Foreign Policy

Kim Jong Un for President

rafifarber Foreign Policy, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

Donald Trump or Kim Jong Un, they are both whackjobs with nuclear arsenals. Here’s a novel idea for peace. Trump should fly to North Korea, prostrate himself to Kim Jong Un, and offer him the Presidency. Sure, that’s not constitutional, but neither is anything else Trump has done as Overlord.

Kim Jong Un would be appeased, become president, and nobody in the US would listen to a word he said.

It’s similar to taking the fears of the lefties and righties in Israel to the ultimate extreme. Annex everything and watch the Arabs outvote the Jews and 61 out of 120 MK’s are Arabs and vote to “drive the Jews into the sea”.

So what? Will the Jews say “Well, they have 61 votes, and according to our constitution which doesn’t exist, that means we have to follow everything they say because the State is Holy and We Are All Religious Zionists Now.”

No. Because as much as people believe that nonsense, when it comes to their actual lives, they will throw it out because it is, all, nonsense in the end.

What would really end up happening is that nobody would listen to the Knesset, finally, that would be that.

So Kim Jong Un for president. It would solve all the war tensions and solve a lot of problems with all the Trumpheads following his every command. Nobody would listen to him. He’d be a figurehead and we’d all ignore him.

Disclaimer: I am not a supporter of Kim Jong Un.

 

One Lesson Even I Learned From the Trump Administration About Politicians

rafifarber Foreign Policy, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

Trump’s latest move in Syria, which was basically to attack Assad who is attacking ISIS, and therefore to support ISIS, taught me one thing about politicians I did not even realize.

The one good thing about Trump, at least what I thought was the one good thing, was that he would not start a war with Russia. But apparently, starting a war with Russia is the first major foreign policy move of the Trump administration.

Well, at least I own lots of gold and silver, and some bitcoin. Here’s Dmitri Medvedev, clearly pissed out of his mind.

That’s it. The last remaining election fog has lifted. Instead of an overworked statement about a joint fight against the biggest enemy, ISIS (the Islamic State), the Trump administration proved that it will fiercely fight the legitimate Syrian government, in a tough contradiction with international law and without UN approval, in violation of its own procedures stipulating that the Congress must first be notified of any military operation unrelated to aggression against the US. On the verge of a military clash with Russia.

Nobody is overestimating the value of pre-election promises but there must be limits of decency.

Beyond that is absolute mistrust. Which is really sad for our now completely ruined relations. And which is good news for terrorists.

One more thing. This military action is a clear indication of the US President’s extreme dependency on the opinion of the Washington establishment, the one that the new president strongly criticised in his inauguration speech. Soon after his victory, I noted that everything would depend on how soon Trump’s election promises would be broken by the existing power machine. It took only two and a half months.

Lesson being, even with aspects about a politician in terms of his moves that you may really believe, and have evidence for believing, he’ll always end up doing the wrong thing in the end. I should not have believed that Trump would not start a war with Russia. I was wrong.

Well, the debt clock time bomb on US Treasuries just starting ticking faster. Who knows if we’ll even last the rest of the year.

Chag Sameach!

Donald Trump or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Who Is Worse on Immigration?

rafifarber Foreign Policy, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

roosevelt-trump-memeI am in no way defending anything that Donald Trump is doing with his immigration ban. I am not a fan of Donald Trump, I did not vote for Donald Trump, and I think the man is a bad person.

That being said, the liberals who are slamming Trump for his draconian immigration executive order should keep their hero, New Deal mastermind Franklin Delano Roosevelt in mind. Among other things, FDR:

  1. Imprisoned 120,000 Japanese American citizens, by executive order, for two and a half years, just because he felt they were a threat.
  2. Turned away 973 Jews on the St. Louis off the coast of Miami to their deaths in 1939.
  3. Refused to admit refugees from the Nazis into the US.
  4. Refused to even damage the death camp infrastructure during World War II allied bombing campaigns.

Beyond that, he confiscated the gold of every single US citizen and arrested anyone who kept any gold illegally. He imprisoned people during the Great Depression for doing work inside their own homes in his crazy “spread the work” schemes.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has banned visas for a few hundred people from Yemen, Iran, Syria, and three other countries he doesn’t like that I don’t remember. I don’t think that’s good. But I have perspective.

But despite all this, let’s all remember the Official Accepted Truth:

FDR is a beloved national hero, beloved by Jews especially, despite imprisoning hundreds of thousands of people by executive order and sending 973 Jews to their deaths. DJT is a racist Islamophobic scumbag for banning visas from Muslim countries. 

On Elie Wiesel, Idolatry, and the State

rafifarber Foreign Policy, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

Elie Wiesel died. I’m sad about it. I liked certain things about Wiesel, and I disliked other things. I see the word going around now that some guy named Max Blumenthal who is the son of some of other Clinton-sniffer named Sidney Blumenthal, who are both Jewish…Max does not like Elie Wiesel and tweeted that at the end of his life he supported those who commit war crimes. He’s referring to Jewish “ethnic cleansing” and “settlers” and whatnot, and all the other trifling nonsense that equates homesteading vacant land with “war crimes”. But nevermind that. That’s nonsense, but I still appreciate Max for cutting through the worship of supposedly infallible people.

Now, I’m no fan of Max Blumenthal or virtually anyone who has any dealings with the sleazy Clintons. From the little I read about him he’s your average shallow thinking stereotypical left winger. But I still consider his comments heroic because deifying any person to the point where he can do no wrong and anything he says is right, is very dangerous and the essence of Avoda Zara, or idol worship.

I read some of Wiesel’s books when I was a kid. I definitely remember reading Night. He was a good writer and his works will live on. But unlike most Jews who base their Jewish identity on the Holocaust, I don’t consider him a role model at all. Wiesel was knee deep in the State infrastructure, and served as part of its intellectual guard, most notably justifying the various wars of the US government against the world, including the invasion of Iraq, which is now ISIS and the next excuse to invade the next country in the “war on terror”. He took pictures with president this and that, visited with a whole bunch of state leaders all the time, and generally approved of what they do as long as they were Western.

Wiesel was a good writer and a good speaker who did not understand that the source of the holocaust was not anti Semitism. Anti Semitism was only the excuse. The cause was the institution of the State which keeps a monopoly on violence.

The danger of deifying a person is that all of his positions come in packages. To criticize is illegitimate. To say he was wrong about some things takes you out of the realm of discussion. Max Blumenthal may be an idiot, but at least he has the courage to criticize a person that everybody else refuses to touch.

Lots of people say things like “Let’s not speak ill of the dead.” I don’t hold by that. When everyone is saying the same thing nobody is thinking. The truth is, there were good things about Wiesel and bad things about Wiesel. He did, in a sense, support the war crimes that he was a victim of. Not because he supported the “ethnic cleansing” of East Jerusalem which basically means supporting Jewish purchase of Arab property, which is absolutely legitimate, but he did support unjust wars against innocent people. Are the atrocities in Iraq on the same quantitative level as the holocaust? No. But add in Vietnam and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Korean War and Granada and the Philippines and every other place that the US government has invaded in the last century and a half or so, the numbers get pretty close.

It is especially important to criticize when everyone else is praising, just to help people remember that nobody should emulate anybody entirely. If you are an aspiring writer, you can learn from Wiesel. If you want to learn how to deal with tragedy and loss, his life is an example.

If you want to learn how to stop the next holocaust, Wiesel is not your man. He had good and bad, and to a degree, Max is right, but for mostly the wrong reasons.

May the good parts of his life be for a blessing, and his mistakes pointed out so they will not be repeated.

 

 

Chillul Hashem: Israel’s Cellebrite Hacks iPhone for FBI

rafifarber Foreign Policy, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

Head in hands pathetic. On Monday the FBI voluntarily postponed its legal hearing on forcing Apple to open its smartphone, because apparently they got help from some unidentified firm helping them hack it.

The firm is Israeli, something called Cellebrite, a company with nothing better to do but be lap dogs to their masters in the United States of America.

From ZeroHedge:

In the aftermath of the FBI’s surprising request on Monday to postpone a hearing in its legal crusade to unlock Apple cellphones, many wondered who it was that had succeeded in penetrating the supposedly unhackable smartphone. Earlier today Reuters provided the answer: the FBI’s effort is being assisted by Israel’s Cellebrite, a provider of mobile forensic software, which is now helping the Feds in their attempt to unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, California shooters, the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported on Wednesday.

It’s poetic really. On the one hand you have the world’s most valuable company, and most beloved by consumers. On the other hand you have the world’s most indebted government that spends money faster than it can steal it, nearly universally hated outside of the United States. And the Jews take sides with the bankrupt thieves.

Bad idea.

Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz vs Rabbi Barry Freundel, who is worse? A lesson in inverted Tzedaka from the Rambam

rafifarber Foreign Policy, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , , ,

Here I go again, looking for trouble. Something tells me I’m going to get it. Before everyone gets all “what in blank’s name are you talking about Captain Ahab?” on me, let me set up the comparison first. I know I said I’d lay off him after he thankfully advocated organ sales, but the hypocrisy just boiled over the surface of the pot again and I can’t take it.

A spate of articles came out recently about Barry “Tom” Freundel the “Peeperer Rov” Shlitah (everyone rise). One article was published in the Washingtonian on January 3rd, brought to my attention by my wife, that brought to light even worse aspects of the case than we knew about previously. Apparently, Barry set up hidden cameras in a vacant apartment he had set up for a Haredi woman as a safe shelter who was fleeing from her abusive husband. The woman had gotten in touch with him for help and he took advantage of the opportunity to see her naked.

The schadenfreude instinct in all of us loves to squirm at the thought of something like that and denounce Barry for being even more heartless than we thought. It certainly is quite gross. From his perspective though, there wasn’t any difference between that and spying on women in the mikveh. In both cases he assumes he will never get caught, nobody will ever know, and therefore no harm will be done because none of the women will ever find out.

So practically it doesn’t matter if he’s peeping on an abused woman he himself is helping shelter from an abusive husband, or converts dunking in the mikveh or whatever. There’s no nafkah minah (practical difference) assuming he is never caught, and all criminals assume they will never be caught or they would never commit their crimes.

The Eight Levels of Tzadaka, The Eight Levels of Harm

But let’s consider harm in levels parallel to Rambam’s 8 levels of Tzadaka, or charity. Rambam, Zra’im, Hilchos Matanos Ani’im 10:7 says that the highest form of charity is giving someone a loan or a gift (notice Rambam does not differentiate between loan and gift) or a job so that he does not have to rely on charity any longer. This level is higher than the ever-praised level of giving anonymously to people who not even the giver knows the identity of, which is only the second level, and called a Mitzva Lishma, a Mitzva for its own sake, by the Rambam. The third is knowing who you give charity to but them not knowing who gave it.The lowest level is giving tzedaka grudgingly, publicly with a sour resentful face.

Conceptually, this means that employing someone at $10 an hour who needs a job is considered better than  dumping a million bucks on the same needy person who will simply consume it and continue to live off charity. Hiring someone, whether to help him (Lishma) or make money off him (Lo Lishma), is a higher level than anonymous giving. According to the Rambam then, the highest form of charity is not even charity, since it could even be a loan or employment. The highest level is to lessen the need for charity in the first place.

Before we even flip that around, it’s amazing to consider that hiring labor at any wage or extending a loan for someone to start a business (which could include buying shares in an IPO or buying corporate bonds, setting aside the issue of interest) is a greater level of charity than giving a billion dollars anonymously to anonymous people. In today’s world though, those who give away $1 billion anonymously are considered gracious selfless philanthropic saints. A business owner who hires a worker at $10 an hour, which is a higher level than giving $1 billion anonymously to charity, is considered a cheap selfish misanthropic schmuck.

Now let’s invert that. If the highest level of charity is turning unproductive people into productive people, then the highest level of harming a person or people is turning productive people into unproductive people, necessitating that they live off charity, or worse, taxpayer money. Harming anonymous people anonymously, say by being a sadist for fun and setting a bear trap for random people on a sidewalk you will never see and just reveling in the thought that someone you will never know got seriously hurt, well that would only be the second worst way to harm someone. That would be harm for the sake of harming people, “harm Lishma”, paralleling Rambam’s description of anonymous charity to anonymous people as a Mitzva Lishma, but still only second level.

The third worst way to harm someone would be to harm people anonymously, they no knowing you but you knowing who they are. The least bad way to harm someone would be to harm him grudgingly, he knowing you and you knowing him, but not really wanting to harm him at all, and the victim knowing that you don’t really want to harm him.

Barry is on level three in terms of the harm he inflicted. He inflicted it anonymously against people he knew about. He wasn’t as bad as harming anonymous people for its own sake. He wanted to see them naked. He didn’t want them to be harmed Lishma. If he did, he would have uploaded the videos so everyone could see them. Had he taken videos of anonymous women, never watched them or knew who he was videotaping, and simply uploaded them to the internet just to cause harm, that would be harm Lishma, only the second level.

Still not as bad as turning productive people into unproductive people.

But let’s face it. Had Barry recorded women in the mikveh, not knowing who they were, never watching the tapes, and uploading all of it to the internet just to harm them for fun but not watching because מסתכלין בעריות (watching pornography) is assur and he’s too frum, we would consider that even sicker than what he actually did. We would consider that really incredibly sick and bizarre. But it’s still only level 2.

That incredibly bizarre sickness of harming anonymous people only for the sake of harming them, is not nearly as bad as turning productive people into unproductive people living off charity or taxpayer money, according to the Rambam-1.

It is fascinating how the Rambam’s top level of charity is not even considered charity in the popular sense. Employing a worker or giving a loan is not generally seen as charitable, though it is, and the highest level of it. By the very same token, turning productive people into unproductive people is generally not seen as all that harmful, but it is. It is an even higher level of harm than hurting anonymous people for its own sake.

And how does one turn productive people into people dependent on charity?

Let’s take one example from the Social Justice Rav’s Facebook page. He hasn’t blocked me from seeing the page yet, even though after this post he might. (I dare him.)

I mentioned that the reason Rav Shmuly “unfriended” me years ago was that I yelled at him publicly for supporting American intervention in Syria. He was busy thwacking about trying to get politicians to send lethal weapons and training to “the Rebels” to unseat Assad. These weapons and training ultimately ended up in the hands of ISIS, and led to the civil war that caused the Syrian refugee crisis.

And now, Rav Shmuly Yanklowitz, who advocated for the very cause of the Syrian refugee crisis in the first place, is scoring even more social justice publicity points by diarrheaing about how he has personally invited Syrian refugees to his home for Thanksgiving and New Year’s and Whatever.

So not only is the Social Justice Rav advocating for turning productive people (former Syrian citizens) into unproductive people (current Syrian refugees) by rooting and lobbying for war in their former country. He now wants US taxpayers to support these people with free immigration, free healthcare, free education, food stamps and whatnot. And to add even more insult to that injury, he gets all the publicity for helping them out.

Disclaimer: Helping out refugees is a great thing. But not in this case, where he was the one who was rooting the refugee status on in the first place, and he now wants others to pay for it. In this case his hachnasas orchim (taking in guests) is manipulative self-righteous BS, which seems to be the essence of nearly every single one of Rav Shmuly’s initiatives. I support the actual act of taking in refugees, but cannot refrain from calling hypocrisy on the people who help cause the problem to begin with.

This is just the one thing that set me off this time. Shmuly tries to turn productive people into unproductive people by advocating for minimum wage laws, equal-work-equal-pay laws, and boycotting products made in third-world sweatshops. Minimum wage laws prevent the least productive workers from working at all. Equal-work-equal-pay laws prevent women from being productive. Boycotting sweatshops unemploys destitute third world kids from earning enough money so they don’t have to choose between starving to death and performing sexual favors for a piece of bread.

Shmuly spends a lot of his time advocating that unproductive people remain unproductive with labor legislation. He spends the rest of his time demanding that taxpayers support these unproductive people by force.

And then he takes the fruits of his anti labor (Syrian refugees) and manipulates the whole situation to make it look like he’s the good guy.

The harm Rabbi Shmuly “Social Justice” Yanklowitz causes is much worse than the harm that Barry “Tom” Freundel ever caused. Yes, Shmuly has good intentions, and some of his initiatives are good, like this one. and Barry’s intentions were neutral to bad. He never tried to actively harm anyone, but he did cause harm. I’m sure Barry also had some good initiatives over his career as well. They don’t count for much now, at least not in the public consciousness.

But Mao Zedong, the biggest murderer in world history who killed 45 million people in 4 years in an attempt to create a socialist utopia, was filled with good intentions just as well. Good intentions count for nothing. Zero. The only thing that matters is whether you support liberty, or control over other people’s lives. Ultimately, life and death comes down to that single question. This is reality folks, and as Ayn Rand liked to say, “Existence exists.”

If you advocate for a war in a distant country, don’t be surprised if there is a refugee problem. And when there is, don’t you dare ask that other people pay for it.

IRONIC US Says Russian Bombing of Syria will ‘Backfire’

rafifarber Foreign Policy, The Jewish Libertarian Blog ,

How do they find these people? If it isn’t the warmonger calling the psychopath bloodthirsty eh?! Unless I’m mistaken, the US was about to bomb Syria in 2013 for some reason or another but Congress actually said no to something insane for once.

Now all the previous warmongers who were egging Obama on to not only bomb Syria in 2013, but to also ship weapons to ISIS, will all say that the US is right, that Russia bombing Syria will “destabilize the region” and Putin must not be allowed to show such “aggression”.

Warmongers including my favorite guy Shmuly Yanklowitz, who the last time I talked to the warmonger it was about this very issue in 2013. Now I bet he’ll be mouthing off about how Russia should not bomb Syria because war is evil and bombing countries is not the “progressive” thing to do and it’s not a “Jewish value” or “social justice” or something maddeningly cliche like that.

Well all you progressive warmongers should know one thing. I was anti bombing Syria before you all were, and all it took to change your minds was some idiot in the state department who decided to mouth off about how people who aren’t Barack Obama shouldn’t be bombing countries just because they feel like it.

Well, neither should Barack Obama.

The Nuking of Japan Led to the Spread of the Soviet Union

rafifarber Foreign Policy, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

There’s this guy that always comments here about how great war is and how it’s always justified. He’s annoying. His last comment:

Yet again, a “libertarian” regurgitates Soviet/Fascist anti-capitalist propaganda as if it’s just an obvious fact. There’s a well known theory that peoples’ negative views towards Truman’s use of the bomb is in inverse proportion to their knowledge of Japanese conduct in WW2. You certainly conform to the rule perfectly.

Reflective people are happy that Japan was crushed and is now a productive and peaceful part of the international division of labour, rather than the epitome of bloodthirsty, destructive statism and are aware of the chain of causation that brought about this change. Infantile “libertarians” not so much.

First of all, I’m very aware of Japanese war crimes, but he thinks I’m not. I wonder if Gavriel has ever seen the movie “City of Life and Death.” There was a period about two years ago that I watched a whole litany of films on Japanese war crimes during the 1930’s. It started when I saw Ip Man, the movie about Bruce Lee’s martial arts Rebbe. Then I read about him and how he had run away from the Japanese.

I then saw this movie with Christian Bale called the Flowers of War. It’s about the Japanese rape of Nanjing, then capital of China. A mortician is trapped in a monastery with Chinese girls, preteens. The Japanese have conquered the city and attempt to rape the girls. One Chinese soldier saves them. Then the Japanese army demands the girls, and thankfully prostitutes replace them in a clandestine operation and the girls escape the city.

That was nothing compared to the movie City of Life and Death, which is a more historical account of the sickness that happened there. In that movie, the only good guy was a Nazi named John Rabe, who was trying to protect Chinese civilians from Japanese rapist soldiers. The movie had me rooting for a Nazi. The movie was sickening.

After that movie I read more about Nanjing, but Gavriel wants to think that I’m ignorant. The fact is that Gavriel justifies the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese people because of what the Japanese army did. Here’s Ralph Raico on that:

Puzzlingly, high decision-makers continued to justify the mass murder of Japanese civilians by reference to atrocities committed by Japan’s military. In May, for instance, Marshall met with General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project and Henry (“Hap”) Arnold, commander of the Army Air Force. Marshall cautioned that “we should guard against too much gratification” over the success of the air campaign because of the number of innocent casualties. Groves replied that he wasn’t thinking of those victims but rather of the victims of the Bataan death march. When Groves and Arnold left, Arnold slapped his companion on the back, saying, “I’m glad you said that—it’s just the way I feel.”89 Arguments along these lines were used by many leaders, up to and including Truman.

It is difficult to come to grips with what these men were saying. How could cruelty on the part of the Japanese army—at Bataan, in China, or anywhere else—possibly validate the deliberate killing of Japanese innocents, let alone hundreds of thousands of them? Those who employed, or continue to employ, such a calculus live in a strangely amoral mental world.

Genocidal fantasies flitted about in the minds of some. Admiral Halsey, commander in the South Pacific, compared the Japanese unfavorably to the Germans. While the Germans were at worst misled, “at least they react like men. But the Japanese are like animals. . . .

They take to the jungle as if they had been bred there, and like some beasts you never see them until they are dead.” Such beasts had simply to be annihilated. At the first interdepartmental meeting of a committee on how Japan was to be treated after the war, a representative of the Navy recommended “the almost total elimination of the Japanese as a race.” Paul V. McNut, former Democratic governor of Indiana and before and after the war U.S. High Commissioner to the Philippines, was chairman of the War Manpower Commission. His recommendation was “the extermination of the Japanese in toto.”

Elliot Roosevelt, one of the President’s sons, proposed bombing Japan until “half the Japanese civilian population” was killed off.

Gavriel also says it is Soviet/Fascist anti-capitalist propaganda to be against the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Anti capitalist? What the hell is he talking about? In order to be a capitalist you have to support the nuclear bombing of civilians? How can Gavriel not be insane?

But there’s something even he, חכם שאין כמהו hasn’t considered. Maybe the nuking of Japan contributed to the spread of the Soviet Union and Maoist China. Raico again:

Establishment writers on World War II often like to deal in lurid speculations. For instance: if the United States had not entered the war, then Hitler would have “conquered the world” (a sad undervaluation of the Red Army, it would appear; moreover, wasn’t it Japan that was trying to “conquer the world”?) and killed untold millions. Now, applying conjectural history in this case: assume that the Pacific war had ended in the way wars customarily do—through negotiation of the terms of surrender. And assume the worst—that the Japanese had adamantly insisted on preserving part of their Empire, say, Korea and Formosa, even Manchuria. In that event, it is quite possible that Japan would have been in a position to prevent the Communists from coming to power in China. And that could have meant that the many millions of deaths now attributed to the Maoist regime would not have occurred.

Like all ignorant shills for murder, and Keynesians on economic theory, Gavriel does not think more than one step deep. The Japanese army committed war crimes. The Chinese army did too under Mao. The Soviets did as well. And the Nazis. And the American army just as well.

By Gavriel’s logic, the nuking of innocent civilians in America, Russia, China, Germany and Japan that had absolutely nothing to do with their respective army’s atrocities would all be justified and good. And if he doesn’t agree with that, he is “anti-capitalist”. That is the kind of world that Gavriel and other apologists for the nuclear atrocities are logically advocating for.

Because of people like Gavriel, there are atrocities in this world.

Mussolini’s Children Are Trying to Boss Around the 4th Reich

rafifarber Foreign Policy, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

Or is it the Fifth one? I lose count. Some Italian zhlub Prime Minister is set to tell Merkel, apparently, that “enough is enough” and Germany cannot “humiliate” Greece any longer. From The Guardian:

“Now common sense must prevail and an agreement must be reached. Italy does not want Greece to exit the euro and to Germany I say: enough is enough.

Now that Tsipras has made proposals in line with the European demands, we must absolutely sign a deal. Humiliating a European partner after Greece has given up on just about everything is unthinkable.”

HA! You know why Italy with a 132% debt to GDP ratio is trying to bully Merkel around, when German citizens are the ones paying for this crap? Because Italy knows very, very well that it is next in line. If Greece goes, Italy is next.

Greece doesn’t have to be “humiliated”. The Greek government has to be humiliated. Humiliate it. Bring it down. Crush it and starve it so they cannot restrict the Greek people any longer. If I were Merkel, I would say to Greece, simply, “Do whatever you want. Print drachmas, don’t print drachmas, we don’t care. Just, you’re not getting any more money from my taxpayers. And whatever happens happens. Have a nice day.”

Ron Paul’s Swords into Plowshares, Outlander, and other Amazon Orders

rafifarber Foreign Policy, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

I’m headed to America on July 20th with my family. We’re planning on splurging a bit since we don’t have to buy food or electricity or water or whatever else it is we buy on our own that we won’t buy when we’re at our parents’ places. And I’ll still be working, so nothing lost there.

My first mass purchase was based on Bob Wenzel’s post for Ron Paul’s new book Swords into Plowshares. The truth is, these days, I generally find Ron’s commentary somewhat boring because I know it all already. But I love him so much that I am compelled to support him in anything he does, and I urge you to do the same. The man is a Tzadik Gamur, 100%, (a perfect righteous person) one of a handful left on the planet. I am not one. I do not claim to be one. But I can recognize one. Ron Paul is one. And we must support everything he does on the condition that it is just. We can assume everything he does is just until proven otherwise.

So while on Amazon buying Swords into Plowshares, which I will read immediately upon receiving it, I also bought the Game of Thrones books, some Injinji toe socks, a pair of pants because my wife complains there are too many holes in my current pairs of pants, and the Outlander series of books.

Here’s a blurb about each of these purchases. First of all, you’ll notice there are no affiliate links here, at all. That’s because you can give all the money to Bob, Click on his amazon links and give him money. He’s more productive than me so he can use it more to promote the libertarian cause. Maybe one day, with God’s help, I’ll overtake him, but right now I’m still a baby.

Swords and Plowshares, the point is to support Ron over all everyone else calling for more war and bombing, which is most people, including those I hang out with and daven with in Minyan. Everyone wants to kill everyone, for one reason or another. (Again, it’s a wonder I’m still religious.)

As for Game of Thrones, I watch the show because it is anti government. And entertaining. Even the supposed good guys are sometimes evil.

Injinji socks, I have a pair of Vibrams I wear on Har Habayit, and when I’m not suffering from plantar fasciitis due to my flat feet. If anyone has any remedies for that, let me know. I like toe socks.

Most interestingly, Outlander. I got into this show totally accidentally, when one of my wife’s friends recommended it. At first I wasn’t so impressed. Something about stupid magic stones that transformed someone into the past or some nonsense. But towards the end of the season things got really intense.

It ended with a male rape scene that was very difficult to watch. I can handle most violence, but this was a first for me. Watching a male rape scene was horrible. Probably the worst thing I’ve seen on screen. It was not pornographic, they did not show those parts. But emotionally it was something new, because I’ve seen female rape scenes. I do not like them, but being a male I don’t identify with female rape as much as women do. But this I did, and it hurt watching it.

The most real thing about it was, the guy was so abused that at the end, he just acquiesced because there was nothing else he could do about it. Being married to a woman, he felt guilty that he let it happen without fighting at the end, and even liking it because he was no longer being tortured. And he felt he could no longer be married to his wife when he was finally rescued, because he did not fight until the end.

That opened my eyes up to something new. I never even considered the fact that women who are raped may be (and probably are) often biologically compelled to let it happen, on an animalistic level. The human in them fights it, but sexual response is often automated, especially when there is no way of fighting it off physically. The prospect of allowing a rape to happen, and then being forced to biologically respond to it is horrifying. It strips you of your humanity completely, and leads to incredible guilt.

As a man, I have never considered this before. But now I (at least think) I know part of the horror of rape. In the end he recovers, but not without suicidal thoughts.

And that’s why I bought all those things. Hooray for trade.