Victor Orban Running Hungary LIKE A BOSS!!!!

AP  |  As Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban prepares to continue his autocratic governance of Hungary for another four years, he faces a shattered opposition at home but an increasingly isolated position abroad, where his flouting of democratic standards and approach to the war in Ukraine has riled the European Union and other nations.

Never forget this map. It says a lot. https://t.co/xdPGmGMTOB

— Gérard Araud (@GerardAraud) March 25, 2022

On Sunday, as officials from his right-wing Fidesz party gathered at an election night event on the Danube river in Budapest, Orban told supporters that their landslide victory in the country’s national election was a message to Europe that his model of “illiberal democracy” was a prophecy for the continent’s future.

“The whole world has seen tonight in Budapest that Christian democratic politics, conservative civic politics and patriotic politics have won. We are telling Europe that this is not the past, this is the future, our common European future,” Orban said.

 But while Orban’s party won 53% of the vote in Hungary, convincing Europe to get on board won’t be so easy. Orban already faces heavy pressure in the EU to change tack on his approach to corruption, minority rights and media freedom, and as war rages in neighboring Ukraine, his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin have alienated even some of his closest allies. 

During Hungary’s election campaign, a Western-looking coalition of opposition parties challenging Orban called for Hungary to support its embattled neighbor and act in lockstep with its EU and NATO partners.

Yet Orban, considered to be Putin’s closest ally in the EU, insisted that Hungary remain neutral and maintain its close economic ties with Moscow, including continuing to import Russian gas and oil on favorable terms.

Your Humanity Is Of No Consequence In A World Designed And Ruled By Egregores...,

ineteconomics  |  The roots of the neoliberal perspective sprung from a world shattered by the collapse of empires and the chaos produced by the first World War. Austrian economists and business advocates in the 1920s and ‘30s, like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, working at the time in the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, worried about how a rump nation like Austria could get along in the new global landscape. The specter of socialism and communism in Hungary, part of the old Habsburg Empire, which briefly went red in 1919, added to their anxiety. They were also afraid of rising nation-states calling the shots on economic matters by doing things like raising tariffs – especially nations governed by democracies that recognized the interests of regular people. The spread of universal male voting rights set off alarm bells that power was shifting.

How could capitalists survive without a vast network of colonies to rely on for resources? How could they protect themselves from continuing interference in business and seizures of private property? How might they resist increasing democratic demands for more broadly shared economic resources?

These were big questions, and neoliberal answers reflected their fears. From their viewpoint, the political world looked frightening and uncertain – a place where the masses were constantly agitating to disrupt the realm of private enterprise by forming labor unions, conducting protests, and making demands to reallocate resources.

What neoliberals wanted was a sacred space free from such turmoil – a transcendent world economy where capital and goods could flow without restraint. They imagined a place where capitalists were secure from democratic processes and protected by carefully constructed institutions and laws — and by force, if necessary. Neoliberals weren’t fully opposed to democracies as long as they could be constrained to provide a safe haven for capitalists, but if they didn’t, many thought that authoritarianism would do just fine, too.

These early stirrings of neoliberalism were thus a kind of theology, a utopian longing for an abstract, invisible world of numbers that humans could not spoil. In this promised land, talk of social justice and economic plans to enhance the public good was heresy. “Society” was a realm which, at best, should be kept strictly separate from the economy. At worst, it was the enemy of the global economy — the troublesome domain of nonmarket values and popular concerns that got in the way of capitalist transcendence.

After World War II, the neoliberals organized formally as the Mount Pelerin Society, in which key figures like Hayek pushed the vision of a “competitive order” where competition among producers, employers, and consumers would keep the global economy humming along smoothly and protect everybody from abuse (quite an idea, that). Protections like social insurance and regulatory frameworks were unnecessary.

Basically, the market was God, and people were here to serve it – not the other way around.

For neoliberals, the twentieth century wasn’t about the Cold War, which didn’t much interest them. It was about fighting against things like Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and what they considered dangerous totalitarian schemes of economic equality. As historian Quinn Slobodian put it in his book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, they set their sights on the “development of a planet linked by money, information, and goods where the signature achievement of the century was not an international community, a global civil society, or the deepening of democracy, but an ever-integrating object called the world economy and the institutions designated to encase it.”

Neoliberals dedicated themselves to protecting unrestricted global trade, crushing labor unions, deregulating business, and usurping government’s role in providing for the common good with privatization and austerity. While it’s true that most Western governments, as well as powerful global institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, are deeply influenced by neoliberalism today, it really wasn’t until the 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis that most people had even heard of the movement.

That’s because, for a long time, neoliberalism invaded our lives like a stealth virus.

The Courts WILL UPHOLD Cornpop's Mandate And Minority Resistance WILL BE Crushed

LATimes |  As Biden said in introducing his program Thursday, COVID vaccination “is not about freedom or personal choice. it’s about protecting yourself and those around you — the people you work with, the people you care about, the people you love.”

That said, there are still some questions and issues about the program that deserve answers. Here are some of the most important points.

The court

The Supreme Court has endorsed vaccination mandates for more than 105 years. The court first weighed in on mandates in 1905, with a 7-2 decision in Jacobson vs. Massachusetts, upholding a fine imposed by the city of Cambridge, Mass., on a resident who refused to get inoculated against smallpox.

“Upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members,” Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote for the majority.

Harlan saw no problem with constraining “liberty” in the name of public welfare: “In every well-ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand.”

The Jacobson decision has been the linchpin of vaccine requirements coast to coast and at almost all levels of American society. As Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University Law School observed late last year, “All states require childhood vaccines as a condition of school entry.” Adult mandates may be rare, but “at least 16 states require influenza or hepatitis B vaccinations for postsecondary education.”

It’s true that Jacobson has sometimes been exploited to support noxious public policies — Oliver Wendell Holmes cited it as precedent, for instance, in Buck vs. Bell, the 1927 opinion in which he upheld Virginia’s forced sterilization law with the notorious comment, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

It’s also true that the court’s approach to questions of individual rights has evolved over the last century, generally in the direction of narrowing government’s ability to restrict them. But constitutional scholars tend to find that the pandemic is sufficiently dangerous to warrant the constraints Harlan endorsed.

“A law that authorizes mandatory vaccination during an epidemic of a lethal disease ... would undoubtedly be found constitutional,” Wendy Mariner of Boston University wrote in 2005. “However, the vaccine would have to be approved by the FDA as safe and effective, and the law would have to require exceptions for those who have contraindications to the vaccine.” Those conditions would appear to be met by the Biden program.

Federal powers

Biden is relying on the power of federal funding and federal workplace laws. The government’s power to set conditions on its funding are largely unquestioned.

In mentioning an earlier order he issued requiring vaccinations of all nursing home workers who treat Medicare and Medicaid patients, he stated, “I have that federal authority.” The administration’s position is that the same authority extends to firms holding federal contracts and employees of the federal government, as well as 300,000 workers in federally funded Head Start preschool programs.

 

 

 

Corrupt Corrosive Covens That Have Profoundly Damaged America...,

 chicagounheard  |  Teachers unions don’t like to affiliate themselves with police unions.  The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) recently advocated for pulling Chicago police from the city’s schools.  As we see the police brutality against Black people continue unabated even as the light of transparency increases, police unions are not very popular. They protect rogue and abusive police officers and have for hundreds of years.  They fight reform and any sorts of limits on their power. 

And they do their job well.  Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer, who brutally killed George Floyd, had 18 prior complaints against him and still had his job.   Police unions are effective at protecting their members.  

And it is the same with teachers unions. When police officers or teachers are accused of wrongdoing, it is the union that supplies the public relations spin, the lawyers and the defense. 

Teacher unions want you to believe that they are about students, that they are social justice warriors, fighting for sanctuary cities, DREAMers and others, but their fundamental purpose is to increase teachers’ pay, lower their class sizes and protect their jobs.  And in these roles, they are successful.  When I was a teacher, that is what I wanted from my union. 

It is not the union’s job to protect students; their job is to help teachers keep their jobs. Sadly, this is still the teacher union’s job, even when teacher members are sexual molesters and otherwise abusive.  In the 2018 series Betrayed, the Chicago Tribune uncovered hundreds of cases of sexual assault and abuse by teachers and school staff in Chicago’s public schools over the previous 10 years; there are myriad examples of predators moving from school to school. It is impossible to know the exact number because records are spotty.  

In Betrayed, there is evidence of the failings of every step of the school system while the CTU remained silent.  Apparently, their leader, Jesse Sharkey, “missed” the emails from investigators.  What could he say?

It is not hard to argue that these recent actions of both police and teacher unions are not in the public interest. Both enjoy significant political power from supporting elected officials who advocate for them. The unions often fight any legislation aimed at increasing teacher accountability and transparency or eroding the robust job protections that teachers and police officers enjoy.

Sadly, almost everyone has a story of a bad teacher. When I was a teacher, I had a colleague who was just waiting to retire.  For two years, I saw the energetic and intellectually curious 6^th graders in her class shrivel. It was heartbreaking.

The barriers to firing ineffective–not to mention harmful or predatory– teachers are almost insurmountable thanks to tenure laws, which give teachers almost 100% job protection once they have taught for a few years.  This probationary period is different in different districts, but teacher unions always fight for the shortest probationary period possible. 

Both teachers and police officers work with the public when they are at their most vulnerable.

The Golden Rule Is Capitalism's Intrinsic Incompatibility With Democracy

alternet |  The capitalist economic system has always had a big problem with politics in societies with universal suffrage. Anticipating that, most capitalists opposed and long resisted extending suffrage beyond the rich who possessed capital. Only mass pressures from below forced repeated extensions of voting rights until universal suffrage was achieved—at least legally. To this day, capitalists develop and apply all sorts of legal and illegal mechanisms to limit and constrain suffrage. Among those committed to conserving capitalism, fear of universal suffrage runs deep. Trump and his Republicans exemplify and act on that fear as the 2020 election looms.

The problem arises from capitalism’s basic nature. The capitalists who own and operate business enterprises—employers as a group—comprise a small social minority. In contrast, employees and their families are the social majority. The employer minority clearly dominates the micro-economy inside each enterprise. In capitalist corporations, the major shareholders and the board of directors they select make all the key decisions including distribution of the enterprise’s net revenues.

Their decisions allocate large portions of those net revenues to themselves as shareholders’ dividends and top managers’ executive pay packages. Their incomes and wealth thus accumulate faster than the social averages. In privately held capitalist enterprises their owners and top managers behave similarly and enjoy a similar set of privileges. Unequally distributed income and wealth in modern societies flow chiefly from the internal organization of capitalist enterprises. The owners and their top managers then use their disproportionate wealth to shape and control the macro-economy and the politics interwoven with it.

However, universal suffrage makes it possible for employees to undo capitalism’s underlying economic inequalities by political means when, for example, majorities win elections. Employees can elect politicians whose legislative, executive, and judicial decisions effectively reverse capitalism’s economic results. Tax, minimum wage, and government spending laws can redistribute income and wealth in many different ways. If redistribution is not how majorities choose to end unacceptable levels of inequality, they can take other steps. Majorities might, for example, vote to transition enterprises’ internal organizations from capitalist hierarchies to democratic cooperatives. Enterprises’ net revenues would then be distributed not by the minorities atop capitalist hierarchies but instead by democratic decisions of all employees, each with one vote. The multiple levels of inequality typical of capitalism would disappear.

Capitalism’s ongoing political problem has been how best to prevent employees from forming just such political majorities. During its recurring times of special difficulty (periodic crashes, wars, conflicts between monopolized and competitive industries, pandemics), capitalism’s political problem intensifies and broadens. It becomes how best to prevent employees’ political majorities from ending capitalism altogether and moving society to an alternative economic system.

To solve capitalism’s political problem, capitalists as a small social minority must craft alliances with other social groups. Those alliances must be strong enough to defuse, deter, or destroy any and all emerging employee majorities that might threaten capitalists’ interests or their systems’ survival. The smaller or weaker the capitalist minorities are, the more the key alliance they form and rely upon is with the military. In many parts of the world, capitalism is secured by a military dictatorship that targets and destroys emerging movements for anti-capitalist change among employees or among non-capitalist sectors. Even where capitalists are a relatively large, well-established minority, if their social dominance is threatened, say by a large anti-capitalist movement from below, alliance with a military dictatorship may be a last resort survival mechanism. When such alliances culminate in mergers of capitalists and the state apparatus, fascism has arrived.

During capitalism’s non-extreme moments, when not threatened by imminent social explosions, its basic political problem remains. Capitalists must block employee majorities from undoing the workings and results of the capitalist economic system and especially its characteristic distributions of income, wealth, power, and culture. To that end capitalists seek portions of the employee class to ally with, to disconnect from other, fellow employees. They usually work with and use political parties to form and sustain such alliances.

In the words of the great Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, the capitalists use their allied political party to form a “political bloc” with portions of the employee class and possible others outside the capitalist economy. That bloc must be strong enough to thwart the anti-capitalist goals of movements among the employee class. Ideally, for capitalists, their bloc should rule the society—be the hegemonic power—by controlling mass media, winning elections, producing parliamentary majorities, and disseminating an ideology in schools and beyond that justifies capitalism. Capitalist hegemony would then keep anti-capitalist impulses disorganized or unable to build a social movement into a counter-hegemonic bloc strong enough to challenge capitalism’s hegemony.

All-A-Deez Heaux With Rothschild In They Mouf - IS ANTI-SEMITIC!!!!!

blacklistednews |  Jeffrey Epstein's former defense attorney Alan Dershowitz on Wednesday smeared Epstein victim Maria Farmer as "anti-Semitic" while she's in the middle of undergoing treatment for brain cancer and struggling to survive, let alone defend herself.

As the New York Times reported last year, Maria Farmer and her younger sister Annie were the first people to report Epstein to the FBI and NYPD all the way back in 1996.

Dershowitz on Wednesday evening posted an article he wrote for Newsmax titled, "Key Witness in Epstein Case Made Anti-Semitic Claims," where he took comments of hers condemning Ghislaine Maxwell's alleged supremacist views completely out of context and accused her of sharing "anti-Semitic canards" that sound like they came from "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

In one particularly hilarious example, Dershowitz said Farmer was anti-Semitic for saying Epstein and Maxwell were connected to "The Rothschilds" -- even though Dershowitz himself told Fox News' Laura Ingraham on Fox News late last year that he was introduced to Epstein through Lynn Forester de Rothschild!

"Farmer claimed to have evidence that the Israeli Mossad hired Jeffrey Epstein to video tape prominent American political leaders committing acts of pedophilia so that Israel could blackmail them into doing their bidding," Dershowitz said, "and that the entire conspiracy was under the protection and direction of 'The Rothschild's.'"

Dershowitz also constructed this quote of hers where he compiled multiple of her statements into one:

"They are 'Jewish supremacists'" and they are "all connected" through a mysterious organization called MEGA, which is run by Leslie Wexner who is "the head of the snake."

As a reminder, the former Prime Minister of Israel and head of Israeli Military Intelligence, Ehud Barak, was pictured hiding his face while entering Jeffrey Epstein's New York City townhouse (which was given to him for free by pro-Israel billionaire Les Wexner) in 2016.

EXCLUSIVE: Married Israeli politician Ehud Barak is seen hiding his face entering Jeffrey Epstein's NYC townhouse as bevy of young beauties were also spotted going into mansion - despite his claim he NEVER socialized with the pedophile and his girlshttps://t.co/wQBJDkfVzt

— HomerB (@HomerB33) July 16, 2019

Barak also reportedly regularly visited Epstein's other apartment building in New York (which was majority owned by Epstein's mysterious brother Mark who bought the apartments off Les Wexner) where underage girls say they were trafficked.

Jeffrey Epstein: Israeli Politician Ehud Barak Crashed at Epstein Apartment Building, Neighbors Say https://t.co/yM89xoKKBs

— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) August 6, 2019

Nonetheless, according to Epstein-defender Alan Dershowitz, it's "paranoid drivel" (and apparently now anti-Semitic!) to suggest Epstein is connected to the Mossad.

Broadly This Mirrors My Observations and Experiences With WhistleBlowing

nakedcapitalism |  I have had a lifetime to think about why I acted (unsuccessfully) and so many others do not.

I remember once reading about inner city police corruption which seems to come and go in cycles. The article proposed credibly that 90% of policemen were essentially followers and would follow the existing culture of their institutions. The key to eliminating corruption is in the other 10%. People like me. 

10% will act according to their own perception of right and wrong. 90% will imitate the culture that surrounds them. Those ten percent can be as easily agents for bad as agents for good. I would not make the claim that some of us are intrinsically good or bad. I have made many bad choices in my life, despite appearing to make myself the hero of this story. I could easily see myself as one of the mavericks who turned a police force corrupt.

But even among the 10%, I think I am part of an even smaller group. I think only 1% are fearless enough to buck the dominant culture. When a police force goes bad, 9% are leading the bad behavior, and 1% are trying to reverse it. Similarly, when a police force is good, 9% are leading the good behavior, and 1% are trying to reverse it. Often the key to protecting an institution is crushing people like me by “hammering the nail that is sticking out.”

Throughout my life I have been the rare person trying to change the culture wherever I go. Usually I am unsuccessful. When I am successful, I sometimes do more harm than good. We should be glad there are not more mavericks in the world. It would be anarchy. We should be glad that 90% of people fundamentally work to protect their institutions, even if those institutions are flawed.

Returning to the role of the enabler, let’s talk about Hillary and Jim Jordan. Of course, both people are part of the 90%. Of course, the Secretary of State, and a coach at a major university, have primary responsibility to protect their institutions. Protecting the institution is the very definition of those roles. Despite the significant power that they could have used to thwart evil, doing so would have undermined their primary roles. And like the Tuck Dean in my story, I am not even convinced they had anywhere near enough insight (if any) to have taken credible action.

In my case I may have done some good, even though it did not feel like it at the time. Although the parents I approached vociferously defended my father, I do know that my fathers’ access to him decreased, and had the situation continued there was less likelihood of those parents remaining enablers. I also know that word got back to my father, and although we broke off any further relationship, he had to be aware that people were watching him.

Years later I discovered that there was open communication amongst our family about my fathers’ predation, which surprised me. I always thought it remained a hidden secret. Maybe my actions had something to do with this. The life lesson for me is that speaking out is effective for would-be enablers despite the violent push-back and self-doubt. It sets the tone for everyone else in your system.

Calling Things By Their Real Names

charleshughsmith | In last week's explanation of why the Federal Reserve is evil, I invoked the principle of calling things by their real names, a concept that drew an insightful commentary from longtime correspondent Chad D.:

Thank you, Charles, for calling out the Fed for their evil ways. We have to properly name things before we can properly address them. I would add that the Fed's endless creation of "money" to hand out to connected bankers (not all bankers) is just one facet of the evil. The evil also manifests itself as extraordinary political-economical power in a system that allows legalized bribery disguised as free speech.

One does not need money to speak/write to convey one's thoughts, but what money does allow is the drowning out of speech of those without money by those with a lot of money. In essence, the ultra-rich (i.e. the top .01%) get a huge megaphone to blare their thoughts, many of which are deliberately used to disorient and confuse the common man through the major media and so-called higher institutions of learning. Hence, we get common folk actively fighting for policies and laws that are against their own personal interests, such as promoting "free trade" agreements that are really managed trade agreements, whereby domestic workers are forced to complete with workers in other countries who make a pittance and are not protected by labor or environmental laws.

These agreements are part of a legal, yet unjust, framework that gives unfair, competitive advantages to large, multinational businesses at the expense of their smaller domestic and international competitors, which includes the abridgment of basic rights to settle disputes in a real court of law, not some kangaroo arbitration process with biased "judges".

And we must not forget the bailouts, lack of prosecution for economic crimes, such as fraud and monopolistic and deceptive trade practices, and tax loopholes, all of which are bought in one way or another from the compromised "representatives" and "public servants" within the system.

Trump Impeached for Interfering with A System of "Woke, Self-Serving, Lying and Looting"

mattstoller.substack |  If the goal of economics were to ascertain truthful views about the world, if economics were as its proponents offer, a ‘science,’ then one would remark on the lack of self-policing within the profession. Of course, given that there is limited self-policing at best and the top practitioners in the field are routinely wrong about fundamental questions, we can conclude that uncovering truth may be an incidental outcome of the practice of economics, but it is certainly not the goal of the discipline.

Methodological Biases in Economics

There are three main problems with economics as a ‘science’ that can guide public policy choices. The first is that it is a post-mortem discipline. Economists often assert we need data before drawing conclusions. Economist Thomas Phillipon noted this in his book on the institutional basis of markets that an economist was like that of Sherlock Holmes, asserting ‘data data data, I cannot make bricks without clay.” And yet, there was no data in 2000 when the U.S. changes its policies vis-a-vis China, because the consequences were in the future. There’s nothing wrong with being a study of the past that has a specific quantitative framework, as long as there is a genuine acknowledgment that there’s no science here and projections have no scientific validity whatsoever. 

The second is that using economics to make judgments about the world can be extraordinarily costly and exclusionary. This may or may not be a big deal when considering macro-economic forecasting, but when economics becomes a key part of institutional legal arguments it shades who can use the law to protect their rights. For example, showing that someone robbed me by breaking into my house requires evidence and common sense. But bringing an antitrust lawsuit showing someone robbed me by excluding me from a market often requires millions in economics consulting services. If you don’t have that money, the law becomes meaningless.

The third is that an obsession with quantifying leads to political control by those who have access to data. A well-known example is famous economist Alan Krueger, who was paid by Uber and then wrote widely circulated scholarship based on internal Uber data about the corporation’s wage setting terms. But it’s broader than just one company, most of the big tech platforms work with economists, giving these powerful corporate entities a measure of political control over lines of research. Beyond tech, it’s actually quite hard to get information on a whole host of practices in the economy. For example, the Trump administration had to battle hospitals just to get them to disclose their official price list for different procedures (which isn’t even real considering the extent of secret discounts and rebates throughout the industry).

The Vast Fortune Behind Trump's Immigration Regime

splinternews |  Tanton’s individual persistence was at bottom made possible by the greater persistence of wealth across generations in the United States, coming to fruition in the hundreds of millions of dollars that Cordelia Scaife May left to the Colcom Foundation when she died. What endures is not any individual or personality but capital and institutions. Tanton’s best political skill was not his analysis or his rhetoric but his ability to flatter wealthy racists. He was not a great theoretician or leader or organizer, but an adroit servant of capital’s class interests, for this is how the capitalist class exerts power—not by engaging in democratic politics, but by creating a bulwark against it.

Ironically, Tanton recognized this dynamic himself, however accidentally, in his striving for an essentially American identity. “I think there is such a thing as an American culture, however difficult it may be to define,” he once mused. “For instance, the United States is the most philanthropic society on the face of the earth, and most of the work that FAIR and our opponents do is supported by philanthropy. Few, if any, other cultures have developed the idea of public philanthropy as strongly as we have here.”

What he failed to recognize is that the very idea of public philanthropy as it is practiced in the United States of America is wholly the creation of the American plutocracy—wealthy industrialists and corporate scions seeking ways to consolidate and protect their money over time. While the practice of establishing private family trusts and foundations and of spending copious amounts of money on ostensibly philanthropic (though in fact political) causes is now commonplace among the capitalist class, it was not always so. The first of these, the Rockefeller Foundation, was formed in 1913; a century later, according to political scientist Robert Reich, there were over 100,000 private foundations in the United States, controlling over $800 billion. “The tax code turned many extraordinarily wealthy families, intent upon preserving their fortunes, into major forces in America’s civic sector,” Jane Mayer writes in Dark Money. “In order to shelter themselves from taxes, they were required to invent a public philanthropic role.”

Scaife, were the beneficiaries of two charitable trusts of $50 million each, structured such that, after 20 years of donating all net income from the trusts to nonprofit charities, the siblings would receive their $50 million principals. Their mother did the same in 1961, setting up a pair of $25 million trusts, and again in 1963, setting up another $100 million in trusts for her grandchildren. Mellon Scaife, who once called a reporter for the Columbia Journalism Review a “fucking Communist cunt,” would go on to make some $1 billion in political and philanthropic contributions over a 50-year period, anticipating the Koch brothers’ current reign and shaping the right-wing of American politics for half a century. In a secret memoir, obtained by Mayer, Mellon Scaife gloated, “Isn’t it grand how tax law gets written?”

There is deep and horrible irony in Mellon family money, which powered American imperialism in Central and South America and which grew as a result of that imperial expansion, now being spent to denigrate and punish the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the men and women whose countries the Mellons helped to colonize, who now come to the United States seeking respite from their nations’ ruin. For people like Tanton and Scaife May or organizations like FAIR and CIS, the point is not to purge the United States of immigrants wholly but to ensure the continued immiseration and suffering of the poor and the dispossessed—the most destitute of whom, it is no accident, are mostly people of color.

The activity of the Tanton network and the support it has received from one of America’s oldest imperial families shows above all how one faction of the ruling class, at least, imagines it can create a permanent underclass from which to extract value: first, by dehumanizing migrants in the minds of the citizens; then, by allowing them to sell their labor to employers across the country; and finally, in the prisons and detention centers where they are housed until deportation, and the cycle begins anew. In turn, this contributes to the continued creation of a massive population of surplus labor, which puts downward pressure on wages for all workers.

Tipping point for large-scale social change

sciencedaily  |  According to a new paper published in Science, there is a quantifiable answer: Roughly 25% of people need to take a stand before large-scale social change occurs. This idea of a social tipping point applies to standards in the workplace and any type of movement or initiative.

Online, people develop norms about everything from what type of content is acceptable to post on social media, to how civil or uncivil to be in their language. We have recently seen how public attitudes can and do shift on issues like gay marriage, gun laws, or race and gender equality, as well as what beliefs are or aren't publicly acceptable to voice.

During the past 50 years, many studies of organizations and community change have attempted to identify the critical size needed for a tipping point, purely based on observation. These studies have speculated that tipping points can range anywhere between 10 and 40%.

The problem for scientists has been that real-world social dynamics are complicated, and it isn't possible to replay history in precisely the same way to accurately measure how outcomes would have been different if an activist group had been larger or smaller.

"What we were able to do in this study was to develop a theoretical model that would predict the size of the critical mass needed to shift group norms, and then test it experimentally," says lead author Damon Centola, Ph.D., associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Drawing on more than a decade of experimental work, Centola has developed an online method to test how large-scale social dynamics can be changed.

In this study, "Experimental Evidence for Tipping Points in Social Convention," co-authored by Joshua Becker, Ph.D., Devon Brackbill, Ph.D., and Andrea Baronchelli, Ph.D., 10 groups of 20 participants each were given a financial incentive to agree on a linguistic norm. Once a norm had been established, a group of confederates -- a coalition of activists that varied in size -- then pushed for a change to the norm.

When a minority group pushing change was below 25% of the total group, its efforts failed. But when the committed minority reached 25%, there was an abrupt change in the group dynamic, and very quickly the majority of the population adopted the new norm. In one trial, a single person accounted for the difference between success and failure.

The Destructive Dynamics of the Small Minority

NYTimes  |  Most Americans assume that democracy and free markets go hand in hand, naturally working together to generate prosperity and freedom. For the United States, this has largely been true. But by their very nature, markets and democracy coexist in deep tension.

Capitalism creates a small number of very wealthy people, while democracy potentially empowers a poor majority resentful of that wealth. In the wrong conditions, that tension can set in motion intensely destructive politics. All over the world, one circumstance in particular has invariably had this effect: the presence of a market-dominant minority — a minority group, perceived by the rest of the population as outsiders, who control vastly disproportionate amounts of a nation’s wealth.

Such minorities are common in the developing world. They can be ethnic groups, like the tiny Chinese minority in Indonesia, which controls roughly 70 percent of the nation’s private economy even though it is between 2 percent and 4 percent of the population. Or they can be distinct in other ways, culturally or religiously, like the Sunni minority in Iraq that controlled the country’s vast oil wealth under Saddam Hussein.

Introducing free-market democracy in these circumstances can be a recipe for disaster. Resentful majorities who see themselves as a country’s rightful owners demand to have “their” country back. Ethnonationalism rears its head. Democracy becomes not a vehicle for e pluribus unum but a zero-sum tribalist contest. This dynamic was also at play in the former Yugoslavia, in Zimbabwe, in Venezuela and in virtually every country where there has been a market-dominant minority.

For most of our history, it seemed as though we were relatively immune to dynamics like these. Part of the reason is we never had a market-dominant minority. On the contrary, for 200 years, America was economically, politically and culturally dominated by a white majority — a politically stable, if often invidious, state of affairs.

But today, something has changed. Race has split America’s poor, and class has split America’s white majority. The former has been true for a while; the latter is a more recent development, at least in the intense form it has now reached. As a result, we may be seeing the emergence of America’s own version of a market-dominant minority: the much-discussed group often referred to as the coastal elites — misleadingly, because its members are neither all coastal nor all elite, at least in the sense of being wealthy.

But with some important caveats, coastal elites do bear a resemblance to the market-dominant minorities of the developing world. Wealth in the United States is extraordinarily concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of people, many of whom live on the West or East Coast. Although America’s coastal elites are not an ethnic or religious minority, they are culturally distinct, often sharing similar cosmopolitan values, and they are extremely insular, interacting and intermarrying primarily among themselves.

They dominate key sectors of the economy, including Wall Street, the media, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. And because coastal elites are viewed by many in the heartland as “minority-loving” and pro-immigrant, they are seen as unconcerned with “real” Americans — indeed as threatening their way of life.

The Alt-Right and the Jewish Question

Quillette |  For many on the alt-right, every grievance is, at root, about Jews. Andrew Anglin, host of the most popular alt-right/neo-Nazi website, explains: “the only thing in our movement that really matters [is] anti-Semitism.” If only the Jews were gone, he argues, the white race, freed from bondage, would immediately overcome all of its problems. Where does this attitude come from?

Jews are a conspicuous people, small in number but large in footprint. As Mark Twain wrote in 1899:

If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one quarter of one percent of the human race….Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk….What is the secret of his immortality?

For many people throughout history, the answer to Twain’s question was simple: Jews conspire among themselves to dominate and disadvantage gentiles. This answer fell out of fashion, at least in polite society, after World War II. Since the 1990s, however, the conspiratorial account of Jewish prominence has taken on a new, more meretricious form in the work of (now retired) California State University, Long Beach psychologist Kevin MacDonald, known affectionately among alt-righters as “KMac.” According to Richard Spencer, the inventor of the term “alt-right” and unofficial leader of the movement: “There is no man on the planet who has done more for the understanding of the pole around which the world revolves than Kevin MacDonald.” And: “KMac…may be the most essential man in our movement in terms of thought leader[ship].” To understand the alt-right’s anti-Semitism, we must understand MacDonald’s ideas, particularly as outlined in his most influential book, The Culture of Critique.

According to MacDonald, Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy.” Jews possess both genetic and cultural adaptations (including, on the genetic side, high IQ and ethnocentrism) that allow them to develop successful intellectual movements that undermine gentile society and promote their own group continuity. “Jewish intellectual movements,” MacDonald argues, are led by charismatic figures analogous to rabbis. They attack white nationalism while promoting Jewish nationalism, and use pseudoscience to “pathologize” anti-Semitism, which in reality is a justified response to “Jewish aggression.” According to MacDonald, Jewish intellectual movements include Freudianism, Frankfurt School critical theory, and multiculturalism. These movements, MacDonald claims, taught white gentiles to reject ethnocentrism and accept high levels of nonwhite immigration to their countries while tolerating Jewish ethnocentrism and racially restrictive immigration policies in Israel.

MacDonald’s theory and the anti-Semitism of many on the alt-right are largely reactions to the perceived liberalism of Jews. One of us (Cofnas) has just published an academic paper that examines MacDonald’s most influential book, The Culture of Critique, and finds that it is chock full of misrepresented sources, cherry-picked facts, and egregious distortions of history. MacDonald and the alt-righters are, nevertheless, correct that many liberal leaders over the last hundred years have been Jewish. We’d like to offer an explanation for this phenomenon, as well as determine whether Jewish liberalism is the cause or the result of anti-Semitism.

Record Number of Visitors Attend Florida Gun Show

dailymail |  The Florida Gun Show had never seen a crowd as big as the one it saw this weekend, according to organizers.

Almost 7,000 people showed up to The Florida Gun Show in Tampa this weekend, nearly two weeks after a gunman killed 17 teachers and students at a high school in the state.

'Some of the people attending are afraid that future legislation will impact their gun ownership rights,' manager George Fernandez told WTSP. 

Indeed, the gun business becomes more profitable after mass shootings, as gun owners become afraid of public backlash causing restrictions to their Second Amendment rights.

Why the Future Doesn't Need Us

ecosophia |  Let’s start with the concept of the division of labor. One of the great distinctions between a modern industrial society and other modes of human social organization is that in the former, very few activities are taken from beginning to end by the same person. A woman in a hunter-gatherer community, as she is getting ready for the autumn tuber-digging season, chooses a piece of wood, cuts it, shapes it into a digging stick, carefully hardens the business end in hot coals, and then puts it to work getting tubers out of the ground. Once she carries the tubers back to camp, what’s more, she’s far more likely than not to take part in cleaning them, roasting them, and sharing them out to the members of the band.

A woman in a modern industrial society who wants to have potatoes for dinner, by contrast, may do no more of the total labor involved in that process than sticking a package in the microwave. Even if she has potatoes growing in a container garden out back, say, and serves up potatoes she grew, harvested, and cooked herself, odds are she didn’t make the gardening tools, the cookware, or the stove she uses. That’s division of labor: the social process by which most members of an industrial society specialize in one or another narrow economic niche, and use the money they earn from their work in that niche to buy the products of other economic niches.

Let’s say it up front: there are huge advantages to the division of labor.  It’s more efficient in almost every sense, whether you’re measuring efficiency in terms of output per person per hour, skill level per dollar invested in education, or what have you. What’s more, when it’s combined with a social structure that isn’t too rigidly deterministic, it’s at least possible for people to find their way to occupational specialties for which they’re actually suited, and in which they will be more productive than otherwise. Yet it bears recalling that every good thing has its downsides, especially when it’s pushed to extremes, and the division of labor is no exception.

Crackpot realism is one of the downsides of the division of labor. It emerges reliably whenever two conditions are in effect. The first condition is that the task of choosing goals for an activity is assigned to one group of people and the task of finding means to achieve those goals is left to a different group of people. The second condition is that the first group needs to be enough higher in social status than the second group that members of the first group need pay no attention to the concerns of the second group.

Consider, as an example, the plight of a team of engineers tasked with designing a flying car.  People have been trying to do this for more than a century now, and the results are in: it’s a really dumb idea. It so happens that a great many of the engineering features that make a good car make a bad aircraft, and vice versa; for instance, an auto engine needs to be optimized for torque rather than speed, while an aircraft engine needs to be optimized for speed rather than torque. Thus every flying car ever built—and there have been plenty of them—performed just as poorly as a car as it did as a plane, and cost so much that for the same price you could buy a good car, a good airplane, and enough fuel to keep both of them running for a good long time.

Engineers know this. Still, if you’re an engineer and you’ve been hired by some clueless tech-industry godzillionaire who wants a flying car, you probably don’t have the option of telling your employer the truth about his pet project—that is, that no matter how much of his money he plows into the project, he’s going to get a clunker of a vehicle that won’t be any good at either of its two incompatible roles—because he’ll simply fire you and hire someone who will tell him what he wants to hear. Nor do you have the option of sitting him down and getting him to face what’s behind his own unexamined desires and expectations, so that he might notice that his fixation on having a flying car is an emotionally charged hangover from age eight, when he daydreamed about having one to help him cope with the miserable, bully-ridden public school system in which he was trapped for so many wretched years. So you devote your working hours to finding the most rational, scientific, and utilitarian means to accomplish a pointless, useless, and self-defeating end. That’s crackpot realism.

You can make a great party game out of identifying crackpot realism—try it sometime—but I’ll leave that to my more enterprising readers. What I want to talk about right now is one of the most glaring examples of crackpot realism in contemporary industrial society. Yes, we’re going to talk about space travel again.

Manipulated Minorities

TheSaker |  Question: why does the US foreign policies always support various minorities? Is it out of kindness? Or a sense of fairness? Could it be out of a deep sense of guilt of having committed the only “pan-genocide” in human history (the genocide of all the ethnic groups of an entire continent)? Or maybe a deep sense of guilt over slavery? Are the beautiful words of the Declaration of Independence “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” really inspiring US foreign policies?

Hardly.

I submit that the real truth is totally different. My thesis is very simple: the reason why the US always support foreign minorities to subvert states and use domestic minorities to suppress the majority US population is because minorities are very easy to manipulate and because minorities present no threat to the real rulers of the AngloZionist Empire. That’s all there is to it.

I think that minorities often, but not always, act and perceive things in a way very different from the way majority groups do. Here is what I have observed:

Let’s first look at minorities inside the USA:

1. They are typically far more aware of their minority identity/status than the majority. That is to say that if the majority is of skin color A and the minority of skin color B, the minority will be much more acutely aware of its skin color.
2. They are typically much more driven and active then the majority. This is probably due to their more acute perception of being a minority.
3. They are only concerned with single-issue politics, that single-issue being, of course, their minority status.
4. Since minorities are often unhappy with their minority-status, they are also often resentful of the majority.
5. Since minorities are mostly preoccupied by their minority-status linked issue, they rarely pay attention to the ‘bigger picture’ and that, in turn, means that the political agenda of the minorities typically does not threaten the powers that be.
6. Minorities often have a deep-seated inferiority complex towards the putatively more successful majority.
7. Minorities often seek to identify other minorities with which they can ally themselves against the majority.

To this list of characteristics, I would add one which is unique to foreign minorities, minorities outside the USA: since they have no/very little prospects of prevailing against the majority, these minorities are very willing to ally themselves with the AngloZionist Empire and that, in turn, often makes them depended on the AngloZionist Empire, often even for their physical survival.

Doing Their Best To Be Accepted Until Their Host Community Tired Of Them..,

NYTimes |  Israelis know well that Jew-hatred fuels much of the continuing Arab assault on the Jewish state. But worry about anti-Semitism outside the region and unrelated to the conflict is ballast we have long-since jettisoned.

This summer, I taught a course at Jerusalem’s Shalem College on foundational American texts. We read the Declaration of Independence; some Federalist Papers including James Madison’s Federalist No. 10 on the danger of “factions”; Abraham Lincoln’s 1838 “Lyceum Address” on the rule of the mob; the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail”; Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me”; and more.

To illustrate how alive the issues raised in these texts remain, this week I had the students — a highly knowledgeable group of undergraduates — watch video footage of Charlottesville. They sat stunned as they watched the parade of the torches, an image they understood. When I explained that the men with flak jackets, helmets and semiautomatic weapons were the protesters, not the police, they were incredulous. When the Nazi flags appeared, the room was silent except for the sounds of the protesters onscreen.

Then the video cut to one of the marchers, who explained their “republican principles.” The first was the supremacy of “white culture.” The students listened, disgusted. The second was free-market capitalism. Still, they were quiet. Then, the third principle, the protester said, was “killing Jews.” The entire class burst into laughter.

Stunned, I paused the video. Even with the video stilled, they were chuckling. I asked them what they found so amusing. Finally, one student said: “What, does this guy believe that in today’s world you can just go out and kill Jews? It’s funny, that’s all.”

It is, of course, not funny at all, but I chose to focus their attention on the history behind their laughter. “You,” I said, “are actually the living embodiment of that new Jew of whom Nordau and Jabotinsky wrote. People say they hate blacks, and you watch in stunned, horrified silence. They say they’re going to kill Jews, and you laugh.” Israel has normalized Jewish existence in ways of which the headlines rarely remind us.

Not everyone is equally complacent. The morning after Mr. Trump’s Tuesday news conference in which he walked back the conciliatory tone of his Monday statement, I woke up to an email from our 27-year-old son Avi, studying law at Hebrew University after eight years in the army.

“Has the day arrived?” was the subject. “I have a very clear memory from 7th grade of coming home from school after several hours of classes on the Holocaust,” he wrote. “I remember saying to you, ‘Abba, I don’t understand why we spend so much time learning about the Holocaust. It can never happen again and the U.S. will always be there to protect us.’ As the years went by, I wondered if I would live to see the day when America would no longer ‘be there’ for us anymore. I thought about that a lot during my time in the army. Today, for the first time in my life, I asked myself if that day had arrived.”

Has it? I pray not, though it is too early to tell. But here is what we do know. The tiny, embattled country our family now calls home has raised a generation of young people to understand that ultimately, the only people who can be fully trusted to safeguard the safety of the Jews are the Jews. For having afforded our children a chance to grow up with no sense of the vulnerability that we knew growing up in America, we owe Israel and its founders a profound debt of gratitude. It is a debt that I don’t believe we fully appreciated until Charlottesville and its disgraceful aftermath.

Mythology of American Democracy (Why So Butthurt About Trump!)

carrollquigley |  I am going to give you an historical view of the American democratic tradition with analytical overtones showing how democracy has changed over the course of our history. The United States is a democracy. I think there is no doubt of that — but the American democratic tradition is largely a myth.

   First, a few definitions. I define democracy as majority rule and minority rights. Of these the second is more important than the first. There are many despotisms which have majority rule. Hitler held plebiscites in which he obtained over 92 percent of the vote, and most of the people who were qualified to vote did vote. I think that in China today a majority of the people support the government, but China is certainly not a democracy.

   The essential half of this definition then, is the second half, minority rights. What that means is that a minority has those rights which enable it to work within the system and to build itself up to be a majority and replace the governing majority. Moderate deviations from majority rule do not usually undermine democracy. In fact, absolute democracy does not really exist at the nation-state level. For example, a modest poll tax as a qualification for voting would be an infringement on the principle of majority rule but restrictions on the suffrage would have to go pretty far before they really abrogated democracy. On the other hand relatively slight restrictions on minority rights — the freedoms of speech, assembly, and other rights — would rapidly erode democracy.

   Another basic point. Democracy is not the highest political value. Speeches about democracy and the democratic tradition might lead you to think this is the most perfect political system ever devised. That just isn't true. There are other political values which are more important and urgent—security, for example. And I would suggest that political stability and political responsibility are also more important.

   In fact, I would define a good government as a responsible government. In every society there is a structure of power. A government is responsible when its political processes reflect that power structure, thus ensuring that the power structure will never be able to overthrow the government. If a society in fact could be ruled by a minority because that elite had power to rule and the political system reflected that situation by giving governing power to that elite, then, it seems to me, we would have a responsible government even though it was not democratic.

   Some of you are looking puzzled. Why do we have democracy in this country? I'll give you a blunt and simple answer, which means, of course, that it's not the whole truth. We have democracy because around 1880 the distribution of weapons in this society was such that no minority could make a majority obey. If you have a society in which weapons are cheap, so that almost anyone can obtain them, and are easy to use — what I call amateur weapons — then you have democracy. But if the opposite is true, weapons extremely expensive and very difficult to use — the medieval knight, for example, with his castle, the supreme weapons of the year 1100 — in such a system, with expensive and difficult-to-use weapons, you could not possibly have majority rule. But in 1880 for $100 you could get the two best weapons in the world, a Winchester rifle and a Colt revolver; so almost anyone could buy them. With weapons like these in the hands of ordinary people, no minority could make the majority obey a despotic government.

   Now there are some features of democracy that many people really do not understand. It is said, for example, that our officials are elected by the voters, and the one that gets the most votes is elected. I suggest that this is misleading. The outcome of an election is not determined by those who vote, but by those who don't vote. Since 1945 or so, we have had pretty close elections, with not much more than half of the people voting. In the 1968 election about 80 million voted, and about 50 million qualified to vote did not. The outcome was determined by the 50 million who didn't vote. If you could have got 2 percent of the nonvoters to the polls to vote for your candidate, you could have elected him. And that has been true of most of our recent elections. It's the ones who don't vote who determine the outcome.

   Something else we tend to overlook is that the nomination process is much more important than the election process. I startle a lot of my colleagues who think they know England pretty well by asking them how candidates for election are nominated in England. They don't have conventions or primary elections. So the important thing is who names the candidates. In any democratic country, if you could name the candidates of all parties, you wouldn't care who voted or how, because your man would be elected. So the nominations are more important than the elections.

   A third point is one I often make in talking with students who are discouraged about their inability to influence the political process. I say this is nonsense. There never was a time when it was easier for ordinary people to influence political affairs than today. One reason, of course, is that big mass of nonvoters. If you can simply get 2 or 3 percent of them to the polls — and that shouldn't be too difficult — then you can elect your candidate, whoever he is.

Once You See The Mechanism Of Political Control, You Can't Unsee It

Tonight: Stephen read through James Comey's pre-written testimony, and found some pretty weird stuff. #LSSC pic.twitter.com/XUWcabcyul

— The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) June 8, 2017

dailybeast |  Colbert relished imagining just how President Trump informed Comey that he “had not been involved with hookers in Russia.” As the host joked, “Comey replied, I understand Mr. President, but I just asked what you had for breakfast.”

On their unexpectedly private dinner, which took place a few weeks later, Colbert said, “Oh, c’mon, that’s the oldest trick in the book. You invite your FBI director over for a movie, saying it’s going to be a ‘group thing.’ When he shows up, it’s just the two of you. Can’t make Netflix word so, you know… so you obstruct justice.”

Trump’s “bombshell” at that particular meeting was telling Comey, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” In response, Comey says, “I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed.” “Basically, Comey treated Trump like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park,” Colbert said. “It makes sense, they both have the same sized hands.”

Among the “weird stuff” in Comey’s remarks, Colbert said, was the fact that Trump repeatedly referred to his Russia scandal as “the cloud” over his administration. “Mr. President, that’s not a cloud,” Colbert told Trump. “Meteorologists call that a shitstorm.”

Colonial Mentality Notwithstanding Israel is Not a Western Country

jerusalempost |  In 1946 there were only 543,000 Jews in Palestine. Between 1954 and 1964, according to the Immigrant Absorption Ministry, around 250,000 Jews came to Israel from Morocco. You’d think the musical impact of that community, almost a third of the country’s population at the time, would be immediate and that by 2017 European-origin Israelis would no longer be whining about it. But they still are whining, because for some of them Israel cannot have diversity, it cannot have Ethiopian culture, or Russian culture, or Moroccan or Iranian or even Arabic culture. These Israelis have waged a jihad against everything non-Western since 1948, and they have lost.

To those Israelis who dreamed of Israel being a “villa in the jungle,” a kind of Denmark in the Middle East, or a kind of Rhodesia, everything that was non-European was “primitive.” Journalist Ari Shavit asked fellow writer Amos Elon if Israel had this “primitiveness” in a 2004 interview and Elon agreed; the “primitiveness” comes from the Arab countries, he said. What he meant was Jews from those countries.

This colonial mentality of a subset of Israeli society cannot accept that Israel is not a Western country, that it has major influences from non-European peoples and cultures. It is a hybrid civilization, with Western currents in it but a foundation that is rooted in the Middle East. Jewish civilization has always had that hybridity. Since the time of the Hasmoneans fighting the Greeks and the war with Rome, or the expulsion from Spain at the hands of Catholic Europeans, Jewish history has been East struggling with the West.

Some Jewish thinkers cannot accept this. Richard Cohen in his 2014 book Israel: Is it Good for the Jews predicted what would happen when Israel’s “fighting intellectual, rifle in one hand and a volume of Kierkegaard in the other,” became a minority and “Jews from Islamic lands” became the majority. Cohen didn’t realize Israel was never a country of “Jews holding Kierkegaard in one hand.” This was a myth invented among American Jews about Israel, in order to convince themselves Israel was like a miniature version of the Upper West Side in New York, only with tanks and a flag.

Why the fear of “Jews from Islamic lands,” who are presented as barbarians by Israel’s European-rooted writers and their fellow travelers abroad? The same “Western values” that welcome Syrian refugees in Europe despise Syrian Jews in Israel? The same people who value the diversity Moroccan immigrants bring to Paris despise Moroccan Jews in Israel.

Because Israel’s Europhile cultural minority is rooted in a different time, the era of Rhodesia and the Old South, when non-Europeans were still openly called primitives. They cannot accept that Israel is not a Western state and that the revolution of Zionism has overthrown Europeanism in “their” Levant. They cannot accept the hybrid culture of Israel. This is why they imagine that only when Israelis are not “welcomed” in Europe will Israelis end the occupation of the West Bank.