Personal announcement: New moderation policy plan adopted

Common Sense! Now that says it all.

I think that your position on ethnicity is quite correct. With reference to Jews, it is, in Australia, simply impossible to criticise the actions of Israel without being immediately censored or accused of ‘antisemitism’. This despite 30-40% of the decent Jewish Israelis, and even greater percentages in the Diaspora, being against their fascist and racist ruling caste’s tremendous crimes, that sully all Jews in Israel and the Diaspora.
On the other hand, as you say, criticism of all Jews simply for being Jews is not only morally wicked, but plainly intellectually wrong. No group, however you define it, are universally alike, either good or bad. The variety is huge, and Jews, Palestinians, Armenians, Eskimos etc are all alike in this.
However the antisemitism industry asserts a worldview that implicitly asserts that all Jews are incapable of doing ill, even, one would have to imagine, of making a mistake. All Israeli actions are examples of ‘moral purity’, all criticism merely antisemitism based on the ‘oldest hate’ and other bulldust. To merely describe this process is to see its obscenity, and how it justifies the brutal repression of the Palestinians and feeds a growing hatred of Israel and Judaic Israelis, and that is a real problem. Unfortunately the religious and secular zealots who run Israel and control the immensely influential Diaspora lobbies, because they do hate goyim (Judaic anti-goyism is the real ‘oldest hate’), welcome this growing antipathy, because it feeds Israeli paranoia and xenophobia, that redounds to the Right’s benefit.It is a very, very, dangerous process, one that affects people far from the eastern Mediterranean.

Sounds very reasonable to me, especially this:

“Frankly, I will try to use common sense first and foremost. I think that for 99.9% of you this should make no difference at all. But a few trolls, freaks or paid provocateurs will now be shown to the door.”

-yt

´2) The opinion that races are different in certain aspects; saying that Blacks have a lower IQ then Whites is a hypothesis which must be proved or disproved based on facts. ´

PROVEN, DISPROVEN

;)

Sounds good to me, Saker. Perhaps you could keep it on your sidebar where it can always be available?

Thank you kindly for your thoughtful and respectful conclusion. Your “rant” (if I will!) about religion and racism makes me laugh. As an American Indian I consider cats, trees and rocks to be as deserving of respect as I am – and think atheism is the cure for religious violence! Also, on a humorous note, one of my favorite distractions, Fred on Everything, recently made a post supporting racism. http://www.fredoneverything.net/LaudableRacism.shtml

Life is good! :-)

Saker…

I had very good results on I specialized site that I ran…about a particular musical instrument…by creating a separate section where all non-commercial trollsters’ communications and posts were sent. (I just trashed the obvious spam.) I called it “The Back Alley.” That way they were not being trashed, exactly, and if any people wished to talk with them about such foolishness they were quite able to do so. It was also a good place for me to put a spike through the most glaring holes in their arguments when I had a little time to do so.

(Sorry if this is a double post.)

==============================

Thanks for this site, Saker. It is so rare that any real information about important events…information that is contrary to the tripe that the Governmental Media Complex hands out on an hourly basis…is available on the web. You are someone who obviously has an insider’s/ex-insider’s view, and your hard work and courage is appreciated.

Thanks again…

AG

Sounds entirely reasonable to me.

One suggestion: I really do not like off-topic posts after an article on a specific topic. I would like to know that all the posts I’m scanning relate to the article I read.

Why not always give posters two separate choices: (1) comments about this article, (2) comments on other topics.

Saker: The main attraction to this site is your very insightful commentaries about world events, not the comments. I think you are spending way too much of your valuable time agonizing over the comment section. Anyway, you shouldn’t have to carry this burden alone. I’m sure volunteers could be found that could help you with the moderation and proofreading.

Of course your genetic makeup restricts your freedom of choice! Thinking otherwise is illogical and, IMO, bordering on delusional. Lots of individuals are free to choose professional basketball as a career, yet their choice is severely restricted by their genetic makeup. And so on – the examples can be seen everywhere on every turn.

good for you, saker. thanks for caring.

DK said…
…your genetic makeup restricts your freedom of choice!
————–
No – your “genetic makeup” might, and often does, restrict your range of choices, but it does not your freedom of choice. Thinking otherwise is racist IMO.

DK said… “Of course your genetic makeup restricts your freedom of choice!” Yes, but in the case of most national populations, language populations, or any other large population defined essentially by accidents of political history, the genetic scatter is so enormous that to claim they all had such and such a characteristic would be ridiculous.

I have found that serious racist ideologues admit this, and speak rather of a future project, viz to createa race, rather than to claim to find one ready-made. This is of course a vile idea, but it is empirically plausible. Mussolini, for instance, admitted freely that the Italian population of his day was composed by accidents of history in such a way as to contain three or four major and perhaps a dozen minor ‘ethnic groups’ as we would call them now in our rather meaningless, euphemistic way. But he proposed that over the coming century or so that he envisaged for this, ‘the Italians’ be made into a ‘race’ by means of various sorts of extremely invasive ‘family planning’, so to speak. A special agency was to be created to implement this.

Some of Julius Evola’s early work is concerned with this, since at one point he was an advisor to it, though he was rapidly pushed out by Party functionaries whose main interest was their gangster fiefdoms, rather than abstractions such as ‘race of the spirit’ and so forth. This distasteful glimpse of the underside of 20th century history is offered in the hope that it will clarify what ‘race’ in politics actually means.

Your policy seems sensible on its face, and I agree that you need to slap down the racist trolls (for moral and tactical reasons), but I would advise you to adopt a loose, more case-by-case policy.

You don’t need to be much of a lawyer to game the rules that you wrote. This is not your fault – the problem is inherent in any attempt to condense the entirety of permissible communication into a code.

This is also why trolls flood the internet; here they can anonymously write things that would never be allowed in normal company, and not because of any law or code.

restrict your range of choices, but it does not your freedom of choice

What blatant sophistry! Freedom has no meaning if one cannot exercise it. Out of range = cannot.

“4) the denial that all humans are equally precious to God or that some humans deserve a special status not granted to others.”

Irrelevant. Nobody is precious to God – God does not exist. There is no evidence of any kind, including the bible that God has ever existed.

#4 should read:

“the denial that all humans have equal status and rights irrespective of religion, race or color.”

Hi Saker,

When all this talk started about the referendum in Crimea buy Tolstoy’s Tales of Sebastopol (1855). Not only a masterpiece worthy of the author of War and Peace, the first literary work to portray war in a realistic manner, and a moving, lyrical tribute to the people and soldiers of Russia.

I didn’t need to read Tales of Sebastopol to know how much Russian blood was spilt in the past to defend Crimea. But what I found really interesting, and relevant to today’s political situation, was discovering that as soon as Tolstoy published the collection in April 1855 the czar, Alexander II, immediately had it translated into French, the international language of the time.

When I read about this I thought: imagine Napoleon III or the Earl of Aberdeen at the time mumbling some lamentation about the Czar using this young novelist (Tolstoy was 26 at the time) to present the Russian point of view – i.e., John Kerry would say , as a “propaganda bullhorn”!

Ah, Saker, we’re indeed living in reduced times: now I can understand better where Lavrov was coming from when he commented that Kerry’s referring in this disparaging way to RT was “culturally” wrong.

I have a number of apartments in Lugansk/Luhansk. The casualty level of civilians has been significantly higher then the west is printing. My sister-in-law who still lives there had a Ukrainian Ethnic friend and her son drive North, and prior to the point of decision of Russia border or Kiev, they were stopped at a checkpoint, and the boy was executed in the car – passenger side – she was driving as they though it would cause them not to shoot. She was on the phone at the time, and got out the word ‘hi’, before being shot as well. It is unknown who executed them, as it was a checkpoint manned by the masked slime that run all over (which could be either). Odd thing was she was never asked what Ethnic group she was, they did not ask, they simply executed. She is in the Hospital in Lugansk (I think), and last I heard unable to talk. If they are shooting people for just going through checkpoints, without asking even a question, then it is some strange form of Perverted Ethnic Cleansing. As it stands this approach taken by the (what to call them – Parasite Oligarch Slime and their minions) are eliminating the entire region as even the ethnic Ukrainians there will over time become bitter at the right wing troops who are murdering anyone they wish – freely. That region is 90% Russian Speaking, but maybe 30% fully Ethnic Ukrainian, also with perhaps like my family a mix of Ukrainian, Russian, Georgian. My estimate just on the friends of family dead is closer to 4000 dead civilians. How else could I know five dead or wounded already. We are not even in the main battle zone – YET. As to the Nazi Nuts who reply, my recommendation on that is to drop the blog and do the news and focus on a moderated blog with a password for accepted writers.