Does anyone know how Sinc is going? He did bring us all together.

Watched the video of the Jewish man being “marched” off .. Why have plod got their hands on him ..? If he’s been arrested then should be in handcuffs .. if not they shouldn’t be man-handling him ……..!

In the face of evil, we must build on our nation’s virtues

Henry Ergas, The Australian, 7th October 2024

This I will never forget: the murderers’ faces. They aren’t searching for soldiers. They are looking for babies and children. They cheer when they capture the old and weak. They gloat when they seize young women. And, most harrowing of all, they are laughing, laughing, laughing. The Nazis hid their crimes. Hamas’s killers filmed theirs. For the first time in the history of mass murder, the murderers wanted their faces known, their deeds recorded.

Watching the videos, one after the other, is not only horrifying. It shattered my comforting illusions. Particularly this one. Drummed into me as a student, I repeated it on these pages immediately after October 7 last year.

Real evil, I said, dehumanises its victims: stripped of their humanity, they are no longer people. They are, to use Gloucester’s words in King Lear, as “flies to wanton boys”, to be slaughtered without sin or guilt.

Dehumanisation was, I believed, indispensable because, otherwise, who would commit such crimes? Who – beside a few sadists and lunatics – could do those things to other human beings?

Now I know that is an illusion. For the footage leaves it beyond doubt: the killers don’t just realise their victims are human beings; they relish it. They relish the all too human fear, the pain, the shame at pleading desperately for mercy for oneself and one’s children. And it is precisely the fact they are torturing, hurting and humiliating real, living, human beings that fills the killers with glee.

Looking back, it is easy enough to see the illusion’s origins. Whatever it may claim, our age doesn’t believe in evil.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us “In modern colloquial English ‘evil’ is little used, such currency as it has being due to literary influence”. Evil, according to the OED, is simply an antiquated synonym for bad. The rhetorical vestige of a prescientific, credulous past, the term’s only purpose is to express heightened disapproval, elevating bad to “very, very bad”.

Nor are the people who commit horrifying acts evil. They are ill. Perhaps their troubles are personal, or perhaps they arise from society’s failings and history’s injustices. Either way, apply the appropriate cures – from neuroscience, psychology, public policy or international relations – and all will be well.

Immanuel Kant, as usual, knew better. When he spoke of “radical evil”, he didn’t mean evil that is extreme; he meant evil that is at our root, an inherent part of what it is to be human. Reason makes it possible for humanity to soar. Evil, when it can, drives it to depths so deep as to be utterly unfathomable.

It requires, Kant argued, no “formal proof” to show that the risks it creates are ever present: humanity’s entire record provides overwhelming evidence. As Claudio puts it in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure:

Our natures do pursue

Like rats that ravin down their proper bane

A thirsty evil; and when we drink we die.

That in no way diminishes the moral responsibility of the perpetrators, who are, like all human beings, endowed with reason. Even less does it reduce our collective responsibility to hold the perpetrators to account, prevent them committing new crimes and deter any who may follow in their wake.

On the contrary, the very fact the capacity for boundless cruelty is always there makes thwarting evil imperative. And, Kant famously added, “for any person who acts rationally, to will the end is to will the means”.

In other words, a rational person who genuinely seeks that goal must – and Kant stresses must – accept what is required to achieve it. Anything else is not to “will the end”: it is, at best, to idly wish it, “like the dreams of children and the fantasies of the feeble-minded”.

That, ever since October 7 last year, has been our government’s problem. Time and again, it says “Hamas must play no role in Gaza’s future governance”.

But like the children who dream and the feeble-minded who fantasise, it has absolutely no way of achieving that objective – and it adamantly rejects Israel’s option of systematically “degrading and destroying” Hamas’s (and now Hezbollah’s) offensive capabilities, as was done with al-Qa’ida and Islamic State.

Perhaps there is another credible way of disabling a firmly entrenched, heavily armed and ruthlessly evil terrorist group that shelters behind hostages and human shields. If so, the government should spell it out. Instead, it has, as Winston Churchill said of Neville Chamberlain’s hapless cabinet, remained “trapped in paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent”.

Nor is that solely the case internationally. At home, it has stood by as attacks on Jews escalate to levels never seen in this country, shredding our much vaunted multiculturalism.

It is true that Australians have not always rapturously welcomed other ethnicities. But there has long been a qualified acceptance, an “indifference which is not apathy” that DH Lawrence portrayed as quintessentially, laconically, Australian. Now, openly exterminationist slogans are yelled out every day in our public places, and – stripping away feeble cover-ups – October 7 is celebrated as a triumph. Meanwhile, confusing handwaving with being even-handed, the government mouths platitudes that swirl helplessly in the wind.

Blaming that on electorally minded hypocrisy would be all too easy. The far more terrifying, and far more accurate, reality is that the government believes what it says.

It is, of course, hardly alone. With a handful of shining exceptions, much of the West is no better. Maybe we should thank Hamas for that: it has exposed the extent of the rot. And who knows, to expose the rot may open the road to addressing it.

In 1943, as World War II raged, Brian Penton’s Advance Australia – Where? took a cold, hard look at this country and its prospects. A brilliant writer and influential editor, Penton, who made The Daily Telegraph into a powerhouse, was not unduly kind about his fellow countrymen.

Complacency had been elevated into a religion, he wrote, resulting in a disastrous lack of military preparedness. As for the nation’s leaders, they were, all too often, “mincing chameleons of cant and commonplaces”. Until it was far too late, they had ignored the mounting threats. Even worse, having decided “the job is too big, the adjustments too painful”, they might well ignore them again in the future, “leaving the remnants of Australia Felix to the crows, and rabbits, and drifting sand”.

But Australia had this going for it: the “qualities of mind, but mainly of heart, ordinary Australians had developed in their isolation and unsophistication” – a disabused realism, a contempt for fanatics, an ethic of comradeship and loyalty.

However battered, they are still there. With the anniversary of October 7 reminding us that evil is everywhere on the march, it is those virtues that offer, as Penton hoped, “a basis on which better leaders can build a better nation”. And with that, a better and safer world.

Note that Kant is simply restating the Christian doctrine of original sin.

Iranian general, top Hezbollah official both missing

Maria Bervanakis
An Iranian general who promised to “see the dead bodies of Americans all over the Middle East” is missing after an Israeli attack in Lebanon.
Brig. Gen. Esmail Qaani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, has not been seen since Friday’s airstrike in Beirut, the New York Times reported. Some Arab and Israeli outlets report he is dead, while others say he is wounded.
Hashem Safieddine, a top local Hezbollah official and the presumed successor to the terror group’s recently slain leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is also missing

The real problem is the one the West has with leftoid women.

All women, not just the leftist ones.
Even the right of centre women want to usurp men’s place in society and are completely unwilling to wind back the excesses of feminism.
Ask them to sacrifice even one iota of their unearned status, and they will melt down on you in exactly the same way as the worst leftist.
The institutions they now occupy, they did not build.
The universities, the companies, the political parties, the churches, the sporting organisations.
They built none of them, but demanded access, were given access and proceeded to completely dismantle any merit those institutions had,
The progressive march through the institutions was really a woman’s march through the institutions.
But this is NOT the fault of the women.
It is their nature to be such and any man who has a wife and family knows this.
They are by nature capricious and require structure and direction from men.
It is the fault of men. It is a weakness in men that will undo all of us, men and women.
Because the entire edifice is built upon a lie: equality.
Men and women are not equal in any way except in the most intangible way, as in before God, as in measuring a life’s value independent of it’s productivity.
That men and women might well be of equal immaterial value before God has nothing to do with what roles they should take in a material world.
Name three major corporations built by women.
Name one church founded by a woman.
Name three sporting organisations founded by women.
Name a record label founded by a woman,
Name two political party out of the hundreds that have existed, founded by a woman.
Out of all the numerous, thousands upon thousands, of institutions name ten that were built by women.
Note that women have had the vote for a hundred years.
Note that women have been legally able to build whatever organisation they wanted for basically forever.
What have they produced? The harsh reality is, if you measure the worth of a person by their productivity and creativity, women are not productive. They are not productive because they aren’t supposed to be productive.
They are supposed to be the centre of the most important part of life: The family
A woman is a good woman insofar as she is the centre of a good family.
A man is good insofar as he is productive.
Women in paid creative or productive work is a category error, and no woman today from either side of politics is willing to admit that error, as to do so in their eyes would be a diminution of their value.

What’s all this about?

BREAKING: Armenian Seismic Station Detects Possible Explosion in Iran

An Armenian station detected a 4.6 magnitude seismic event in Iran last night. Researchers noted that it lacked a seismic compressional wave, making the event more consistent with an explosion rather than an earthquake.

The seismic activity was centered in the Kavir desert near the town of Aradan, and comparisons between typical earthquake vibrations and nuclear tests suggest this event more closely resembles a nuclear test. Notably, no aftershocks were recorded, which is another clue pointing to an explosion rather than natural seismic activity.

Mind you, the South Africans and Israelis did a joint nuclear test in the southern Indian Ocean in 1978 which the Vela satellites picked up but this was denied by the US Government.
How would we really know when/if the Iranians test a nuke?

BUT, BUT, BUT, in yet another example of NSWaffen priorities…..they dragged an Orthodox Jewish male, a man I happen to know, from the ‘celebration of the mass murder, rape and hostage taking of Jews’ in Sydney’s Hyde Park. His crime, he unfurled an Australian flag, note, not even an Israeli flag.

The above is from one of Cassie’s comments.

Now why would the police think that an Australian flag would be provocative to the Hamas and Hezbollah sympathisers? Could it be that they know these people like the protection and benefits of Australian citizenship but despise the country and its people?

The police and the government think they can fool the population by just keeping a lid on hostilities but we know what is going on. It’s not just the Jews in their sights, it’s all of us. We will remember and vote accordingly.

The communists and today’s crony capitalists agree on one thing: they want the women in the workforce.
Atomisation of the family results in so many resources to be vacuumed up and exploited.

My magpie couple are such hard working little creatures.
From before dawn until after dark they are in constant motion gathering resources for their young.
Imagine if I could make them work for me!
Imagine if I could put a dollar value on their labour and demand they pay a tax. Rent that tree to them.
Break them apart so the mother had to work alone and even harder to provide for her young. Get the male hooked on meth.
Of course, magpies are too smart to fall for such evil.

And Senator “Payman” put this out an hour ago:

As an Australian, as a Muslim, and as a humanitarian, the bloodshed of any human being, is against the core principles of my identity.

Today is a powerful reminder why we need to renew our commitment to standing for justice and upholding human rights for all.

Nothing justifies the killing of civilians. Nothing justifies the slaughter of 20,000 children. Nothing justifies apartheid. Nothing justifies occupation.

My thoughts and prayers go out to all who are suffering the oss of loved ones and grieving the genocide.”

Now… I’d like to tell Cats the sorts of things I’d like to do to this animal, but I don’t want to get Dover in trouble.

Vote. It. Out.

The mad mullahs might actually bring China around:

Visegrád 24 on X: “BREAKING: Terror attack in front of the Karachi International Airport in Pakistan with many fatalities According to first reports, a suicide bomber in a truck targeted a convoy of Chinese men who had just arrived by plane Some reports say the attacker hit a “high-value target” https://t.co/HSCCqQJ5Oh” / X