Blog/August 2017/Aug 18th

August 18th

There’s a lot to get into this week, but first: it was a normally-good week for us, personally.

• You can skip past the political section
• Or just go to the menu

Political

With that out of the way, I’d like to talk a bit about this week’s insanity in the USA. Please bear with me. Let’s start off with a number of videos discussing the events in Charlottesville, VA this week:

• Sargon’s “This Week in Stupid”, discussing the “Unite the Right” rally, and explaining who the “Alt-Right” and “Antifa” are. He supports Trump’s statement (in his first after the event) that “both sides” were bad.
• Ben Shapiro’s first podcast on the subject, also laying out who the players are and what they believe. He lambastes Trump for equivocating regarding his knowledge of just who the “Alt-Right” consist of.
• Another video by Sargon: “Weimar in America”, where he details just how evil Antifa and the Alt-Right really are.
• Lauren Southern and Brittany Pettibone’s video “They Don't Care About Your Disavowal”, making the case that whatever Trump (or anyone on “the Right”) may say to disavow affiliation with “hate groups”, “the Left” will never accept their disavowal.

Lots of material to view, but it’s useful if you want to understand the background.

One thing should be quite clear: “Antifa” are radical-Left collectivists. The “Alt-Right” are radical-Right collectivists. Neither believes in Western values, and both desire the violent overthrow of the US and Western civilization in general. Neither believes in “freedom of speech”, even when applied to anyone inside their particular tribe; rather, they believe in uniformity of The Collective — all-Red or all-White, it’s the same garbage in slightly different wrappers. The difference between the groups is that “Antifa” are anarchists and communists, who group people according to their “class”, while the “Alt-Right” are “White Supremacists” and “Identitarians” who group people according to their “race” or “ethnicity”. As The Bard said, “A plague a’ both your houses”; they’re both repugnant and they’re both enemies of Western values.

If you only ever read the MSM’s account of things, you might think that Antifa are the “good guys”, to be compared to the brave multitudes of Allied soldiers who stormed Normandy beach in WWII. The truth is, rather, that they are more directly comparable to the Red Mobs in Weimar Germany of the 1920s, and the Alt-Right are like the Brown-shirts.

This is not good at all. When major publications like The New Yorker and The Economist both portray Trump with KKK regalia, the situation can only get worse.

You may or may not like Trump, you may even truly despise him — but he’s not a racist, and portraying him as one despite all evidence to the contrary only serves to further radicalize rightward those who are fed-up with incessant far-Left propaganda. The Alt-Right is mostly composed of young people, not old white racists. Think on that while you still can. Trump was correct when he stated that “both sides” were wrong. They are.

All that said, I strongly disagree with those who say that “yes, freedom-of-speech is important, but some speech is beyond the Pale”. Absolutely not. If “hateful” speech is not protected, then neither is “non-hateful” speech. Once you cede your freedoms, those in power will erode them until you’ve none left. And that is precisely what we see happening in the MSM, in “Social Media”, and in Academia. To wit: Sargon’s been banned from Twitter though his content is very even-handed. He and Lauren Southern (and many, many others) have been “demonetized” on YouTube. The Left is pushing hard to enforce uniformity of thought, and the backlash is gaining momentum.

Let’s hope calmer minds prevail.

Our week

Esther worked as usual, and I presume Sarah did as well. I certainly did!

My time was split between debugging and working on improvements to 8th, working on a client’s Android project, and drumming up new business. The latter is finally getting some traction, since I’m directing more targeted inquiries via LinkedIn. I really do wish I could afford to hire someone to do that work, though; it’s not where my talents lie.

On the 8th front this week, I managed to finish the 64-bit RPI port, and in the process fixed a number of subtle bugs (which nobody had reported, B”H!). The fixes also resulted in some efficiency gains, which might be noticeable, depending on what people are doing. As well, this week the forum was quite busy. So I was, too.

I had a desire for capers, but was too lazy to go to the store to get them. Then I remembered that caper bushes are pretty much everywhere around us, so I looked to see what I could find. I didn’t see any small capers, but there were some caper-berries (the large, olive-shaped mature buds). I’ve started the pickling process, and will let you know anon how it turned out.

Esther decided she wanted “English muffins”. So since we’ve taken to entertaining ourselves by watching “The Great British Bake-off”, she looked up Paul Hollywood’s English muffins recipe, and off she went! For a first-attempt, they turned out quite well. I don’t know how good they are for the diet, but sunny-side-up eggs over fresh English muffins are really “scrummy”.

Not sure watching that show is good for our health, but it helps our attitudes remarkably.

The menu

The weather was summer-normal this week, and it’s supposed to keep on that way, more or less.

Sarah is joining us this shabbat! We’ll prepare:
homemade ḥalla, baked chicken, mushroom soup, tarta de choclo (corn quiche, but non-dairy), eggplant pashtida, baked potatoes, roasted butternut squash, various salatim, chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies, and apple pie.

Until next time,
shabbat shalom!

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