What I don’t understand is the urgency of debating the decision to bring Syrian refugees to the US. What’s the goal, on Obama’s part, of making a huge issue of it right now, as opposed to putting it off until some point in the future when the memory of the Paris attacks fades? Realistically, there will be just as many refugees in a year, in two, in three, etc.

All this is going to do is compromise the Dems’ chances at the next presidential election. WTF is Obama doing? And he seems very emotionally invested into winning the debate, too.

By the way, the really cute part of all this is that right now Obama is doing all he can to create more refugees from the Donbass region of Ukraine. He encouraged Putin and immediately Russians went on the offensive in Ukraine. This small aside is for those who will be tempted to suggest that Obama cares about refugees.

People, check this out, in the sea of whiny, saccharine idiocy, I actually found a good, interesting analysis of the Paris acts of terror and the ways of doing damage to Daesh.

2. Another strategy of magical thinking is “say a magical word, like ‘abracadabra!’ or ‘open sesame!’, and the big bad boo-boo will go away.”

We can see this strategy play out in the invocations to politicians to say the words “radical Islam” as if the act of saying the words could change reality.

3. The third strategy is “I can manipulate the situation to my benefit because I have secret knowledge of everybody’s true motivations.”

This strategy manifests itself in narratives like “Terrorists killed because they want us to hate refugees, so let’s resist and, instead, embrace refugees to thwart terrorists.”

The only adult alternative to these childish manifestations is to find a way to accept the disturbing fact that bad shit happens to good people and bad shit can happen to us at any time. Finding a way to be at peace with this knowledge and not let it destroy one psychologically is a sign of psychological maturity.

I sincerely hope that people understand that I’m not asking anybody to avoid the words “radical Islam” or to do any harm to refugees. I like the expression “radical Islam” and I think it’s insane to blame refugees for the Paris attacks. The post is about magical thinking that is revealed in all aspects of people’s lives, not just in discussions about terrorism. 

Immature minds are so threatened by the knowledge that random horrible suffering is an integral part of human experience that they use magical thinking to protect themselves from having to accept this difficult reality.

Let’s see how magical thinking works using the example of reactions to the Parris terror acts. Everybody is scared of terrorists, and the idea that one can get blown up by men in masks while one is dining at a restaurant is intolerable to many, forcing them to use early childhood coping strategies.

1.  To make terrorists seem less scary, one can indulge in an imaginary redistribution of power where the self becomes big and strong and the terrorist is imagined as small and pitiful. “Terrorists killed because they were driven to desperation by poverty and marginalization, as well as the hopelessness of Palestinians. I’m powerful because I can see what is happening to them and take steps to protect them from further hurt. And when I do that, they will not hurt me.”

This narrative is very similar to “Daddy hit me because I upset him. If I stop causing him hurt and forcing him to hit me, he will stop.”

[To be continued. . .]

From just a single example of Nazi apologia that gets published daily by seemingly normal people:

Do you know why the Nazis built gas chambers? I mean, gas chambers are a lot more expensive than bullets, right? Well, it turns out they had a shortage of soldiers willing to put bullets into the heads of unarmed civilians. ‘Cause looking at an innocent person that you’re killing pretty much breaks the heart of anybody who has one. Soldiers would shoot a few civilians, then turn around and shoot their officers who had ordered them to shoot the civilians.

I have no idea from what sappy Hollywood flick this idiot got the ridiculous idea he popularizes here but the reality was not nearly as warm and fuzzy.

Most of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were not gassed. Most were shot at close quarters by soldiers who described in letters they sent home how much fun it was to hurl Jewish babies in the air and shoot them in mid-flight (I have exact quotes if anybody needs them.) These same soldiers would also bring over their own wives and children to admire their shooting skills or gush about their exploits in letters sent home.

But gosh, isn’t it nice to be able to blame the Holocaust on an impersonal bureaucratic machine that was hidden from view in a well-defined, secluded space of Auschwitz while actual human beings wept with pity for the suffering of Jews?

Millions of Jews were killed at close quarters by people of all nationalities who had no trouble looking in their victims’ eyes while slaughtering them. This is a very unpleasant truth but the least we can do for the victims is wake up from these idiotic Hollywood-inspired stories of broken hearts and noble Nazis who feel sorry for the Jews they kill.

There were Jews who survived Auschwitz. But there were none who survived Babiy Yar, Sobibor, Belzec, Krupki, Chelmno, etc.

Yet for most people Holocaust is synonymous with Auschwitz, even though the majority of Jews had already been slaughtered before Auschwitz started its work of mass murder.

The reason why Holocaust is limited to  Auschwitz in so many people’s minds is that it was convenient to do that. For Germans, this was a way to perpetuate the myth that most German civilians had no idea of what was being done to Jews. It’s easier not to notice one place than one thousand places.

This was also extremely convenient for the hundreds of thousands of non-Germans who collaborated with the Nazis in the task of killing Jews.

The USSR also gained heavily from drawing attention to Auschwitz because it was one of the very few places where the extermination of Jews was not conducted with the help of a crowd of Soviet citizens.

Obviously, I’m not saying that we need to forget Auschwitz. It’s important to remember, though, that memory is selective in a way that serves somebody’s purpose.

Students always protest, that’s what they do. And that’s a great thing. Students who have stopped protesting and are meek and quiet are sad to behold. Once students stop protesting and raising hell, we are all done for as a society. I’ve seen meek, complacent students in the post-Soviet space, and that was horrible.

What’s curious, though, is what students demand in their protests. I wasn’t around in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s, so I can’t say what student protests were like. I did, however, see (and participate in) the protests of 2003, 2007 and 2009. Only 10 years ago, it was my turn to present myself at the house of the President of Yale with a list of demands. And that was a great experience.

All of these protests were political in nature and had such demands as, “Stop the war in Iraq, recognize our union, no to our university investing in private jails, yes to higher salaries for janitorial staff, yes to daycare for faculty.” In short, the kind of stuff that political agents want to achieve.

And today the protests are all, “make us feel safe, make professors take sensitivity classes, I’m ill, give me a shrink” The private has washed out the public completely. People are not demanding political change, they ask for milk of human kindness to be poured on their psychic wounds.

And here is already some airhead fucker  arguing that the acts of terror in France mean the US should form an alliance with Russia to fight ISIS.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Ismail Omar Mostefai, one of Bataclan terrorists, lived in a suburb of Paris with his family, in a large beautiful house.

So neither a refugee, nor a victim of racist marginalization.

The most cited American literature book on Google Scholar and JSTOR is Toni Morrison ‘ s Beloved. And that’s not an exception. Five out of ten most studied and quoted American books in these databases are by African American writers. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck et al bite the dust when confronted with Ellison, Walker,  Wright, Morrison, and Hurston.