Abundant peace from heaven, and life, for all
of us; but if not this, O God, if You
are real then grant us less, and if not, do
it anyway: that we will not fall
for the same false lessons as before; we will call
our mothers and email our friends; we’ll renew
our marriage vows and sex lives. We try too
hard to be more than simply good and stall
in our moral progress every time we think
we must defeat evil with will instead
of opening our doors and being kind, letting
our neighbors know our names, having a drink
with our estranged brothers, giving the dead
our Kaddish; those who killed them our forgetting.
Jacob Bacharach 
Simply good; simply beautiful.
very good
Awesome!
i weep for Paris, i weep for sense, i weep for harmony. May the creator of us all, hear our cry, from our woes dont shy, may he pass buy, and touch the wounded souls…..
Another atrocity, by its real name. No! Tragedy!
Their hatred is clear. But ours? No! We love.
It’s our fault. We did it! When push comes to shove,
they push and they shove. We fall. Self blamingly.
But what can we do? Change our policy? Blasphemy!
The answer is ordained from above,
by Jesus or the gods, whom we believe none of,
but nonetheless take moral trajectory.
It’s our fault! We must change! We must offer them more!
More immigrants. More “services”. More “refugees”.
Less of us. More of them! Then they won’t kill!
The great and good assure us. We must ourselves deplore.
But for all that, I’m left with a sense of unease,
that the copybook gods brood over us still.
Every other word a well-set gem, but if only IOZ meant what he says about “evil”. Or rather, if he would just define it, and apply it with rather less remove. If only “evil” meant something less vapid and fungible here than a pageant finalist advocating for World Peace. Zut alors, les poulets came home to roost today….
I do understand the events in Paris cannot stir actionable indignation among America’s Educated and Good compared with the serial horrors to which self-anointed race-victims throwing consciousness-raising tantrums in sacred co-ed outrage circles at Mizzou say they have been subjected. Apples and oranges, really…
How odd that the tragic events in Beirut only the day before (likely by the hands of allied actors) didn’t inspire you to call for America’s noted “Educated and Good” to stir themselves to “do something”, anything with their indignation. A pity that the Unworthy Victims just can’t move the soul…
We began, here anyway, with IOZ’s touching paean to perspective. How the heck would you know my reaction to Beirut, “Bill J.”? I deplore every single atrocity worldwide by ambulatory strips of Islamist filth.
You’re projecting. It’s Paris and like events which inspire affirmative defensiveness in you, because pharasaical Western liberals are conditioned to downplay and rationalize such deaths for Westerners as our just deserts.
That said, I do not presume to compare my own efforts with for instance Michelle Obama and her courageous one-off Boko Haram selfie with the “Bring Back Our Girls” signboard, on her way to the Beyonce concert.
who are these “western liberals” inkblot is going off about? bernie sanders tries to sound like arnold in the original Conan the Barbarian while the Butcheress of Benghazi invokes the rapist of Gaul, Julius Caesar. you mean these little bloggie corners w/like 5 readers? these are the 5th columns for the coming Caliphate your panties are all twisted out of shape over?
Robert, here’s a failsafe method for detecting modern Western liberals (a method which even your fabled reading comprehension somehow failed to grok from my previous comments to this thread).
Look for those whose first expressed reaction to a pan-Muslim rage-boy collective murder spree is to raise fears of overreaction; to urge big-picture perspective and wise remove; to rationalize, contextualize and thereby minimize or at least dilute the conduct.
Look also for those who piously cry the functional equivalent of “Man the Ramparts!” and “Is there no Justice?!” in the face of every bleat of outrage and pain, fact-based or not, significant or not even if true, from the African-American rage-boy collective.
you can’t vote any of these people into office that you are so up in arms about, i only hear of them, hear that they exist, but there are nowhere to be found. probably need a bigger spy budget to find ’em.
most of A.A’s are in prison but do not fuck with American Football!
and what’s a “pan-Muslim”? i didn’t grok that. can you show me a pan-muslim please?
One of these puffed-up social justice warriors, albeit an indolent and elitist one, is in the Oval Office serving out his second term. Today’s Youths for the Cause, #BLMers, are the darlings of the media infotainment complex now that LGBTQers have been forced to share the voguelight.
“Pan-Muslim” literally signifies all Muslims, or more precisely here, those beliefs and priorities which almost all observant Muslims share. You might recall e.g. the Panhellenic Council from from your Greek fraternity days. You were a Sigma Chi, right?
“an indolent elitist puffed up social justice warrior.” Obama is a bureaucrat, a chair warmer, not a warrior. just for starters on this word garbage. “almost all muslims” = “all muslims”= 4 or 6 muslims in paris (or how many ever it was, it = 1.2 billion). allah save us when the Indonesians get involved in the struggle for the caliphate.
parlez usted ingles?
“We began, here anyway, with IOZ’s touching paean to perspective.”
A perspective that you, as usual, piss all over.
“You’re projecting. It’s Paris and like events which inspire affirmative defensiveness in you, because pharasaical Western liberals are conditioned to downplay and rationalize such deaths for Westerners as our just deserts.”
Come now. Who’s projecting?
Look, davidly, I can take about an hour on the Tower of Ailleurs, as long as I get (or give) a little golden shower.
Who’s projecting? Pharasaical Western liberals, as I’ve already noted, with their superciliously selective outrage.
Or supercilious lack thereof. But by all means let’s get back to pearl-clutching over the maudlin plaints of #BLM mouthbreathers.
Almost all Muslims believe in the inevitable triumph of shariah in a world caliphate, Robert, Thankfully, only a fraction either actively pursue that vision with violence or condone it as the unfortunate concomitant of Western sins amid that inevitability. Just a few score million so far then, with the pendulum swinging towards orthodox rigor worldwide, not humanistic reformation.
If you’d read a bit more slowly, you’d have seen that for me as well as apparently you Obama is but a milquetoast social justice warrior, a seminar-room and toady-circle titan. I wasn’t part of the big liberal social-reparations reach around which put the queue-jumping oaf in office. In terms of inchoate policy and harm done, however, he’s the other side of the same coin from Dubya.
fear of a muslim caliphate, sharia, etc., bill o’? caught some of The Factor last night for the first time in years…wow. inkberrow, you should apply for a job there.
TPP or sharia? which is more of a threat, the Fukuyamaites or ISIS…or are they THE SAME THING???
ink, take those Obama speeches a bit more skeptically, will you please? liberal milquetoast? when it suits him, sure. but nothing that is so is so.
A narcissistic and shallow yet petulant and stubborn lightweight is every bit as dangerous as a low-wattage martinet.
Obama might well be bemused or even amused at the prospect of Rome burning, then blaming conservatives.
the inner state of the Obama psyche in a hypothetical, metaphorical and implausible scenario is of zero import or interest. again, I don’t understand wth you are on about. is rome supposed to be America? or Wash. DC? are we burning? what day is this? is this a weekday?
robert, it’s a metaphor, of course. Like every single other Inkstain smeared in these here parts, it betrays an obsession. Hence his paranoid projection that everyone who does not subscribe to his worldview is out to assist in his subjugation.
all i hear is lear
never furgit, never, never, never furgit, never
kill, kill, kill, kill, kill.
we all know what’s coming for these fugees in Europa, right? this the labor, this the toil, war down the haughty, spare the defeated. surplus labor is part of the imperial candle. look at all the slaves them Romans had.
open your doors, indeed. if you instilled a 20 hr work week and guaranteed every human being in Europe a living wage, whether they were working or not…imagine. and stopped bombing their countries? crazy talk.
we can also just invest diapers. for all the pants-crapping we are supposed to do.
I imagine Inkbarrow is heavily invested in industrial diaper services.
That’s Ink-berrow, peckerwood. I imagine you’d have stood up straight to Jihadi John without a pantload. If so, you’d have been like the real Americans (and Brit) who overpowered that strip of Muslim filth from the same sleeper cell on the train this summer. Yeah, but it’s all fear-mongering, unlike the arch-racist police assassins behind every bush in the Victim Hood.