Oriental dichotomies

Mehdi Hasan : I'm consistent I take the side of the Ukrainian people under occupation and the Palestinian people under occupation I'm consistent.
Pierce Morgan : No, you're not. They're totally different situations
Mehdi : You have to say that because you're not consistent
Pierce : And you have to say what you say
Mehdi : But I literally described it: two peoples under foreign occupation, two people having their hospitals bombed, two people having their kids killed, two people facing governments that say genocidal stuff; yeah I'm consistent.
Pierce : One is a democracy and an ally of the West
Mehdi : What little slip in there! What's that got to do with anything? so allies of the West get to be genocidal?
Pierce : No...
Mehdi : Why did you say Ally of the West? Why that? So if Russia was an ally of the West they could kill people in Ukraine?
Pierce : I don't believe what they're doing in Gaza is genocide. You do, I don't! Genocide is the complete...
Mehdi : Put genocide to one side, whether we agree or not on genocide, and it is genocide! But you just said, "they're your ally of the West". Why is that relevant?
Pierce : I think it's important you support your allies.
Mehdi : So if you're an ally of the West you get to kill kids?
Pierce : No. You get why is it relevant you support...
Mehdi : You're making my point for me. I'm consistent. I don't care whether you're an ally of the west, or an enemy of the West; I care about what you Do! Russia and Israel both committing war crimes, both saying genocidal stuff.
Pierce : Here's my point : you are so blindly anti-israel that you frame everything
Mehdi : I can say the same thing about Russia.
Pierce : I'm very blindly against Russia.
Mehdi : That's, again, you're inconsistent.
Pierce : Are you not?
Mehdi : I'm consistent. I'm blindly anti- occupying Russia that occupies Ukraine and I'm blindly anti and Israel that occupies Gaza.

The Muslim Question (Anne Norton) : An interesting strategy of image formation, where you first define the 'other' using projection of their own negative fantasies, so that they can define themselves in contrast. Hinduism uses the same strategy against so-called Abrahamic faiths. Marx's on the Jewish questions addresses this problem. Through the power of Orientalist imagery that forms the foundation and greatest consensus across Europe, competing the belief that Jesus was white, new and new properties are added to the oriental caricature to enrich the western man further in service of new invasions.

Because our god is bigger - Bush in Iraq war

There is a modern liberal orthodoxy that goes back to orientalism in which the values of freedom, democracy, civilization, human rights, justice and secularism must always align in history's march forward. That's the new atheist style religion which also adds atheism in the mix, in the same way that LGBT tolerance of Palestinians is am arguement against their survivals, and how BJP and a majority of Hindu believe that a Hindu can never be a terrorist. As Saba Mehmood highlighted, a feminist can't be allowed piety. The feminist case that a female president means an end to all war because women have the empathy that men lack (an actual argument I had) is the type of standpoint epistemology and strategic essentialism that is just theorizing of reverse racism, erecting structures in service of an oppresser with a victim complex (Meera Nanda). It's a silent admission that these category are not applied based on meaning, but are attached to other attributes like race or culture. Just like a Hindu cannot be a terrorist, a terrorist can only be a non Hindu. This is an admission of the being accomplice to the crime as they've done in pressuring NIA to go easy on Sadhvi and the gang.

The dogma of this fundamental alignment is what allows fairly late ideas like the Sexual and gender revolution to be carried into postcolonial society despite the absence of a prima face coherent idea or the colonial institutional structure. The dogma allows for new associations between civilization and homosexuality based on existing slogans about freedom and pursuit of happiness. In the postcolonial world, there is only delayed imitation not realization, only exegesis not new intuition or fresh insight. Even the most leading ideas in the postcolonial space that are identified as Indian are only more-radical-than-thou extensions of a western model to newer territory to cause further destabilization (Spivak). This is what Hasan Spiker means by postmodenism being 'emtombed' in the western hegemony, and the removal of the final instinct to resist the formation of the a subjectivity by declaring it not only impossible, but a western ploy. But instead of taking it back to actual pointers, they just accuse each other of being the true Macaulay putra.

After dividing the world across ethnic lines, they need another excuse to divide it further. Palestinians aren't bad because they are from elsewhere. "They" must be displaced or killed indiscriminately because they believe in death to Israel and/or America (no reason at all, maybe their religion, who knows) . All excuses must be reduced to this in the end. They hate or envy our freedom/sovereignty. It is because of lack of a better excuse for state terrorism that they have to stack the deck this way. It's the condition that makes the in critical belief in atrocity propaganda from resistance (beheaded babies) possible, and the belief in colonizer atrocities impossible.

This is a consequence of 2 features of public memory that manufacturing consent exploits :

• Terms like caste and terrorism are not remembered by their conceptual content, but their association to other nouns or images (Russel Peters, and the news coverage of Israel vs Hamas)
• Repetition

The dichotomies are informed by a series of other dichotomies e.g. the difference between a fanatical mind inspired by scripture for a suicide attack when compared with a rational civilian in the democratic society wanting to enjoy his family and life paints a poweful and unmistakable contrast between the force of life and the death cult, enough to suspend all further enquiry into the dichotomy itself, or question the extent of the response. Each event is attached to the narrative to produce widespread confusion, shock and awe, pushing inhumane narratives to the extent that even those not looking for an large enough excuse to drop their facade of tolerance begin to fall silent, questioning their own judgements and not being able to defend the 'indefensible', reclining into a position where they're no longer able to interrupt the dichotomy. Your ignorance may be justified in the confusion, but he's pretending to share in it so that he can lead you away from the reality into the imagery. You simply allow it to happen, and that's how they want you to sign up to their death cult.

There's target advertisement involved in converting people to the treaty of westphilia by repurposing the same supposed entity at different times using appeals to secular democracy, Judeao-christian heritage, or taller buildings and cleaner roads, like the argument about economic advantages of slavery and Morals Without Money. Ben Shapiro eloquently talks about the fundamental disagreement between the two sides being architecture:

"Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage."

Mark Twain talks about this in To The Person who sits in the darkness.

Ben Shapiro's book and the cringe poetics about Palestine rally. Sam Harris starts his book not with first principles or his intentions, but the imagery of a suicide bomber's routine on his final day and his family's complicity.

Reign of quantity has become reign of imagery, and in the realm of imagery, words lose their meaning. But Vietnam, Gaza genocide etc. proved that where the media can not longer contain the horror. Reality for the west is an open wound and Larry Ellison is the bandage.

The correct response to anyone pushing this dogma is not to defend against the negative image or to force a cognitive dissonance by questioning the positive one (Israel=apartheid). Some pro-russia groups tried this in the Ukraine war by pointing out that the Ukrainian resistance is mostly made of NeoNazis, but this did not register at all since the lack of alignment is not an issue once the support is locked in. Instead, use him as a demonstration of of a death-cult for the fence-sitters: ask him to justify his faith in the alignment of such values (cult), and let him talk about the human price he's willing to pay for it (death). That's a death cult for you. The dichotomies are just the sales pitch, this is their most deeply held belief, and they're at their weakest when this secret is laid bare: they're asking you to join their religion so you can feel better about the right to decide others' fate.

Gaza genocide is called the most democratic genocide of all because being one of the most polled placed of earth, Israeli population is overhwhelmingly in support of the genocide and its methods. The ignorance plea of german folks for the holocaust is no longer admissible when your society is celebrating the atrocities en masse.

Time to upgrade Samuel Johnson for our times: democracy is the latest refuge of the scoundrel.

Chomsky vs Sam Harris email debate, and the conclusion on the point of indifference.

The unsubtle dichotomy in the title of "On Democracies and Death Cults" will remain one of the most impressive intellectual sacrifices Douglas Murray has made for Israel, second only to going on Joe Rogan against Dave Smith.

The western media and Israeli hasbara reaching India:
https://youtu.be/f9WdN0fWmzg?t=2m31s

His occasional co-host, Pierce Morgan, once walked himself into the corner of claiming that Israel is uniquely worth defending. When he was pushed to provide a reason why, his hasbara programming took over and he simply blurted out, "because it is the only democracy in the middle east." The propaganda should not be made this obvious for it to have any value. He was immediately pushed on this response and had to change topics.

Nobel awardee made the same effort in a recent speech: https://youtu.be/m8U_yKsdh5o?t=7m58s

During the months of British debate on the Gaza genocide, the Zionist side (including Pierce Morgan and Rabbi Schmuley) kept invoking the British Nationalists' reverence for Churchill to draw a parallel between indiscriminate British bombing of German cities in WWII and the Israel's Gaza response. This forces such a power dissonance in the nationalist British mind, that they are forced to legitimize both at the risk of losing the only British hero. Subjective morality lives in constant fear of being reduced to arbitrarism, and clings onto the semblance of objectivity from its closed, immanent world and its symbols.

Recently, a disturbing reddit post shows a religious congregation claiming that the gods whose favor week seek in freedom, security, prosperity, also demand sacrifice, "some need to die for the world to flourish".

Only few are The Ones who walk away from Omelas, and for the remaining city, the spectacle of happiness and prosperity must go on, believing wholeheartedly that the sacrifice of the child in the dungeon is worth the glitter, and that their right to happiness allows them ownership of the child's fate. For Israel, their right to demacracy allows them ownership of human life and international law. Once this principle is accepted, sedation of the centrist outrage at atrocities is just a game of hyponises using the right symbol.

Democracy as red herring

Liberalism is also against using democracy against progress. What allowed the rise of Hindutva politics in India was the Treason of the intellectuals like Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who wrote the following in a 2014 article:

“Modi cannot be exonerated of marginalising minorities or worse. But consider this. The secular-communal divide in India, except at the extremes, is not so much a divide between two different species of citizens as a fissure running through most of them. This divide is activated by circumstances. It is not a structural fact. Second, we hope that the law will take its course and deliver justice. But Gujarat has, at least, been subject to serious court scrutiny, direct SIT investigations and so on...You can look at the convictions of Modi’s cabinet colleagues and point to those as proxy proof of his culpability. You can also look at them and wonder why so many Congress cabinet ministers still have not been made to answer for 1984. The point is not to use 1984 to politically exonerate Modi. The point is that it is hard to attack evil when we so widely condone it in other contexts.”

The spectre of fascism is said to be haunting India. It is easy to dismiss this concern over fascism as the hyperbole of a crumbling elite that has often used moral outrage as a substitute for addressing genuine political challenges....Can the the combination of military power, total mobilisation and eliminationism that marked fascism really be reproduced in India?”

Democracy cannot be the excuse for immobilising questions of individual liberty and security. But invocations of fascism often express a kind of distance from Indian democracy that is also disquieting. We are not on the high tide of fascism. It is more about a complicated country feeling its way through difficult times, fed up with old power structures.

The loss of objective, transcendent morality has not only left the world without a basis to ground the most intuitive notions of morality, it has allowed for emergence of a substitute morality which relies on polarizing or stacking your horizon of concepts to influence your judgements. Liberalism reduces morality to just differences, be it architectural or aesthetical, and you make your bed with the side you choose, and live through its consequences. It allows for Meaning without reality to emerge where human life has no divine given or inherent worth. Any notion of human worth must be subjected to the moral aesthetic for the human world to not become animalistic.

Shifting Fault lines

https://youtu.be/0jzMt8baJCI

Secular fundamentalism

The Dogma

The coercive dogma of liberalism doesn't lie in the basic creed of individual freedom which it shares with religions, but the absolute faith in the necessary alignment of each new moral invention or product with the existing orthodoxy. Liberalism in actual practice is not merely a belief in freedom to choose regardless of what is chosen, but consists of dishonest actors smuggling a deep (and often violent/bigoted) commitment to securing frontiers, and very specific concerns about legitimate conceptions of history and its moral progression.

The point is not that this conflation is psedo-morality, or amorality, but that the conflation itself is an invitation to an immoral temptation to the core.

Emergence of new atheism's value assignment during Iraq War, and the breadtube first world Aesthetics of deprioritizing genocide

Our obligation towards preservation of life is utterly indifferent to how we feel about them or their beliefs until they pose an existential threat to us and our belongings. Quran 60:8, Riyadus Saliheen 1356, and Malcolm X

With Hamas' original charter being waived around, the demand is that the indigenous folks to use politically incorrect language to identify their oppressors delegitimizes not only their resistance, but nullifies the very fact of oppression.

BJP's politics like european right is one of alignment of anti-appeasement (anti-immigration) with the welfare and upliftment of majority.

If you look into the William Buckley's inability to consider alternatives to military intervention in his debate with Chomsky, it explains the inverse structure to the arguments of propaganda and manufacturing consent: the cart of democracy is always put before the horse of colonization, but is never the precondition or the key driver of its sustained march. It insists that its manifest brutalization cannot be decoupled from the underlying noble intentions and therefore the machine must be allowed to continue its relentless march because to resist its movement is to resist the only force for good. Ergo, immoral and a death cult.

Ukraine's NeoNazis, Malala and Khalid Hosseini's liberal interventionism, the Iran fetish and the meme culture of Iran in 70s, the key and peele sketch

Clash of civilizations narratives

The famous Daniel Haqiqatjou debate moment with Aron Ra and his list of happy countries, and the old liberal rhetoric of Nordic welfare states as fruits of secular atheism (CAA protest). People counter with a much larger list of other countries where secular liberalism did not produce the same results, explaining that they must look elsewhere.

Mohammad Hijab's clean roads and taller buildings

The slavery argument of the southern states - economic welfare

Freedom democracy and other Pretty sounding words

You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall -- you need me on that wall.

We use words like "honor," "code," "loyalty." We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line.^[1]

Nationalism does the same with culture and pride. It has no interest in progressing the cultural arc or contributing to its evolution, or living those principles as an experience, paying their dues. Instead, it wants to use it as a placeholder to further it's need for identity, pride, and as an object of faith and devotion to preserve. As the new sacred.

"...education, freedom, justice, democracy, and all of those other pretty-sounding words." - Malcolm X^[2]

Chomsky, despite his resistance to the impulse, falls into the general liberal dogmatist camp that believes in progression of human freedom etc. as a moral progression, and attacks the postmodernists for abandoning these pursuits as naivete. This teleological impulse endorses the cultural or epistemological interventions that must translate to military intervention at some point.

Kya khabar thi ke chala ayega ilhaad bhi saath

The above forms cover the use of this alignment concept in developed world where it is used as a prejudice to manufacture consent by showing one thing and hiding the other. In the rest of the world, this argument is used to bully and to shame. Morals Without Money is one such example where opinions are forced in an amoral, materialist direction by shaming the impoverished as choosing to not better himself by letting go of his 'pathological' identification with morality. His aversion to greed is diagnosed as sour grapes, amd his morality a cognitive dissonance and a coping mechanism. Greed has become the norm against morality.

At some point, we must question whether the slave morality has been overdiagnosed as morality itself. At some point, we must refuse to be bullied by the rhetoric and explain how the so-called fruits of modernity can be divided into two parts:

• The ones that are built upon and require the modern ideology of amoral violence and exploitation of humans and nature that we must learn to live without
• The ones that are not inherent to the modernist ideologies and are merely correlated. These require moral evaluation in their pursuit
  Our considerarion must begin with morality. All other concerns of comfort and affluence are not abolished, but must be subjected to that. And this nuance must be forced back into the common understanding of our day to day behavior. Poverty is not a virtue or a vice. The poor does not need constant protection and support (although that certainly is part of a healthy moral conscience), nor does his poverty define his moral worth or character. It is a completely unrelated fact.

Thus, to break the spell of this misenchantments, the Omelas symphony of the world must be brought to a halt, and one must actively decide to travel the difficult gap between these illusions and their underlying realities instead of being passively indoctrinated into the illusion's oneness with the supposed unseen and unknowable of the Lockean variety.

Ye sannai magar jhute nago ki reza kaari hai
اللَّهُمَّ آرِنَا الْحَقَّ حَقًّا وَارْزُقْنَا اتَّبَاعُهُ وَ ارِنَا الْبَاطِلَ بَاطِلاً وَارْزُقْنَا اجْتِنَابَهُ

But this is not a pity party, not a resignation into self loathing. You must also stand upto the bully with the facts against his faith, and launch a devastating counter attack to make him retreat.

Just like 'Amusing ourselves to death' somewhat proves the Ottoman suspicion of printing press, the resistance of Muslims to the nation state structure and the failures also hides a blessing: Islam continues to remain the only destiny continued among the ruins of fulfilled destinies of the ideologies that were able to fully identify themselves with nation states as their churches and thereafter tombs. In this apocalyptic landscape, Islam seems to acquire the powerful image of the last man standing despite having not being faithfully represented on world stage.

Similarly, the enlightenment's entanglement with Aristotlianism, Protestantism, Orientalism, Hegel/Feuerbach, Colonialism, Deism, and Scientism, Futurism etc. also seems to have tarnished the Christian theology's ability to redirect itself to a better destination. It all seems like the natural course, the triumph and the conclusion of the Christian Metaphysics. The collapse of the scriptural foundation of orthodoxy also seems to have greatly reduced the faith in its authenticity.

Islam needs to be studied from this angle of the modernity's collapse to counter the modernist claims of having missed the bus etc.

Muslims report the highest life satisfaction of all people by poll number.

Like Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro waxed insufferable poetic in another pro-Israel book with a dichotomous title "Lions and Scavengers":

The Scavengers crowd around the battered Lion.

Our institutions lie in ruins; our borders in tatters; our communities in knots.

The Lion, weary from the exertions of the centuries, bleeds.

The Scavengers snarl and circle him.

The dream of the Scavenger, it seems, will finally come True. The Lion, it seems, will finally die.

And then it emerges.

It emerges from the belly of the Lion: a low grumbling at first.

It resonates in the Lion’s throat, growing louder with each passing millisecond.

And then, at last, the Lion opens his massive jaws.

He struggles to his feet.

And he roars.

His strength, dormant for so long, still rests coiled in his limbs.

His courage still beats in his chest.

The Lion’s honor is not dead after all.

It goes on and on like this. The “lions” are CEOs, the IDF, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ben’s wife, and the people who buy his books but don’t think about them that carefully. The “scavengers” are Marxists, Muslims, pro-Palestine student protesters, Bernie Sanders, AOC, and anyone who ever thought they were owed a living wage.^[3]

The terrible prose is empty by design because there are no facts to fill. Israeli employment rate is only 60.4%, while the unemployment rate is only 2.9%. This means around 40% of israelis are neither working or seeking work. These hilltop youth gangs are composed of hardal (hardline zionist haredi) extremists. Israel is the biggest recipient of aid, and is the most scavanger-like in inducing US to fight its wars.

But for the purpose of Ben Shapiro's job, "Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage."

In the world misenchanted with imagery, images alone can be the source of disenchantment (Ram Puniyani) as well as re-enchantment. Don't just stop at disenchantment.

Formation of an orthodoxy. Carl schmitt

First democracy is argued as a necessary condition of human dignity such that all conceptions of human dignity is incomplete without the political institution of democracy. Then using hypermorality, the necessary condition of democracy is made into a sufficient condition such that it allows for violation of the human dignity of those that oppose it. That's also how Afghan women can be bombed with their families in the name of liberating them from hijab and illiteracy. There's deployment of a principle against itself, like salafism does with tawheed.

Politics fat
Image based culture

Validating and solidification of our biases under the triumph of Subjectivist on both sides, and erosion of objective/transcendent principles

The opposite orthodoxy of postcolonial scholarship. It's worth preserving simply because its indigenous, and there is no ground for critique by anyone who has the previlige to be heard by mainstream

The desi liberal argument of communalism being bad for economics or global brand, or the US right wing argument for US imperialism being bad for US economy