More quotes from writer Milan Kundera

The New Neo Posted on by

Long-time readers of this blog know that one of my favorite authors is Milan Kundera. Here are a few more Kundera quotes that offer food for thought:

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

Every love relationship rests on an unwritten agreement unthinkingly concluded by the lovers in the first weeks of their love. They are still in a kind of dream but at the same time, without knowing it, are drawing up, like uncompromising lawyers, the detailed clauses of their contract. O lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once you’ve brought breakfast in bed you’ll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.

This next one is about leaving the leftist circle dance, something that happened to Kundera:

That is when I understood the magical meaning of the circle. If you go away from a row, you can still come back into it. A row is an open formation. But a circle closes up, and if you go away from it, there is no way back. It is not by chance that the planets move in circles and that a rock coming loose from one of them goes inexorably away, carried off by centrifugal force. Like a meteorite broken off from a planet, I left the circle and have not stopped falling. Some people are granted their death as they are whirling around, and others are smashed at the end of their fall. And these others (I am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles.

ADDENDUM: I noticed in the comments a couple of people mentioning the negative aspects of circle dancing. In previous posts I’ve covered what Kundera had to say about that, but I think it’s good to include those other Kundera quotes again, because they are so good and so tragic.

Here’s one:

Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise– the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.

And here’s another:

…[T]he Communists…had an imposing program. A plan for an entirely new world where everyone would find a place. The opponents had no great dream, only some tiresome and threadbare moral principles, with which they tried to patch the torn trousers of the established order. So it’s no surprise that the enthusiasts, the spir­ited ones, easily won out over the halfhearted and the cautious, and rapidly set about to realize their dream, that idyll of justice for all. I emphasize idyll and for all, because all human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter.

There, everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue, and anyone who refuses to be one is a mere use­less and meaningless black dot that need only be caught and crushed between thumb and finger like a flea. There were people who immediately understood that they did not have the right temperament for the idyll and tried to go abroad. But since the idyll is in essence a world for all, those who tried to emigrate showed themselves to be deniers of the idyll, and instead of going abroad, they went behind bars. Thousands and tens of thousands of others soon joined them, including many Communists like the foreign minister, Clementis, who had lent his fur hat to Gottwald. Timid lovers held hands on the movie screens, adultery was harshly sup­pressed by citizens’ tribunals of honor, nightingales sang, and the body of Clements swung like a bell ring­ing in the new dawn of humanity.

And then those young, intelligent, and radical peo­ple suddenly had the strange feeling of having sent out into the world an act that had begun to lead a life of its own, had ceased to resemble the idea it was based on and did not care about those who had created it. Those young and intelligent people started to scold their act, they began to call to it, to rebuke it, to pur­sue it, to give chase to it.

ADDENDUM II: And that last paragraph, about trying to call back an act that’s regretted, reminds me of this post of mine about the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Goethe’s, “The spirits which I have summoned/I now cannot banish.”

Russia: we’re bravely fighting those Jewish Nazis here, there, and everywhere

The New Neo Posted on by

Hatred of Jews isn’t a new thing for Russia, which in addition to all the rest of its propaganda has specialized in anti-Jewish propaganda for a long time. The Tsarist-era fabrication “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is the anti-Semitic gift that keeps on giving, with people quoting and believing it to this day:

The hoax was plagiarized from several earlier sources, some not antisemitic in nature. It was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century. It played a key part in popularizing belief in an international Jewish conspiracy.

Distillations of the work were assigned by some German teachers, as if factual, to be read by German schoolchildren after the Nazis came to power in 1933, despite having been exposed as fraudulent by the British newspaper The Times in 1921 and the German Frankfurter Zeitung in 1924. It remains widely available in numerous languages, in print and on the Internet…It has been described as “probably the most influential work of antisemitism ever written”.

The Russian Revolution was supported by many Jews who believed the revolutionaries’ promises of an end to anti-Semitism, but over time that promise became a cruel joke as the Soviets persecuted Jews. The Putin government now seems to think it’s a great idea to call the Jewish president of Ukraine a Nazi, and to say that Israel – a country that has tried to remain neutral during the Ukraine War although its sentiments lie with Ukraine – is pro neo-Nazi. Because the Putin propaganda machine rests on the idea that what it’s doing in Ukraine is an anti-Nazi cleanup, it must put out this sort of tripe:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov extended an argument he made on Sunday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Jewish roots don’t preclude him from being a neo-Nazi. Israel was infuriated by the comments, saying the attack was “unforgivable.”…

In a statement on Tuesday, Russia said Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid’s response was “anti-historical” and that Israel’s response “large explain why the current Israeli government supports the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv.”

The statement went on to cite “examples of cooperation between Jews and the Nazis” during the Holocaust, according to the Times of Israel.

Those examples of “cooperation,” according to Russia, were coerced during the Holocaust, but Zelensky participates in crimes “quite consciously and quite voluntarily,” the statement continued.

Lavrov’s comments on Sunday were aimed at criticizing Ukraine but drew ire from Israel, a country that has maintained relative neutrality in the conflict between the two countries.

It’s ironic to note – as I’m sure Lavrov did not – that it was actually Russia (the USSR at the time) that allied itself with the Nazi regime and cooperated with it in invading Poland in order to gain territory. Funny that – and I don’t mean funny ha-ha. It was only when the Nazis turned on Russia itself that the Soviets broke off with the Nazis.

If your memory needs refreshing, speaking of territory:

Soon after the pact [between Germany and the USSR], Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September, one day after a Soviet–Japanese ceasefire came into effect after the Battles of Khalkhin Gol. After the invasions, the new border between the two countries was confirmed by the supplementary protocol of the German–Soviet Frontier Treaty. In March 1940, parts of the Karelia and Salla regions, in Finland, were annexed by the Soviet Union after the Winter War. That was followed by the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and parts of Romania (Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Hertsa region). Concern for ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians had been used as pretexts for the Soviets’ invasion of Poland. Stalin’s invasion of Bukovina in 1940 violated the pact since it went beyond the Soviet sphere of influence that had been agreed with the Axis.

The territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union after the 1939 Soviet invasion east of the Curzon line remained in the Soviet Union after the war ended and are now in Ukraine and Belarus. Vilnius was given to Lithuania. Only Podlaskie and a small part of Galicia east of the San River, around Przemy?l, were returned to Poland. Of all the other territories annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 to 1940, those detached from Finland (Western Karelia, Petsamo), Estonia (Estonian Ingria and Petseri County) and Latvia (Abrene) remain part of Russia, the successor state to the Russian SSR after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The territories annexed from Romania had also been integrated into the Soviet Union (as the Moldavian SSR or oblasts of the Ukrainian SSR). The core of Bessarabia now forms Moldova. Northern Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Hertsa region now form the Chernivtsi Oblast of Ukraine. Southern Bessarabia is part of the Odessa Oblast, which is also in Ukraine.

The pact was terminated on 22 June 1941, when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union, in pursuit of the ideological goal of Lebensraum.

So Russia still retains some of that territory gained from its alliance with the actual real-life Nazis.

NOTE: As far as coerced Jewish collaboration with the Nazis goes, I have written about that at length. Here’s a piece I wrote about kapos; I suggest you read it because most people don’t understand much about kapos and throw the word around in ignorance. I also have a draft about the Judenrat that I’ve never finished and published (here’s an article someone else wrote, however). Suffice to say that what people do for survival when plunged into a nightmare situation at the hands of others – and the fact that they sometimes were forced to make decisions in which some were sacrificed in order (they believed) to save a greater number – cannot be judged in the usual ways and constitute a moral “gray area” as Holocaust survivor and author Primo Levi wrote.

And while we’re at it, now may be as good a time as any to state that although George Soros is many abominable things, “Holocaust collaborator” isn’t one of them, although that’s often an accusation made against him. I dealt with that question and several others here, and in greater detail here and here.

Trans identity as a fad for teen girls

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was in graduate school, there were a number of self-destructive body-oriented fads that were rife among teenage girls, the most popular at the time being cutting and anorexia. Those days, it appears that embracing a trans identity is following a somewhat similar pattern, as described here by a parent:

My teenage daughter has decided that she is “trans”. So have all her friends. Not some of them. Not most of them. Every. Single. One.

She had never heard of trans, and had no signs of gender dysphoria, until she was moved to a new, cool trans-friendly school by her unsuspecting, politically liberal parents. There she met a group of geeky (or dare I say nerdy?), smart, slightly (but not very) gender nonconforming, artsy kids. As I understand it, they all discovered “trans” together. The old “cis” friends were swiftly discarded in favour of this exciting new peer group.

Exploring “trans stuff” online with friends is a source of great interest and excitement—a real social event…

Bonding with friends, searching for their identity and place in life, working out their sexuality, separating from family—these are all normal developmental tasks for teens. For many, youth subcultures can be a natural part of that. Some are harmless. Some, like drug use and extreme dieting, not so much. But in the case of the latter, sensible adults usually intervene to help steer the young people in the right direction. Not in the case of trans. Here we have adults steering kids down a dangerous path, which involves permanent, life altering drugs and surgeries for which there is no good evidence base.

For many of these kids, LGBTQ+ is a youth subculture. It really is as simple as that. Recent surveys have been identifying skyrocketing rates of “trans” or “queer” identification in young people. One found that an astonishing 39% of young adults in the US aged between 18-24 identified with the label LGBT—the figure for teens <18 may well be even higher. Of course this figure includes gay and lesbian people as well as those identifying as trans. Another poll, which looked only at gender, found that nearly 10% of US high schoolers identified as “gender diverse”. Yet another survey gives a lower figure of 1.8%. Whichever figure is correct, this is a huge explosion in numbers over a very short period of time. As endocrinologist Dr Will Malone asks; “How do we reconcile these numbers with 2013 data reporting the prevalence of adult gender dysphoria to be a rare 2-14 in 100,000?”

This is a very different pattern from the traditional trans personal history. It was a much more rare situation that involved a perception very early in life – much earlier than the teen years – of being trapped in a different body. There was nothing and no one promoting the idea, either, unlike today, and so it didn’t take on the aspect of a fad.

Victor Davis Hanson sums up the left’s m.o.

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not a new observation, but Hanson states it so well [emphasis mine]:

So what is behind leaking Supreme Court drafts of impending opinions, or seeking to pack the Supreme Court with 15 justices, or ending the Senate filibuster, or adding two more states to the 60-year-old, 50-state union, or curtailing states’ rights to set their own balloting procedures, or trashing the Constitution’s Electoral College?…

The answers are obvious.

The hard Left has detoured from the mainstream of American voters onto a radical trajectory. So it will never find 51 percent public approval for any of its current extremist and crackpot initiatives.

Instead, it sees success only through altering the rules of governance or changing the demography of the electorate—or both.

That is not just what our left is doing, it’s what the left always does in order to gain power unless it can somehow convince a population to install it in the first place. And if the left manages to come to power legally at first, they change the rules afterwards so that they can never lose power again. The rules only serve to restrain the right, and when the right is in power the left tries to hold them to the rules. But when the left is in power all bets are off.

The American far left (as opposed to more old-fashioned liberals of the past) has never had the degree of power it has now, and they are showing their ruthless hands. That’s causing a backlash, which causes the left to become even bolder about their desire to change the rules to gain more power and to keep it forever.

Hanson ends his piece with the idea that these actions on the part of the left are a double-edged sword that sets “precedents for the next Republican president” that the left may end up regretting. But I will add that the left doesn’t intend there to ever be a “next Republican president,” so to them such precedents don’t matter.

Can Congress pass a national abortion bill?

The New Neo Posted on by

Now that The Great SCOTUS Leak has occurred, there’s even more talk than before about Congress passing some sort of national abortion bill. But if that were to happen, would such a bill be constitutional?

“Constitutional” seems to be a quaint word these days, because part of the purpose of the leak was to undermine the Court’s decisions and credibility in general by intimidation and propaganda, and it’s the Court that would be ruling on such legislation’s constitutionality.

The purpose of this Dodd decision leak becomes more and more clear as we watch the Democrats’ propagandist rhetoric around it: it means that the GOP is going to ban contraception, interracial marriage, gay children in the school system, whatever lie that the left believes will serve to inflame their base and even frighten people in the middle who don’t know any better.

Here’s an article that attempts to deal with the constitutional issue:

Democrats in Congress are calling on their colleagues to “codify Roe” in federal law. The Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA) introduced by Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) in June 2021 would do just that. Here’s what you need to know.

The WHPA announces as its purpose “to put an end to harmful restrictions, to federally protect access to abortion services for everyone regardless of where they live, and to protect the ability of health care providers to provide these services in a safe and accessible manner.”…

This time around, Congress would again define access to abortion as a case of interstate commerce. People travel across state lines to procure abortion services; medical equipment that provide abortions all moves in interstate commerce; and licensing, training and education for abortion providers all involve interstate travel and commerce. Proponents hope that by codifying Roe in this way, a new federal law guaranteeing the right to abortion would survive the Supreme Court’s inevitable review.

Unfortunately for proponents, the Supreme Court has become much, much more conservative since 1964. As I detail in “Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution,” Congress’s commerce power has been one of the primary targets of a conservative legal movement eager to limit the regulatory scope and power of the federal government…[a discussion of a number of such decisions follows]…

With these negative Commerce Clause decisions and an even more conservative Supreme Court supermajority installed for the foreseeable future, it is likely that the same five justices who appear poised to overrule Roe v. Wade would find reason to strike down the Women’s Health Protection Act as exceeding Congress’s power.

To me it’s clear that it would exceed Congress’s power, but that doesn’t stop the left from trying, or from arguing that it is well within Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. That argument can be used to federalize almost anything, which was certainly not the Founders’ intent. If a woman is not barred from traveling from one state to another for an abortion, how can the interstate commerce clause be used to force every single state to legalize something that is not otherwise in Congress’s power to legalize or to ban?

Please note what I added there: “or to ban.” Similarly, a conservative Congress could not ban abortion in every state, for exactly the same reason. Abortion is not illegal now and any state can legalize it to its heart’s content if Roe is repealed.

Making abortion available nationwide, in every single state, would actually take a constitutional amendment, and the same would be true for making it illegal in every state. But amendments have gone out of style because they’re hard to pass, plus Congress and the president and federal agencies have gotten used to doing whatever they want without worrying about Congress or amendments. To pass an amendment, major and widespread consensus is required, and that’s hard to get if the policy you’re advocating isn’t supported by a strong majority of the people and the states. That’s by design, of course; the design of the Founders.

Republicans are going to put you all back in chains – again

The New Neo Posted on by

Democrats and Joe Biden will be campaigning by drumming up fear:

President Joe Biden called the ‘MAGA crowd’ the ‘most extreme political organization in American history’ in a full-throated attack on Republicans and their ‘ultra-MAGA’ agenda in a speech from the White House on Wednesday.

He also warned that the GOP could ban LGBT children from classrooms if Roe v. Wade is overturned and signaled they could even reverse the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut case that struck down a state law banning the use of contraceptives by married couples.

What else do you expect from a low-down corrupted guy who has been lying his entire political life? And if he’s not the one deciding on this message, there are plenty of people around him who support him and feed him lines. I happen to think he’s still quite involved in the whole thing, however.

Recall that this is the man who said that Republicans – and Romney, of all people – would “put you’all back in chains.”

So, where’s my next eye surgery post?

The New Neo Posted on by

For those of you who might be wondering where the next post in the series is, I haven’t forgotten. There’s just been a lot of intervening news to cover. The next post should be coming in the next few days.

Meanwhile, a little musical interlude:

Glenn Greenwald on overruling Roe, and the arguments pro and con

The New Neo Posted on by

Greenwald is right, and he’s crystal clear about what the legal issues are (he doesn’t deal with the moral ones). An excerpt:

Rhetoric that heralds the values of democracy and warns of the tyranny of “unelected judges” and the like is not a rational or viable way to defend Roe. That abortion rights should be decided democratically rather than by a secret tribunal of “unelected men in robes” is and always has been the anti-Roe argument. The right of the people to decide, rather than judges, is the primary value which Alito repeatedly invokes in defending the overruling of Roe and once again empowering citizens, through their elected representatives, to make these decisions.

The only way Roe can be defended is through an explicit appeal to the virtues of the anti-democratic and anti-majoritarian principles enshrined in the Constitution: namely, that because the Constitution guarantees the right to have an abortion (though a more generalized right of privacy), then majorities are stripped of the power to enact laws restricting it. Few people like to admit that their preferred views depend upon a denial of the rights of the majority to decide, or that their position is steeped in anti-democratic values. But there is and always has been a crucial role for such values in the proper functioning of the United States and especially the protection of minority rights. If you want to rant about the supremacy and sanctity of democracy and the evils of “unelected judges,” then you will necessarily end up on the side of Justice Alito and the other four justices who appear ready to overrule Roe.

Anti-Roe judges are the ones who believe that abortion rights should be determined through majority will and the democratic process. Roe itself was the ultimate denial, the negation, of unrestrained democracy and majoritarian will. As in all cases, whether Roe’s anti-democratic ruling was an affirmation of fundamental rights or a form of judicial tyranny depends solely on whether one believes that the Constitution bars the enactment of laws which restrict abortion or whether it is silent on that question. But as distasteful as it might be to some, the only way to defend Roe is to acknowledge that your view is that the will of the majority is irrelevant to this conflict, that elected representatives have no power to decide these questions, and that all debates about abortion must be entrusted solely to unelected judges to authoritatively decide them without regard to what majorities believe or want.

The left, of course, hypocritically argues both sides of coin, each time choosing the side that supports their desire to make abortion available everywhere and to ban its banning by any state. That’s why we hear them saying contradictory things like this:

It was bizarre to watch liberals accuse the Court of acting “undemocratically” as they denounced the ability of “five unelected aristocrats” — in the words of Vox’s Ian Millhiser — to decide the question of abortion rights. Who do they think decided Roe in the first place?

Indeed, Millhiser’s argument here — unelected Supreme Court Justices have no business mucking around in abortion rights — is supremely ironic given that it was unelected judges who issued Roe back in 1973, in the process striking down numerous democratically elected laws. Worse, this rhetoric perfectly echoes the arguments which opponents of Roe have made for decades: namely, it is the democratic process, not unelected judges, which should determine what, if any, limits will be placed on the legal ability to provide or obtain an abortion.

There is no such inherent contradiction in the right’s position on Roe, however. If you believe that the SCOTUS justices overstepped their bounds with Roe and found a federal constitutional right where none exists, and that the right to pass legislation on abortion should only be allowed the states, then you certainly are not being inconsistent to say that SCOTUS justices can state as much in a decision and undo Roe for that reason. The left, on the other hand, is saying that the SCOTUS justices (“unelected judges”) are allowed to find such a phantom right in the first place but are barred from finding that they were mistaken at the time and that such a constitutional right does not exist.

Will overruling Roe matter politically?

The New Neo Posted on by

Let’s just assume that the Court will overrule Roe and send abortion policy decisions back to the states. Let’s also assume that Congress won’t manage to pass some sort of bill federalizing the right to abortion in every state (of course, such a bill might also be unconstitutional).

Let’s just ask what the political results would be of a Roe overrule. Commenter “Jeanne” writes:

All the offended rhetoric from the conservative legal community seems pompous and beside the point.

I am having a hard time believing this will not annihilate the Republican chances of taking back the houses in November and the presidency in 2024.

The assumption that voters won’t really care about this seems just really dumb to me.

Maybe I’m dumb … hope so.

I certainly don’t think what Jeanne wrote is dumb. I think it’s a conclusion to which a lot of people have come. Certainly it’s a fear of a lot of people on the right, and a fervent hope of a lot of people on the left. That latter point is probably why this happened in the first place, and I don’t think it was the work and planning of one person either.

So, is the blah-blah of outrage “pompous and beside the point”? It certainly shouldn’t be; this is a big big deal, the purposeful political undermining of one of our branches of government. But anyone who thinks SCOTUS has been immune from politics till now is naive; the political pressure (and threats) from the left have been ratcheting up for years, and all nominations by either party are strongly political. What’s more, after Lois Lerner, all the ins and outs of Russiagate, the myriad impeachments of Trump and the legal hounding of Trump that the state of New York has been engaged in, plus a host of other activities that would have been shocking just a few short years ago but are now business as usual, the SCOTUS leak really doesn’t seem the same sort of surprise it would have been not long ago. I’m sorry to say that, but it’s true.

Which brings us to the question of the effect all of this will have in the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election. I’m going to dispose of the 2024 part by saying it’s just way too far ahead to say anything. But what about this coming November?

I think the answer would be that it doesn’t “annihilate” the GOP chances. It may not even affect them all that much, for the simple reason that the people who are already so wedded to abortion in every single state via Roe were not going to be voting for the Republicans in 2022 anyway. Those who are against Roe will be even more energized to go to the polls, if anything (in fact, I was wondering prior to the leak whether a failure to overrule Roe would be the thing that discouraged a significant number of people on the right from voting in 2022). Those in the middle are probably more interested in the economy and matters of that sort.

The decision should come down in June, and if Roe is overruled I believe that the pro- and anti-abortion energy will shift to the states, where it belongs. Red states will enact bans or strong restrictions. Blue states will do the opposite. Purple ones will have a mixed bag. I see Roe as ultimately affecting state elections more than federal ones.

Of course, I could be wrong. But somehow, I don’t think that reactions such as Schumer’s call to impeach Alito and Kavanaugh will sit well with anyone but the rabidly leftist Democrat base. The supposed reason for these impeachment calls is “lying” during their confirmation hearings when asked about Roe.

Ludicrous charge, but typical leftist tactics.

[NOTE: Please see my previous post from January 2022 on the topic of the probable political consequences of overruling Roe.]