top, not in any particular order, and will follow them qith Melber quotes.
If these {State] charges stick that itself could be check mate for Manafort’s strategy, and to the extent Trump is going along with it, whatever Trump hopes to get out of that.
David Corn:
It’s a dessert topping and a floor wax. I mean, they’re both really gigantic stories..
Ainsley:
You are not pardon proof ..
More..
Caroline Fredrickson:
I think this is like a Russian nesting doll, and you keep opening one and you find another Russian nesting doll, and another one inside, and we’re going to find who’s at the very center oof this, and it might be the President.
Melber:
It’s fascinating, and you could reverse the nestying dolls, and say you have Mueller and Andrew Weissmann, but now you also have SDNY, Berman and Khuzami, and then you now have Cy Vance. So you also have prosecutor nesting dolls, no
Caroline:
D’oh!
Hardball:
Betsy Woodruff:
Trump joins an ignominious group of people. As soon as he hired Paul Manafort, he basically joined a League of Bond Villains as far as the people who Manafort had represented prior to Trump. Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Jonas Savimbi, an Angolan warlord who used child soldiers, Sonny [..], who did torture for the Marcos, who literally stole billions of dollars from the people of the Philippines, and now Donald Trump is also part of that pantheon.
He’s gotta be Moses to get through this thing [ Manafort, sentence upon sentence ]
Rep Raja Krishnamoorthi [re Matt WHitaker]:
I heard Mr Whitaker was a body-builder; he’s been doing some heavy lifting for the President.
Chris M:
What do you think about Obstruction of Justice as heavy lifting?
Sen. Claire McCaskill
We’ve got a guy in the Oval Office who listens to nobody but himself and the mirror
Chris M:
Three strikes you’re out, Mr President ..
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All In Chris Hayes:
Natasha Bertrand:
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By keeping the pardon on the table.. that is something that has been refrained throughout this entire ordeal is that we’re not discussing this now, but we’re not taking it off the table. That’s nothing short of a wink and a nod..
Harry Littlam:
People often draw the analogy to the mob and Goodfellas, but I’ve been struck it’s more like Married to the Mob. These are a bunch of real kind of nickel and dimeing kind of — shysters would be the formal legal word. And yes, it really is at times a kind of burlesque. There’s no dignity in Presidential crime any more, it seems.
A mobster comes before me, Your honor, my client here, when he said “sleep with the fishes” he meant that the deadd man in question booked a room next to the aquarium. Like, we understand the code..
Rachel Maddow TRMS:
**
Nicolle 3/14/2019:
What may be happening is less of a grand finale and more of a relay race, handing of batons .
Church Rosenberg
The angels’in the details..
You’re right, we like patterns, because patterns evince intent, and intent is how we convict
David McCraw:
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Fake news is an evil genius, as a bit of politicala theater, because it seems like a search for truth when it’s the opposite ..
**
Well, that’s more than enough, and I have more to come..
[ by Charles Cameron — hold onto your Stetsons, New Zealand, massacre, tips from JM Berger and Clint Watts, sadness, anger, the 8chan ouroboros, more ]
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On the left, the symbol which fronts the Christchurch mosques killer’s manifesto, The Great Replacement; note the black sun wheel in the center, and compare: on the right, the Nazi SS black sun or schwartze sonne. The SPLC’s Flags and Other Symbols Used By Far-Right Groups in Charlottesville page notes:
Schwarze Sonne (Black Sun), sometimes called the sonnerad: symbol has become synonymous with myriad far-right groups who traffic in neo-Nazi and/or neo-Volkisch ideologies. The symbol is based on the ancient sun wheel artifacts that were made and used by Norse and Germanic tribes as symbol of their pagan beliefs. Those sun wheels, made centuries upon centuries ago, do not usually resemble the complexity of this particular version. The version above is inlayed into the marble floor of the Castle Wewelsburg, the castle that Himmler made the spiritual and literal home of the SS during the reign of the Third Reich, and has significance within the occult practices of the SS.
The great replacement (French: le grand remplacement) is a right-wing conspiracy theory, which states that the white Catholic French population, and white Christian European population at large, is being systematically replaced with non-European people, specifically Middle Eastern, North and Sub-Saharan African populations, through mass migration and demographic growth. It associates the presence of Muslims in France with potential danger and destruction of French culture and civilization. [ .. ]
News sources will have more details on the shootings, the shooter or shooters, the trial of Brenton Tarrant and so forth. My interest, posting here, will be in this act of cruel terrorism, in Tarrant‘s manifesto and its close relationship to Anders Breivik‘s manifesto, 2083, and whatever else emerges.
Is Islamophobia the issue here? The ideology of Branton Tarrant‘s manifesto is white supremacist, but the attacks themselves, the massacres, take place not on immigration centers, hut on two mosques — clearly identifying the spear-tip of Tarrant‘s rage.
Consider: Hatred, hatred, hatred, and prayer, prayer, prayer:
The Gurdwara (Sikh temple), Oak Creek, WI, 2012
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, NC, 2015
The Tree of Life and New Light synagogues in Pittsburgh, PA, 2018
The Al Noor and Linwood Mosques in Christchurch, NZ, 2019
There’s context there.
**
On this most recent occasion I feel a mix of emotions:
The terrorist massacre of women, men and children in two places of Muslim worship on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, is heartbreaking: my tears and prayers go out to the victims, their families and friends, and all in New Zealand, a small and notably peaceful country — my friend Walter Logeman, therapist and man of peace, lives in Christchurch, and my heart goes out to him this day, as it does to Marianne Elliott, known on Twitter as @zenpeacekeeper, and Leah Farrall, @allthingsct — see below.
In this moment of rage and hate, it is good to remember and praise the lives of those who untiringly promote peace and love.
So I feel sad, very sad, and grateful for my friends.
Australian Senator Fraser Anning released a statement blaming “the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place” as “the real cause of bloodshed” following Friday’s shootings.
**
Tarrant’s manifesto :
The first thing to know about Tarrant‘s manifesto is that it is propaganda:
JM: The manifesto is — We treat these often as confessional documents, which are supposed to educate us about the person — but what it really is is a work of propaganda. And this one more than most.
We can tell from the manifesto that he’s a white supremacist, he’s anti-immigrant, he’s anti-Muslim, but when you try to drill down into the details,there’s not a lot of utility in the document. [ ..
One court appearance is probably going to be more illuminating nthan the document itself.
On the mix of immigration, racist and religionist issues:
Immigration and race are closely linked issues. Anti-immigration views allow white supremacists and people who have general right-wing views to incorporate a lot of different forms of hatred under one umbrella. It’s anti-Muslim, obviously, he targeted Muslims. It’s also racist as he describes it. Immigration is a convenient umbrella or fig-leaf for underlying bigotries that are more complex.
**
Having said that, let’s dig into the weeds, and take a look at one particular item in Tarrant‘s agenda, and that of Breivik. I’ll use the example of Constantinople, but Jerusalem and Vienna would have been other candidates..
Tarrant‘s manifesto includes a Q&A in which the imagined questioner asks:
Did/do you have ties to any other partisans/freedom fighters/ethno soldiers?
to which Tarrant responds:
I support many of those that take a stand against ethnic and cultural genocide. Luca Traini, Anders Breivik, Dylan Roof, Anton Lundin Pettersson, Darren Osbourne etc.
But I have only had brief contact with Knight Justiciar Breivik, receiving a blessing for my mission after contacting his brother knights.
That’s of particular since it mentions actual contact of some sort with Breivik , and also suggests there are in fact, as Breivik suggested, more Knights Justiciar besides (the self-proclaimed) Breivik himself.
We’ll return to that. The next question and response also mentions Breivik, and emphasizes his importance to Tarrant, whose 74-page manifesto was no boubt inspired by Breivik’s own manifesto of 1,515 pages:
Were your beliefs influenced by any other attackers?
I have read the writings of Dylan Roof and many others, but only really took true inspiration from Knight Justiciar Breivik.
**
Anders Breivik scans geopolitics and notes such things as Hindu nationalism in India as well as crusades and jihad, and one of his focuses within the latter pair of concerns is Anatolia, now known as Turkey — and within Turkey, Constantinople, now known, with the inclusion of largely residential areas on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, as Istanbul.
Breivik quotes a hadith of the Prophet:
Verily you shall conquer Constantinople. What a wonderful leader will he be, and what a wonderful army will that army be!
He refers to Constantinople as a gem of the Christian world:
Constantinople, the jewel of Eastern Christendom, finally fell in 1453 to the armies of Sultan Mahomet II.
He also terms it “the greatest Christian city in the world” and nites that the First Crusade was called by Pope Urban II “in response to an urgent plea for help from the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople”
Tarrant‘s manifesto is much shrter, though 77 pages is long enough to cram in a fair amount of detail, vitriol, and propaganda, including this section, in which he too writes of the Christian city of Constantinople:
To turks
You can live in peace in your own lands, and may no harm come to you.
On the east side of the Bosphorus.
But if you attempt to live in European lands, anywhere west of the Bosphorus. We will kill you and drive you roaches from our lands.
We are coming for Constantinople and we will destroy every mosque and minaret in the city.
The Hagia Sophia will be free of minarets and Constantinople will be rightfully christian owned once more.
**
Knights Justiciar?
As we have seen, Tarrant suggests there is in fact a community of Templar Knights of the sort that Breivik also claimed:
I have only had brief contact with Knight Justiciar Breivik, receiving a blessing for my mission after contacting his brother knights.
Breivik himself in his manifesto offers an open invitation to all those Europeamns who self-identify as Knights Justiciar:
Normally, any individual who decides he want to choose the road of the PCCTS (ie Knights Templar), a road of strength and honour, courage and martyrdom, should leave any other organisation for practical reasons (first and foremost in order to protect them). He will then spend a predefined time preparing himself mentally (this cannot be emphasised enough) as well as for planning the actual operation (planning, financing and eventually execution of the plan). This may take longer than 36 months depending on the nature of the assault.
Breivik also stated that the Knights Templar had been reconstituted as an order in 2002, with founding members of the following nationalities and observances:
English Protestant, English Christian atheist, French Catholic, German Christian atheist, Dutch Christian agnostic, Greek Orthodox, Russian Christian atheist, Norwegian Protestant, Serbian Orthodox, Swedish, Belgian, and European-American
That white supremacism may be, as Breivik either knew or fantasized and hoped, an international movement is suggested by the breadth of Tarrant‘s travels, financed by his “profits from investing in the cryptocurrency Bitconnect, in such places as North Korea, Poland, Ukraine, Iceland, and Argentina [details].
Breivik‘s own sense of Temoplar membership as he understands it is reported in his manifesto:
varies from 15-80 Justiciar Knights in Western Europe (2008 estimate)
And to the extent that he wishes his manifesto to foment other actions beyond his own assaults on Oslo and Utoya, Breivik has clearly been successful.
The Newtown shooter Adam Lanza reportedly collected news clippings on Breivik’s attack and other incidents of mass violence before he killed 20 children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. Other young men, such as the British college student Liam Lyburd, have been inspired to plan or carry out mass shootings based on their admiration for Breivik’s lethality, rather than his beliefs.
More recently:
U.S. Coast Guard Lieutenant Christopher Hasson was charged with planning a mass-casualty attack modeled in significant part on Breivik’s strategy, and bearing the marks of his belief system.
And now, courtesy of an Australian, New Zealand.
**
Clint Watts and cascading terrorism:
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Clint: If you look at Al-Qaida or ISIS, it starts as this central body, this network, and then it expands out and then they inspire their followers.
In the West, it happens in reverse. Inspired followers start to network online, which build into this infrastructure.
We know this is getting more serious because the frequency and pace are picking up. When the pace picks up, that means that the network is tighter [ .. ] They’re citing each other ideologically, they’re playing to reach others’ attacks — and so this often does what I call cascading terrorism. It inspires others to begin acting.
Like a deeper layer of Hell, 8chan is an image board for anyone who is too much of an edgelord for 4chan. Created during the Gamergate fiasco when even the brass of 4chan decided that situation was getting out of hand and became a base of operations of sorts for the GG crowd.
You know, the left plays a tougher game, it?s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don?t play it tougher. OK? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump ? I have the tough people, but they don?t play it tough ? until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad. But the left plays it cuter and tougher. Like with all the nonsense that they do in Congress ? with all this invest[igations]?that?s all they want to do is ?you know, they do things that are nasty. Republicans never played this.
**
Okay, horrors:
For myself as a poet, one of the great but largely unremarked horros of Brenton Tarrant‘s manifesto is its epigrap=h, spelled out in full immediately after the title, Dylan Thomas‘ great poem Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night — with emphasis on the final line:
Rage, rage against the dying of the light..
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Listen to Dylan Thomas himself voice this, his final, trembling plea to his dying father:
God, that’s a breth of fresh air amidst all this hatred.
The poem is one of the finest in the English language: to see it thus dragged through the mire is shocking and saddening in the extreme.
[ by Charles Cameron — from propensity to act, and from individual act to outbreak ]
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The NYT the other day had a stunning, terrifying and or terrific piece by Thomas B. Edsall titled No Hate Left Behind. That’s almost pure slick-bait. The sub-title gives us the sense that we’re talking now and soon, that the article is both a current assessment and a warning: Lethal partisanship is taking us into dangerous territory.>
This article will likely interest Zenpundit readers.
**
Let me offer a quick personal side-note before addressing the substantive issues Edsall‘s piece raises.
Edsall quotes Steven Pinker as saying:
Certainly there is a tribal flavor to political polarization. Men’s testosterone rises or falls on election night, depending on whether their side wins, just as it does on Super Bowl Sunday.
American politics, in other words, is like American football — like enough, IMO, to richly justify the use of football metaphors to describe political outcomes — and vice versa. I’ll return to this theme in the tail-end of this post.
Edsall‘s article is a grim one — grim not because the writer is grim by nature, although that may or may not be the case, I’m no psychiatrist — but because it contains statistical evidence, measurable scientific evidence, of our propensity towards a violent response to the 2020 elections — a propensity which is:
stronger in well informed voters than in those less so
currently stronger in the Democratic electorate than the Republican
and which on election night will be
stronger in the supporters of the victorious candidate than those of the other party
Their abstract notes that historical accounts of partisanship “recognize its contentiousness and its inherent, latent threat of violence,” but that “social scientific conceptions of partisan identity developed in quiescent times” and “have largely missed that dangerous dimension” in their researches. Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason aim to “rebalance” that tendency. Their findings can be found in detail and with appropriate nuance in the body of their paper, but it is their Conclusions that I will note here>
**
The authors open their conclusions with a deft touch of historical background:
Two and a half centuries ago, American founders worried about the lethal consequences of partisanship and hoped to avoid the pernicious development of parties. After ultimately founding parties themselves, their worst fears were realized in the extraordinary partisan violence of the American Civil War and the lesser violence before and after, carrying body counts in the hundreds rather than the rebellion’s hundred-thousands.
They continue by describing how their own work explores the propensity for political violence in our own times::
We conceptualized and measured three aspects of lethal partisanship: 1) partisan moral disengagement that rationalizes harm against opponents, 2) partisan schadenfreude in response to deaths and injuries of political opponents, and 3) explicit support for partisan violence.
Them’s fighting measures to put to scientific test.
**
Selected quotes:
The challenge for democracy, as always, continues to be how to procure the political goods that parties provide while staving off partisanship’s most sanguinary pitfalls — the ones identified by Madison but seemingly forgotten in modern behavioral scholarship.
Madison seems to be the name that keeps popping up as the father of essential American wisdom..
Here are three paragraphs worth considering, each in turn bringing us closer to en understanding of how the propensity to tolerate violence “comes to the boil” in action, either on the individual scale — incidents of mass shooting — or in an uprising somewhere between civil unrest and war:
In two nationally representative surveys, we found that large portions of partisans embrace partisan moral disengagement (40-60%) but only small minorities report feeling partisan schadenfreude or endorse partisan violence (5-15%). Even so, their views represent a level of extreme hostility among millions of American partisans today that has not been documented in modern American politics.
Ultimately, these results find a minority of partisans view violence as acceptable acts against their political opponents. Many times more embrace partisan moral disengagement, which makes the turn to violence easier if they have not made it already. As more Americans embrace strong partisanship, the prevalence of lethal partisanship is likely to grow
Finally, experimental evidence showed that inducing expectations of electoral victory led strong partisans to endorse violence against their partisan opponents more than expectations of electoral loss.
**
Let’s end on a lighter note.
I said above that American politics is sufficiently like American football to justify metaphorical use of one to describe the other — and just as the Republican and Democratic parties holds primaries and National Conventions to determine each party’s candidate in the Presidential election, so the respective American and National Football Conferences hold games culminating in championships to determine each conference’s contenders in the Super Bowl.
Perhaps, indeed, the President-elect should face off against the Super Bowl MVP in a grand culminating match to establish the testosteronic Super-Person. Heaven alone knows where such a match would be held, but the opportunity to discover whether football is a more passionate and partisan sport than politics should not be missed..
2019: Super Bowl MVP Julian Edelman vs sitting President Donald Trump?
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
