Croc watch

Robert Caruso and the grey tribe: The tweets his future employers, editors, and clients should know about

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It was with great interest that I watched one of the security state’s more aggressive propagandists get dragged into the #GamerGate maelstrom last month. I don’t have strong feelings about the movement, but anything that gives Gawker a taste of its own medicine is probably not all bad. This is the first point of contact in the national security realm in what Pax Dickinson calls the grey tribe’s rebellion against the blue tribe.

Meet Robert Caruso, a consultant, columnist seen at the Daily Beast, The Hill, Huffington Post, The Guardian, and elsewhere, former spokesman for the Afghan reconstruction, and is a frequent source for anti-Snowden perspectives for Business Insider’s Michael Kelley. He hasn’t written a word that doesn’t argue for more war. Since surfacing as a columnist he’s argued the best way to stop ISIS is to go after Iran and arm the Syrian opposition, obscured the administration’s denials of NSA spying in a quote at Buzzfeed, said we should arm the Kurds and put boots on the ground in Iraq, thinks the man who thought we could bomb Libya into liberal democracy is a “consummate realist,” and also at Buzzfeed, written a listicle on why the NSA is a-OK. There’s this one:

Once again, the United States finds itself embroiled in a debate over whether or not to “go to war.” It’s a choice the country shouldn’t have to make, and it wouldn’t with a bigger, more lethal clandestine service like France or Israel has. …

In remarks offered right here in Massachusetts, the CIA’s own deputy director once observed dryly, “People in the 1950s and early 1960s concluded that the United States was facing a ruthless and implacable enemy. Our only hope of survival was to match their dedication with our dedication and their ruthlessness with our ruthlessness.” That ruthlessness is sorely needed again.

More humorously, he was published in a Tufts publication, but misspelled the school in a column he wrote quoting a graduate.

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WASP as cultural bellwether: Bp. David Colin Jones and the zeitgeist vs. Solzhenitsyn

If too many Salon articles and SPLC reports have got you doubting that liberalism is the dominant cultural force in America, listen to an Episcopalian sermon. The standard criticism of the historical WASP elite typically involves the charge of being indifferent to common people, preferring rules to justice, and being reluctant to examine their society too closely lest doing so imperil their social privilege. In the past, this was deployed on behalf of institutions like Jim Crow. Today, with the left occupying most positions of cultural power, this patrician diffidence now works to the benefit of left-wing causes and state power.

I was in Williamsburg several weeks ago for homecoming, and went to services at Bruton Parish (est. 1674). It was confirmation Sunday and Suffragan Bishop of Virginia David Colin Jones was preaching. They’ve finally put his sermon online; it begins with a weird dig at the Synod of Bishops (italics mine): (more…)

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New feature: Croc watch

From the humorous writings of the man who designed this blog’s namesake weapon, Da Vinci:

THE CROCODILE. HYPOCRISY. This animal catches a man and straightway kills him; after he is dead, it weeps for him with a lamentable voice and many tears. Then, having done lamenting, it cruelly devours him. It is thus with the hypocrite, who, for the smallest matter, has his face bathed with tears, but shows the heart of a tiger and rejoices in his heart at the woes of others, while wearing a pitiful face.

Moldbug

I am reminded of the tone of the famous Soviet humor magazine, Krokodil, which loved to parody the buffoonish, corrupt doings of the hooligan dissidents. Alas, Krokodil is no more. But perhaps we can remember the entire trope in which the smug and powerful mock the hooligans, peasants and barbarians as crocodile humor.

more Moldbug:

Crocodile humor is the laughter of the powerful at the powerless. It is not intended to be funny. It is intended to intimidate. Those who laugh, as many do, are those who love to submerge themselves in a mob, feel its strength as theirs, chant and shake their spears as one.

and “The Crocodile’s Toothache,” by Shel Silverstein:

The Crocodile
Went to the dentist
And sat down in the chair,
And the dentist said, “Now tell me, sir,
Why does it hurt and where?”
And the Crocodile said, “I’ll tell you the truth,
I have a terrible ache in my tooth,”
And he opened his jaws so wide, so wide,
The the dentist, he climbed right inside,
And the dentist laughed, “Oh isn’t this fun?”
As he pulled the teeth out, one by one.
And the Crocodile cried, “You’re hurting me so!
Please put down your pliers and let me go.”
But the dentist laughed with a Ho Ho Ho,
And he said, “I still have twelve to go-
Oops, that’s the wrong one, I confess,
But what’s one crocodile’s tooth more or less?”
Then suddenly, the jaws went SNAP,
And the dentist was gone, right off the map,
And where he went one could only guess…
To North or South or East or West…
He left no forwarding address.
But what’s one dentist, more or less?