MatrixTransform
Dec 24, 2023 8:52 PM
Melbn

carols by candlelight stage taken by Palli sympathizing protests

live take … here’s a message from our sponsors

I missed that, must have been before I tuned in. Figures they would do that in Melbourne. Can’t watch any more, too boring, I’m switching over to the Christmas channel.

Newly Christian novelist Paul Kingsnorth, ‘Our Godless era is dead’:

I grew up believing in things which I now look on very differently. To put career before family. To accumulate wealth as a marker of status. To treat sex as recreation. To reflexively mock authority and tradition. To put individual desire before community responsibility. To treat the world as so much dead matter to be interrogated by the scientific process. To assume our ancestors were thicker than us. I did all of this, or tried to, for years. Most of us did, I suppose.

Here.

A few quibbles from me, but worthwhile seasonal reading.

Merry Christmas!

Hope you have a lovely and blessed day tomorrow Macbeth. It is great to have you post here.

MatrixTransform
Dec 24, 2023 9:05 PM
Pogs,
answer to your kind query earlier today
we lost the old bloke this morning
passed peacefully

So sorry to read that. Keep him in your memories and in your heart.

Thank you for the carols link.

Sincere condolences, Matrix. Especially awful time, just before Christmas.

More, from the article in the Oz.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Alex Ryvchin condemned the disruption on Sunday.

“You can always count on anti-Israel extremists to make everything about them and to appall decent, ordinary people,” Mr Ryvchin said.

“The chorus of boos tells them loud and clear they’re not wanted.”

This one’s for male Cats, over sixty years old.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOgd9hitEAE&list=RDMM&index=5

Notre Dame getting set on fire is consistent with all the other Old World buildings from around the globe getting set on fire. Erasing history.

Modern day architecture is like a child with a lego set.

More shit ugly modernist architecture

Yeah we know, you’ve been baying about Brutalism for the past decade. But pairing all modern architecture as brutalist is a pretty broad brush and not realistic.

Goil, I just wanna [redacted] …

Discuss Ugandan affairs with?

It was May 2020 and Mr Sharaz had recently separated from his first wife, a Labor staffer called Alexandra Craig.

Okay.

She later described the circumstances of their marriage breakdown just short of two years later as “challenging”.

Wasn’t that the wedding where the tables were named after Labor Luminaries?

Very few people are able to make horse buggies these days, Tickler.

What’s your point?

Just because an old specialised trade is lost doesn’t mean much.

LOL.. This would be close to being the ultimate putdown.

Trump Tells Hugh Hewitt Kamala Harris Would ‘Be Better’ Than Biden as President

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p3DzUwxI0o

Billy Joel “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” You know you are getting on, in years, when you understand all the historical references…

You can NOT build those buildings with a horse a cart.

They literally used horse carts to assist in construction of those buildings. Tickler, Budapest is a uniquely beautiful city, but that’s not the norm. It was a fluke due to a host of reasons. Lots of money during the time it was the second capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire would’ve helped.

All the best. Enjoy family time .

And to you.

From the Oz. I’ve only posted part of the article.

‘One does not argue with vermin’: Hatred of the Jews returns

Jews are not seen as individual human beings but as something dangerous in the eyes of many says Alex Ryvchin, in a disturbing new book tracing the origins of anti-Semitism.
By alex ryvchin
From Review
December 23, 2023
12 minute read
12

My family left the Soviet Union as refugees when I was three years old. Our eventual freedom, and that of millions of families like mine, was the culmination of a decades-long international campaign under the banner “Let my people go”, which pressured the Soviet government to allow its Jewish population to leave.

As the Australian diplomat Douglas White put it when raising the matter at the UN, “should the USSR find difficulty in according Soviet Jewry full freedom to practise their religion, it has a moral obligation to permit them to leave the country”.

Of course, the Soviet position was that anti-Semitism belonged to the previous regime and any suggestion that the Jewish population faced institutional racism was just Cold War-era mischief making. In reality, Soviet Jews suffered immensely. Their identity papers were marked as “Jewish” regardless of how long families like mine traced their roots in those lands, or how integrated they strove to be.

Aside from having no freedom to practise their faith, Jews were subjected to racial restrictions, including entry quotas into universities, thereby excluding them from certain professions, and a prohibition on Jewish cultural practices including the printing of Hebrew-language publications. No other nationality or ethnic group suffered such measures.

This institutional anti-Semitism began in Tsarist times and had established the Jews as people of no worth, to be ridiculed and discarded. In George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, a retired Russian army officer tells Orwell how in the army it was considered poor form to spit on a Jew “because a Russian officer’s spittle was too precious to be wasted on Jews”.

In the 17th century, the Ukrainian nationalist figure Bogdan Chmelnitski and his horsemen unleashed such carnage on Jewish communities that to read the accounts of them leads one to call humanity into question. These crimes set a certain rhythm whereby any upheaval, any discontent, any pursuit of political transformation resulted in Jewish communities being set upon with a perverted delight and with total impunity.

It happened throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries often at the instigation of the authorities. It happened during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. And it happened during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, resulting in 1.5 million Jews disappearing in forest pits and ravines and burning warehouses, through every method of torturous and unnatural death imaginable.

The permanent fear of mob violence and the injustice of racist laws was a fact of life but the vulgarity and public humiliations the Jews experienced in the street, on the trolleybus, in the shop queue, stung bitterly and daily. It was not uncommon for irate citizens standing in futility to buy basic necessities to break out into curses and cries about the Jews. “If there’s no water in the taps, the Jews drank it all,” was one common refrain. “Beat the Jews, save our Russia,” was another. Every Jewish boy had taken regular beatings in the schoolyard. My father’s lunchtime football games would quickly descend into spirited bouts of “catch the Jew”.

My grandmother had once thrown herself upon her elder brother’s prone body to protect him from the boots of anti-Semitic thugs that were striking his ribs and skull. My mother, who lived a block away from a Holocaust-era killing field in Kyiv known as Babi Yar, experienced anti-Semitism like a daily ritual. As her trolleybus approached her destination and the conductor called out, “next stop, Babi Yar,” every day, without fail, one of the drunks dozing peacefully would suddenly return to lucidity, sit bolt upright, and cry out and cackle and lament, “if only they’d shot all you Jews here!”

My father would tell me of how admired he was by his pupils in the town high school where he taught maths and physics. He was a young, dynamic and passionate teacher. Then one day, a rumour circulated the schoolyard, that he, their beloved mentor, was in fact a Jew. The students filed into his office, one by one, to ask if this was really so, and to offer their condolences. “But how could this be?” one boy asked him with great earnestness, “you’re such a good person.”

As a boy, my father had made the mistake of asking one of the old town matriarchs why the area on the edge of the town limits was called a ravine when it was in fact completely flat.

“Ah my boy,” she answered with great pride, “it was a ravine, until we filled it with Jews.”

My father had once asked his father why he kept an axe permanently positioned by the front door. He had never seen it used. His father took a sharp breath, sat his son down and asked him if he knew the word “pogrom”.

Eli Wiesel survived the hellscape of Auschwitz and became a Nobel Laureate. In the 1960s, he travelled to the Soviet Union, including to my birthplace of Kyiv, to see for himself the conditions under which the Jews there lived. He then recorded his observations in a book titled The Jews of Silence. Wiesel wrote that one thing struck him about the Jews there above all others. It was their fear. Fear inhabited the eyes of every Jew he encountered without exception. That fear came from the individual traumas described, some variation of which had been experienced by every Jew. But it also came from a collective panic from opening the papers to see the “rootless cosmopolitans” and “Zionist bankers” denounced, cartoons of great hook-nosed creatures preying upon the decent citizens of the state. Leaving the Soviet Union at the age of three, I of course had no personal experience of any of this but I witnessed this in my parents and grandparents. The fear and trauma are not easily dislodged, not even by the safety and distance of Australia. It presents as a sort of nervous energy, a perpetual sense of looming calamity, a tendency to experience joy as an interval between disasters, and a stiffening of the face the second the word “Jew” is heard.