Category: Uncategorized

Who was on it?

I expect Q will be addressing this soon.

DEVELOPING: Military C-130 plane crashes at @fly_SAV  in Savannah, GA

A lot of military aircraft going down recently. I wonder what the odds are of them all being random events.

Mailvox: this is not Alpha Game

But I suppose the subject is relevant to the Jordan Peterson investigation, so I’ll tolerate it for the time being:

Is it possible for Gamma’s to stop being Gammas? Is the only choice for a Gamma to do what Peterson has done and form heuristics to protect themselves? If they become committed Christians can they exceed their Gamma boundaries or will they simply be Gamma Christians? If they adopt existential relativism per Peterson, will that ever graduate them to Betas, or is always going to be social masking?

Also in trying to generalise from your list of qualities, is it a combination of intelligence plus poor social skills plus generalised low self-esteem? So by that I mean, can socially adroit, physically attractive, plain-speaking men who are good with women still be gamma if they have low self-esteem deriving from some source like a traumatic life event or bad brain biology? If Pyjama boy was able to derive a sense of humility and self-esteem that wasn’t at the expense of others could he stop being a Gamma?

I know a lot of men who are very impressive men, resilient, accomplished, educated, self-confident, but in marriages to women who utterly dominate them in the household with abuse and passive aggression. Are they Gammas because of their inability to exercise dominion over their wives despite all their external accomplishments?

I apologise if these are all stupid questions. I know you hate people asking if they’re Gammas. I’ll freely admit I’m trying to apply the model to myself a bit, but I’m also trying to understand it’s general operation.

First and foremost, “Gamma” is a male behavioral pattern. You are a Gamma to the extent that you behave in accordance with that pattern. One’s socio-sexual rank can be reliably ascertained by one’s behavior, and one’s rank is conferred by the behavior of others, but the core element is always the behavior.

So, in answer to the questions:

  1. Yes, it is obviously possible for Gammas to stop being Gammas. They merely have to permanently change their behavioral patterns. But this is considerably harder than it sounds, as anyone who has ever tried to lose weight, stop smoking, or start working out knows.
  2. No, the choice that Peterson has made is a very conventional Gamma action that is totally consistent with Gamma self-protection.
  3. A Gamma becoming a Christian merely produces a Christian Gamma. Christianity can help a Gamma alter his behavior patterns, but it must be admitted that Churchianity tends to encourage some Gamma behaviors, particularly where women and conflict are concerned.
  4. Existential relativism is only going to cement the Gamma’s behavioral pattern. Any Gamma following Peterson’s philosophy is merely going to become a Gamma with a clean room, better posture, and an iron-clad delusion bubble.
  5. No, to say Gamma is a combination of qualities is mistaking the qualities for the behavioral patterns. My current understanding is that Gamma is primarily caused by the need to avoid experiencing emotional pain. Obviously, the lower on the socio-sexual totem pole you are, the more emotional pain you are likely to experience from rejection, bullying, and failure.
  6. No Gammas are good with women. Women are literally repulsed by the behavior pattern. But Gammas are not the only men with low self-esteem. Except for Alpha and Sigma, any behavioral pattern can possess low self-esteem. One might even argue that a Beta is an Alpha with lower self-esteem.
  7. Pajama Boy will never stop being a Gamma. His behavioral pattern is too embedded in his self-identity.
  8. Married men who are dominated by women are usually Deltas. But any man, of any rank, can marry the wrong woman, and find his behavioral patterns modified to some extent as a result.

There are two easy Gamma signals. The first is dishonesty, particularly in the face of conflict. That dishonesty can take many forms, from false bravado to bizarre lies about their accomplishments to inaccurate explanations of their actions. When Jordan Peterson mentioned that 90 percent of his self-talk in his youth was dishonest, that was a dead giveaway, because Gammas are engaged in a constant monologue with themselves. Whether they talk themselves up or they talk themselves down is irrelevant, the point is that they are always talking to themselves instead of anyone else.

The second is heightened sensitivity. The Gamma is constantly on the alert for what others are thinking and saying about him. He is excessively pleased by praise and will often cite it, and is inordinately upset by criticism. He has a very limited capacity for shrugging off either.

Women are very, very good at identifying Gammas. But they tend to think of it as negative sex appeal. So, if you ask a woman if she would ever have sex with someone and her instinctive response is to shiver in horror at the mere suggestion, you can be confident that he reliably exhibits the Gamma behavioral pattern.

If you want to stop being a Gamma, there is a guide to doing so called Graduating Gamma, written by a Delta who succeeded in breaking his former behavioral pattern.

Big Brother’s retarded little brother

If I was not married, Mark Zuckerberg is literally the last person on Earth I would want knowing about my dating habits:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave the keynote address at the F8 developer conference in San Jose on Tuesday, introducing, among other innovations, the company’s new dating features.

“We are announcing a new set of features coming soon around dating,” Zuckerberg told conference attendees, lamenting that his company has been late to the dating game.

“This is going to be for building real, long-term relationships, not just hookups,” he declared.

Zuckerberg didn’t explain how he plans to prevent “hookups,” but he did say that the dating service will be “opt-in” and “if you want you can make a dating profile. We have designed this with privacy and safety in mind from the beginning,” he assured conference attendees. “We’re excited to start rolling this out soon.” He assured users that no one will see their information without express permission. Instead, he said, Facebook will suggest possible dating prospects.

I’m too old and too-long married to have any experience with online dating of any kind, but I do know that the more sensitive the data is, the less I am interested in making it available to Facebook. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was already selling the information on status updates to divorce lawyers and the IRS.

Meanwhile, Facebook is also implementing a system to better suppress the public’s access to the news it does not want them to see.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the company has already begun to implement a system that ranks news organizations based on trustworthiness, and promotes or suppresses its content based on that metric.

Zuckerberg said the company has gathered data on how consumers perceive news brands by asking them to identify whether they have heard of various publications and if they trust them.

“We put [that data] into the system, and it is acting as a boost or a suppression, and we’re going to dial up the intensity of that over time,” he said. “We feel like we have a responsibility to further [break] down polarization and find common ground.”

Darkstream: the lunacy of Jordan Peterson

I’m doing a Periscope addressing my earlier post about Peterson today. This is the place for your comments on it, live or otherwise.

UPDATE: Even Peterson’s fans have no faith in his intellectual integrity.

JBP will never debate Vox. It is a “No Win” for him. First he would take heavy criticism for even associating with Vox. Second even if he takes Vox apart no one will care, because outside of hardcore politics/culture war guys… no one knows Vox.

Of course he won’t debate me. I never thought for a moment that he would, because it is far more likely that he would break down and cry than take me apart. Look, the reason the guy is always obsessing about making a mistake that will ruin him forever is because he’s an imposter and he knows it.

Once you know he’s a gamma, you know everything you need to predict his behavior. Success will make him more hubristic and self-righteous, then he’ll self-sabotage.

UPDATE: This email was amusing, but I appreciated the sentiment.

Until today, I never really thought about how much flat-out lunacy and inanity you get hit with every freaking day.

Where do you think MPAI came from. Unlike Jordan Peterson’s philosophy, Marcus Aurelius’s is still useful. Peterson tells you to lie to yourself. Aurelius’s advice is rather more useful.

Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. 

That’s a bit more gracious than my version – the father of Commodus was obviously too optimistic – but it’s good advice.

EXCERPT: SJWS Always Double Down

This excerpt from SJWS ALWAYS DOUBLE DOWN seems appropos, considering the recent topics:

What, precisely, is a Gamma male, how do they behave, and what is the connection to the social justice cause? First, let’s consider the attributes of the average Gamma male.

  • Less physically attractive than the norm.
  • More intelligent than the norm.
  • Unathletic, often overweight.
  • Socially awkward and resentful of social hierarchies.
  • Generally unsuccessful with women.
  • Passive-aggressive and conflict-avoidant.
  • Verbally-oriented and prone to snark.
  • Disloyal and socially calculating.
  • Deceitful and disrespectful.

Of all these attributes, it is the latter that is the most important. One can go so far as to say that the chief attribute of the Gamma male is the relentless ability to lie to himself and others.

If you want an ideal example of a Gamma male, it would be hard to do better than Pajama Boy, the literal poster boy for the young liberal Democrats, who was featured in one of the famous Obamacare ads drinking hot chocolate and wearing a red plaid pajamas with a smug look on his extraordinarily punchable face. Pajama Boy’s real name is Ethan Krupp, and he prides himself on being what he calls a “Liberal F—”, which he explains is not a Democrat per se, but rather, “someone who combines political data and theory, extreme leftist views and sarcasm to win any argument while making the opponents feel terrible about themselves.”

In other words, a Krupp is a textbook social justice warrior. The two concepts are not synonymous, and yet there is a tremendous overlap between the SJW and the Gamma male.

Later in the same interview, Krupp went on to say that he has never lost an argument, except once, and then only because he was drunk. Even if we didn’t know what Krupp looked like or what views he espouses, this ludicrous claim would be sufficient to identify him as a Gamma.

Krupp’s statement about himself is tremendously valuable insight into the Gamma mentality, and even demonstrates why women tend to find them off-putting. Krupp claims he combines ideas, opinions, and a tone to both win an argument and cause feelbad. But the truth is that to the Gamma, the two are one and the same. The Gamma’s victory metric is simple: whoever can cause the other individual to feel worse about himself wins. This explains why the Gamma is constantly pretending to be above it all and unconcerned with the outcome even when everyone can see that he is horribly upset and wounded.

The Gamma believes that if he admits to the truth of his own feelings, he will lose. This is why he is always creating the impression that something is off about him, because it is. Even more than with the social hierarchy, the Gamma is at war with himself and with his feelings. This is why they often appear to be living in a delusion bubble of their own creation, and why they so often idolize Spock and human reason. They like to think they are beyond all human emotions, because they find their own emotions to be painful for the reasons that were described above….

If a Gamma is wrong, then he sees himself as being wrong. His very life is wrong. It’s all personal to him. He holds everything against everyone forever, except for that girl on the pedestal, and conversely, expects everyone to hold everything against him forever. It’s a sad and horrible way to live, but if you watch and learn, Gammas are very predictable and keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

Gammas don’t believe in failure, repentance, or forgiveness. That is why they never learn from their mistakes, or anyone else’s.

A Gamma is prone to psychological projection and naturally puts himself in other people’s shoes when it comes to conflict and imagines how he would feel in their place. This is true for both reconciliation and conflict. It is why what he thinks is required for reconciliation is usually out of touch with reality, and why he thinks attacks on other’s feelings are much more effective than they really are.

A Gamma constantly relives adolescent shame, bullying and emotional issues. He likes nothing better than to publicly shame and mock those who he is angry with (except the girl on the pedestal) to the point of losing sight of any other goal he had in mind. If you can imagine the awkward boy on the playground being danced around and called names by the others, then how that boy would treat people when he is a man, and you will begin to understand how they treat others with whom they are angry.

He is a coward and will readily abandon almost everything to save his skin, and the fact of his cowardice gnaws on him internally. Being narcissistically inclined, he is unable to imagine other people not being secret cowards, so he will often talk of being brave while simultaneously accusing others of being cowardly. This, again, is pure projection.

All of this negative, self-destructive behavior ends up sabotaging relationships for the Gamma, including his friends, his family, his coworkers, and even his own children. The recognition of the poor quality of these relationships are not lost on the Gamma, and he will often feel a deep sense of personal disgrace about his behavior. However, since he cannot admit to being wrong, he is trapped in a self-made hell.

It was right there all along

I’m deeply – DEEPLY – disappointed in you Jordan Peterson fans. His lunacy was openly on display from the very start. Did you never even read Maps of Meaning? It was all right there right before your eyes, a psychological purloined letter. How did none of you ever spot this nonsense?

From the 1999 Maps of Meaning Precis

1. We think we live in the “objective” world, but we do not. The objective world is something that has been conjured up for us recently – absurdly recently, from the perspective of evolutionary biology.

Pure existential relativist gobbledygook. And don’t even think of opting for the obvious evasion that it’s just that he defines “objective” differently than the bloody dictionary. If you haven’t learned that bait-and-switch is the first sign of the charlatan, you’re not tall enough for this ride.

Let’s substitute, then paraphrase, the relevant definition just to show how crazy this is:

We think live in the world “existing independent of thought or an observer as part of reality”, but we do not. The world existing independently as part of reality has been conjured up for us recently.

Jordan Peterson’s mind may not live in a world existing independently from him as a part of reality, but those of us who are sane do, and this is particularly true if we are elements of a vast computer simulation. Now do you better trust my sense of discernment? I caught the scent of intellectual wrongness from this lunatic just from that one inexcusable error about intelligence.

Jordan Peterson’s existential relativism

I’m sorry, Peterson fans, but now that I have begun to look more closely at him, it increasingly appears your intellectual hero is a complete joke at best. At worst, he is a insane monster of inhuman ethics. Assuming that others have understood him correctly, his definition of “truth” is absolutely and utterly false – which explains his lack of intellectual integrity – and his Darwinian ethics are not only incoherent, they don’t even rise to the functional level of Sam Harris’s hapless utilitarianism.

Harris, who is far from my idea of a formidable intellect or coherent debater, has absolutely no trouble resoundingly dismissing Peterson’s shoddy logic:

I recently interviewed the psychologist Jordan B. Peterson on the Waking Up podcast. As I said at the beginning of our conversation, I’d received more listener requests for him than for Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Edward Snowden—or, indeed, any other person on earth.

The resulting exchange, however, was not what our mutual fans were hoping for. Rather than discuss religion and atheism, or the relationship between science and ethics, we spent two hours debating what it means to say that a proposition is (or seems to be) “true.” This is a not trivial problem in philosophy. But the place at which Peterson and I got stuck was a strange one. He seemed to be claiming that any belief system compatible with our survival must be true, and any that gets us killed must be false. As I tried to show, this view makes no sense, and I couldn’t quite convince myself that Peterson actually held it.

I found this extremely hard to believe too, and I won’t utilize it until I confirm it from Peterson’s own writings, but the basic idea keeps cropping up again and again when I read what others have written about the man’s ideas, as well as in the man’s own words. Right now, I’m still at the “you have GOT to be fucking kidding me” stage; I am starting to suspect that this guy’s genius lies in piling up so much highly compressed bullshit that the bedazzled reader only sees a mirror of what he wants to believe.

  • Events as they occurred are only factual but not necessarily true. True is a judgment call and is therefore open to interpretation. The claim of ‘something’s’ validity can only be made when one can see ‘the bigger picture’ — the wellbeing of humanity or ‘life’ itself. Only then can we know if something is true rather than just factual or ‘materialistically true’. – Peterson
  • If it doesn’t serve life, it’s not true. – Peterson
  • He seems to claim that any belief system compatible with our survival must be true, and any that gets us killed must be false.
  • Why is Peterson dishonest in some ways? I think he explained this in the debate with Sam Harris, where he said things like ” something which not benefits /potential harms humanity cant be true”.

This is worse than moral relativism, this is existential relativism. Harris correctly demolishes this absurd, childish, and narcissistic conception of truth in his post-interview response.

In the year 2017, the question “How should we act in the world?” simply isn’t reducible to Darwinism. In fact, most answers to this question arise in utter defiance of the evolutionary imperatives that produced us. Caring for disabled children would most likely have been maladaptive for our ancestors during any conditions of scarcity—while cannibalism recommended itself from time to time in every corner of the globe. How much inspiration should we draw from the fact that killing and eating children is also an ancient “archetype”? Overcoming tribalism, xenophobia, honor violence, and other forms of apish barbarity has been unthinkable for hundreds of millennia—that is, until now. And our moral progress on these fronts is the basis of our most enlightened answers to Peterson’s question.

We didn’t evolve to do science, or to build institutions that last for generations, but we must do these things to thrive. Thriving requires the survival of the species, of course, but it’s not reducible to that. Getting our genes into the next generation simply isn’t our only (or even our primary) goal—and it surely isn’t the foundation of our ethics. If we were true Darwinians, every man’s deepest desire would be to continually donate sperm to sperm banks so that he could sire thousands of children for whom he’d have no further responsibility. If we really viewed the world from the perspective of our genes, no other answer to the question “How should we act in the world?” would seem more fitting. I’ll let readers judge how closely this maps onto the human minds with which they’re acquainted.

Peterson believes that there is an inverse symmetry to our views on the relationship between facts and values. According to him, I see “ethics as nested inside scientific realism,” whereas he sees “scientific realism as nested inside Darwinian competition” (which he views in ethical terms).  A clearer way of stating this is that he thinks I locate all values within a system of truth claims, whereas he locates all truth claims in a system that selects for a single value: survival. Hence our stalemate.

Peterson’s peculiar form of pragmatism, anchored to the lone value of survival, can’t capture what we mean by “truth” (or even what most pragmatists mean by it).

But I have always said that the scientific worldview presupposes the validity of certain values—logical consistency (up to a point), explanatory elegance, respect for evidence, and so forth. This is why I think Hume’s famous gap between “is” (facts) and “ought” (values) is misleading on the topic of morality. We can easily reverse direction and discover that we won’t get to “is” without first obeying certain “oughts.” For instance, to understand what the cause of an illness is, one ought to pay attention to regularities in the body and in the environment that coincide with it. (Additionally, we now know that one ought to emphasize material causes, rather than sympathetic magic or the evil eye.) Facts and values are connected.

However, the fact that some values lie at the foundation of our scientific worldview does not suggest that all scientific truth claims can be judged on the basis of the single (Darwinian) criterion of whether the claimants survive long enough to breed.  On the contrary, this assertion is quite obviously false (as I believe I demonstrated throughout our podcast). We can easily imagine our species being outcompeted by one that has no understanding whatsoever of the cosmos. Would a lethal swarm of disease-bearing insects possess a worldview superior to our own by virtue of eradicating us? The question answers itself—because no insect could even pose it. Mere survival doesn’t suggest anything about the intellectual or ethical achievement of the survivors.

Some who listened to my conversation with Peterson thought that in objecting to his conception of truth, I was endorsing materialism or denying that the mind could play any role in determining the character of reality. But that isn’t the case. I was merely arguing that Peterson’s peculiar form of pragmatism, anchored to the lone value of survival, can’t capture what we mean by “truth” (or even what most pragmatists mean by it).

Peterson is so philosophically incompetent that he quite clearly does not fully comprehend that his idiotic ethical system not only fully justifies the Holocaust, it can actually be logically utilized to require future repetitions on a regular basis! I suspect he may harbor a dim awareness of this, which would explain why he is clinging so desperately to the 115 IQ myth that I disproved.

I have not yet confirmed for myself that the way Peterson characterized his definition of truth during the interview is fully representative of his actual thinking on the matter, or that Harris and other commenters are correctly describing it. But if this “evolutionary pragmatism” is genuinely the basis for his conception of the truth, then I have absolutely no problem dismissing the man as an architect of an evil philosophy, an intellectual charlatan, and a false prophet whose works merit complete and comprehensive demolition.

Spare me the “oh, he does so much good for the broken little boys” argument. If this definition of his conception of truth is correct, then Jordan Peterson is not doing anyone any good at all, and unlike more honest atheists like Dawkins and Harris, he is a philosophical wolf in sheep’s clothing, a Pied Piper who is attempting to transform those broken little boys into unethical monstrosities. He appears to have blown up his Gamma delusion bubble into an ethical system and a philosophy of life. I am even beginning to suspect that he isn’t just comprehensively wrong, but that he is mentally ill. Not unlike Google muttering “don’t be evil, don’t be evil” to itself, Peterson is desperately seeking an antidote to the chaos of his mind.

So, if you’re a Peterson fan, you might want to buckle up. I just read the transcript of the Harris interview, then put 12 Rules for Life and Maps of Meaning on my tablet. The baleful eye of the Dark Lord is now focused squarely upon the man. And we’re not just looking at the possibility that the emperor has no clothes here, we’re being forced to consider the very real possibility that the emperor is actually a recently shorn sheep that sincerely believes it’s a cat.

The literal bankruptcy of Never Trump

Mytheos Holt performs a post-mortem on the quixotic Evan McMullin campaign:

For the forces that backed him, McMullin was not the first, the second, or even the third choice for his appointed task—namely, to prevent Donald Trump from winning the presidency in the name of donor-driven True Conservatism™. Rather, the forces that supported McMullin leaped from one anti-Trump hero to another, starting with the plaintive-sloganed Jeb!, continuing with the vapid dreamboat Marco Rubio, and finally ending up desperately lining up behind Ted Cruz because at least he went on their cruises.

What separates McMullin’s backers from other Jeb!, Rubio, or Cruz supporters, however, was their total unwillingness to accept that sometimes a primary just wouldn’t go their way. In many cases, this was because they belonged to a class of people for whom losing wasn’t supposed to happen because of who they were. This was particularly true of Bill Kristol, arguably the man who built what little meager infrastructure there was for McMullin, hoping to put up someone, anyone, who would stop the GOP from rejecting its self-appointed neoconservative establishment rulers, and their domesticated coterie of social conservatives, who, goshdarnit, were just too Christian and principled to limit immigration, or to attack the interests of major metropolitan donor industries.

And so it was that people who had never had to fight to win a primary decided they were going to try and fight back against someone whose only experience was winning a primary he was never supposed to win by sheer force of will. First, they did it by attempting to force a brokered convention, which presumably would have produced someone like Marco Rubio or Paul Ryan as the nominee. All they accomplished was screaming helplessly from the floor of the RNC like a certain highly distressed member of the #Resistance.

Not to be deterred, they then decided to follow in the august footsteps of George Wallace and John Anderson, and run a third party protest candidate to ensure that no True Conservative™ would have to sully his or herself with a vote for Donald Trump. And for a while, their push looked like it might be something to worry about. Names like Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, or even future Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis were bandied about with excitement. That is, until Romney, Sasse, and Mattis got wind of it and quickly made it plain that on no account were they involved in this, and would you please stop calling, Bill Kristol?!

But even after this, McMullin still wasn’t the first choice. That honor went to the august National Review columnist David French, who entertained the idea for just long enough to get a segment on Fox News complaining about how rude Trump supporters were. Then he promptly fled.

Only then, and finally, after casting about in the “darkness” of the dawning Age of Trump, the disappointed neoconservative Captain Ahabs realized they had to run someone if they wanted to look serious. Enter Evan McMullin, former House Republican Conference Chief Policy Director, former CIA agent, former investment banker, and man with nothing better to do because he was possibly the only unmarried Mormon over the age of 19 in Washington. And so, NeverTrump looked at McMullin, squinted, thought he looked enough like David French, and said: “OK, fine, you’ll do.”

Of course, quite rapidly it became clear that the chances of McMullin actually becoming president were someplace between zero and hahahahahahahaha . . . wait, what? But becoming president was no longer the point. It was all about sinking Trump, to prove to those awful populists who had dared to think for themselves, and not the way Bill Kristol and Bill Kristol’s donors wanted them to think, that they were servants, and could never live in the Big House as equals.

And so, a simple strategy for denying Trump the presidency was devised: McMullin would try to carve away enough of his voters in states with high Mormon populations so that even if Trump won a couple of swing states, the losses among Mormons would cancel out Trump’s victory. Whether McMullin won those states, or Clinton won them, was beside the point—which was, and only ever was, to hurt Trump. And, for a few moments, the strategy looked like it might work in Utah, right up until the Mormons thought it through, realized how much trouble they’d gone through making themselves part of the Republican coalition in the first place, and decided they’d rather not self-excommunicate for the sake of panicked Beltway grifters. Ultimately, McMullin came in third in Utah, behind even Hillary Clinton.

As has so often been the case, the light of the God-Emperor has revealed the true character of many a cuck and an America Secondist. I find myself wondering if McMullin even has the self-awareness to be ashamed of how he permitted himself to be used by Bill Kristol to screw over so many sanctimonious conservatives.

Then I recall who those sanctimonious conservatives were and how obnoxious they are, and I remember that I don’t care.

Skin in the game

Last week, I was asked how the Israelis regard the Diasporans and their refusal to join the rest of the Jewish nation. This post by a Jew who lived for nearly 30 years in the USA before moving to Israel  is on the harsh side, but it generally sums up the contemptuous attitude of most of the Israelis I know:

I want a divorce. Not from my wife, whom I love dearly, but from the liberal and progressive American Jewish community. From those American Jews who believe that they have a special right to judge and advise the state of Israel because their parents were Jewish…. Your Jewish DNA does not make you any more knowledgeable than anyone else, nor does it give you a greater stake in the Jewish state, unless you decide to accept the generous offer it has made to all Jews everywhere by its Law of Return.

The fact that you had a Bar or Bat Mitzvah does not mean that your piece in the Forward or your letter to the New York Times in which you explain why, as a Jew, you are traumatized by Israel’s efforts to defend her southern border, should be published any more than that of any other person’s.

Even the fact that at some point in your life you have experienced antisemitism doesn’t qualify you to talk about how Israel should behave toward her own antisemitic enemies. If antisemitism in the US is problem for you, there is always that Law of Return.

There is no reason that the pronouncements of “If Not Now” are any more worth listening to than those of the American Nazi Party. Peter Beinart isn’t a more authoritative source about Israel and the Arabs than David Duke just because he has a bigger nose.

The head of the Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, likes to talk about how the demands he makes of Israel are made out of “unconditional love,” because he wants to “repair it” according to his notion of tikkun olam. What he calls “love,” I call hypocrisy. He owns an apartment in Jerusalem. He should live in it, send his kids to be combat soldiers in the army, pay taxes, and learn to practice situational awareness when he walks the streets or gets on a bus. Then he can try to fix things here (he probably would still give wrong advice, but then at least he would suffer the consequences).

It shouldn’t be surprising that the Israelis are little more inclined to put up with the eternal backseat-driving and unrequested tikkun-olaming of their nomadic kindred than anyone else is. The difference is that unlike most other nations, they aren’t hesitant to call out the Diasporans for their hypocrisy and their enmity-inspiring behaviors, especially since the latter tend to actively damage Israel’s standing in the world.

For example, attempting to eliminate the First Amendment rights of Americans in the name of slowing down the BDS movement is a horrifically bad idea. There are few things more likely to lead to the USA cutting off all foreign aid to Israel; even the most philosemitic Christian Zionist is not going to legally amputate his own tongue for Israel.

Anyhow, this is the sort of thing that NN Taleb means when he talks about the importance of skin in the game; it is a very clear example of how those with skin in the game are always disinclined to respect or pay any attention to those who lack it.

EXCERPT: Hunter Killer

This is an excerpt from WARDOGS INC. #2: Hunter Killer, published today.

Two weeks later I stood on a platform behind Chief Executive Officer (Planetary) Heiermach, suited up and carrying both my Reaper and my Popov-Norinco 60. I was glad for my battlesuit’s climate control as I watched the important men and women around me sweating in the hot afternoon sun.

I’d placed Zelag and Ward down in front of the stage, behind the local fuzz. Jones was on the stage platform with me, also a bit behind Heiermach. The crowd was pretty big. I’d estimate between twenty and thirty thousand people were there. The whole thing was a legitimately big deal.

DVG and the Chrysalans had managed to put this event together and get it advertised quickly. I suppose you can do stuff like that when you have more money than God. There were plenty of locals present, along with more than a few offworld tourists, historians and media crews interested in the temple. I had no doubt I’d end up in the background of a half-dozen documentaries. Good thing I was wearing my exo and my visor was mirrored.

Wardogs had provided us with an armored luxury skycar and a driver to escort Mr. Heiermach. That got us to the mountain in about five minutes instead of driving an hour or two through the desert. Mount Xirtis looked close through the windows of DVG HQ but the flat terrain played tricks on you.

The ceremony itself was typical PR stuff. Sappy speeches by local politicians and a university professor, various religious stuff, some music, blah blah blah. At one point some young Chrysalans did a little dance with gauzy wings on their backs, then we had to listen to a guy playing some sort of glass organ with his feet. I was desperate for coffee to stay awake within the first ten minutes, and I’d been standing here for two hours.

Fortunately, our suits are well-stocked with pharma. I set it to zing me with a little chemical pick-me-up whenever I started nodding and my heart rate dropped too low.

Heiermach played emcee himself. He was good at it too. He made it look easy, introducing each person and pronouncing their names correctly, then standing back and letting them go for their allotted time, then stepping in and moving everything along to the next portion of the program if it looked like they were going to go on too long.

“And next we have a woman who is both a priestess of the temple and an honored historian,” Heiermach announced, his hand on the shoulder of a heavy, older woman with facial tattoos. “You may have seen her book on the divine origins of the temple and the many fascinating events which took place over the centuries on this very ground. Her work has been designated as worth preserving in the Alexandrian national library, as well as bring recognized by the Academy of the Ascendancy as a–”

Some yelling up front at the barriers caused Heiermach to pause. My visor was jacked into the security grid and gave me a tactical summary. Four yellows were pushing through the surveillance field and starting to scuffle with the local police.

“Possible hostiles at barrier!” I yelled into my comm, but I could already see Ward and Zelag converging rapidly on the scrum, so I held my position. Just to be safe, I pulled my Reaper and stepped in front of the CEO and the confused historian, holding it up so no one would think I was aiming it at them. Jones stood behind Heiermach, facing backwards in case a second threat materialized from behind the stage.

I focused on the four men and confirmed they were hostiles. They were dressed like tourists, but they’d pulled vibro blades and had put the police down fast. Two police already lay bleeding on the ground, while a third was staggering away holding his bleeding stomach. I flicked the Blitz to a moderate dispersion and braced to fire, but before I had the chance there were multiple flashes of plasma fire from both flanks and all four of the attackers went down hard.

The crowd was yelling and shouting and starting to get frantic.

“Tell them the threat is neutralized!” I said to Heiermach. “Keep them from rioting!”

He recovered fast, taking the mic. “Ladies and gentlemen—everything is under control. Please remain calm—please stay where you are!”

“Jones, stay with Heiermach,” I ordered, then jumped down off the stage.

On the ground were four men, two of them neatly burned through center mass by plasma bolts. Ward and Zelag were already there.

“Ward, Zelag? Who torched these two?” I asked.

“That was me,” Zelag admitted. “I nailed them with my Cerebus.”

“Good shooting,” I said. “Though non-lethal would have been better.”

I kicked myself mentally. I should have specified that to the team. We wanted captures, not kills. Assuming knowledge was not good leadership, especially since Zelag was a new guy.

“I didn’t kill mine,” Ward said, pointing to the other bodies on the ground. They were still breathing with no burns. Stunned. One of them had lost his hair—a wig? I looked at his detached hair, then at his head. On it was a network of green tattoos, ending at his face where they’d been obscured by makeup. I pulled at the other guy’s hair and it came off as well, also revealing ink.

Then I examined the other two. All of them were wearing wigs. They must be radical monks who hadn’t gotten the memo. Apparently the druid was right and not everyone was easily convinced of DVG’s contrition. Or maybe the gods were still pissed.

One of the two wounded police officers was now sitting up, his arm slashed from elbow to shoulder. The other one was being carried off on a stretcher.

“Damn Chrysalans,” said the local police chief, taking my arm and addressing me over the murmur of the crowd. I nodded. He shook his head. “I swear, I know they’ve been around a long time, but if I had my druthers…”

We’d introduced ourselves to the captain before the event when discussing the security plans and he’d told me in no uncertain terms what he thought of the “crazy cultists and their stupid temple.” I watched the police search the living and the dead. All four of the faux tourists had been carrying blades. I thanked Ares none of them had been wearing an explosive vest. Though the sniffers would have picked that up, I mused. Okay, a disrupter. Thank Ares none of them had a disrupter.

“You’d better make an announcement,” I said to the police chief, aware that the crowd was restless. “Get this thing back on track.”

I took the stage again, as did the police chief. He made a quick announcement, stating that two police officers had been injured in the line of duty but were receiving care and that “security had neutralized the threat and we shouldn’t let terror derail this momentous occasion.”

The event resumed, with Heiermach thanking the universe as well as the local gods and the sacred mountain for keeping everyone safe. We made it through without incident. As the sun set over the temple, the chief druid took the stage and publicly hugged Heiermach, accepting his repentance and blessing him for it, then sharing a drink from a large and glittering ceremonial chalice. It was passed around on stage among a circle of Chrysalans along with important members of the city and the DVG staff, then torches were lit and songs were sung for another half hour before the event came to a close.

And that’s when everything went rodeo.