Prophetic Forensics comments: “An idea gigolo” always “falling in love with new ideas.”
I can relate. My internal process is like a life-giving fountain.
Alone with my thoughts = never alone.
So interesting how you phrased “that’s not absurd” [re] (Taylor Swift music [might be] #unrelatable to black culture)? Reeled me right into the fountain. I am just considering it, from all these angles. The use of the word, [the] idea behind its structure in the sentence and how it disqualifies fluff and misunderstanding. The precision of the architecture by which it was delivered.
You get my drift..blooming..unfolding..fruit bearing..words, to me, like ideas to you.
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The New York Times and the rest of the elite media consistently put out more compelling articles than I do, but in their abundance of production, they often create more confusion than clarity.
Why is this? Does it have something to do with our different incentives? Yes. I feel driven to write what I think is true without regard to profit or popularity. There are no sacred cows here. I don’t need to make money or garner praise for these essays. I just want to share things I notice. The New York Times and The New Yorker, on the other hand, publish to fulfill the desires of their subscribers (such as why Trump and conservatives are bad and Russia hacked the 2016 election).
In early April of 2020, I read Paul Barry’s book The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History and I immediately grasped the case for social distancing (though I was opposed to the closing of parks and beaches and other outdoor spaces because in an influenza epidemic, you want to get people outside and exercising).
June 4, 2020, I posted: “Lacking sufficient knowledge, I did not oppose or support the Covid-19 lockdown. I was willing to give the [Los Angeles] mayor and governor the benefit of the doubt on their Covid-19 response. Now I don’t know any positive way of looking at their Covid-19 choices given that they threw away everything they previously stood for when BLM (Black Lives Matter) came calling.”
In retrospect, I give the mayor and governor great credit for their early Covid lockdown and I wish I had been more supportive of social distancing.
June 4, 2020, I posted: “On a scale of 1-10, with 1 representing reality TV and 10 representing nuclear cataclysm, I think of Covid-19 as a 7 (I think before it is done it will likely take away millions of years of quality of life from Americans, these [BLM] riots as a 3, and Russiagate and impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump as a 1.”
Amidst all the mania about misinformation, I’ve said for years that we have great instincts for detecting when people are trying to manipulate us against our will. Schools and media and and Hollywood don’t turn Republicans into Democrats and religious people into atheists against their will. Propaganda doesn’t change minds. Why? Because we did not evolve to be gullible.
I got that phrase from Hugo Mercier’s 2020 book Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe, but I had the basic idea back in the 1980s when I fell in love with economics and its assumption that people make rational choices. While this sounds ridiculous, the premise encourages you to figure out why people act as they do, rather than to dismiss choices you don’t like as irrational.
Many of the arguments by the right-wing media for a Donald Trump presidency in particular and Republican politics in general fall apart under examination (such as Democrats are the real racists, government can’t help poor people, vaccine hesitancy, a rigged election in 2020, the Biden crime family, lock her up, etc). The left-wing media such as The New Yorker and The New York Times are usually more intelligent than their right-wing counterparts (The Wall Street Journal comes closest to this role) and elites often have good reason to mock conservatives. But you don’t judge a hero system by its dumbest talking points.
For the first time in decades, Republicans seem to be the party of the low IQ. For the first time in decades, eligible voters who don’t vote are more likely to choose Republicans. ABC News noted April 10, 2024: “The less you vote, the more you back Trump – A new poll suggests it’s Republicans who should be rooting for higher turnout.”
Inchoate desires drive us to make the choices that we do, and we then use our reason to defend and rationalize our inclinations, but our instincts don’t spring from reason, they spring from genetics, imprinting and social incentives. Our reason is weak when compared with the other forces that drive us.
In January, the World Economic Forum released a report showing that fourteen hundred and ninety international experts rated “misinformation and disinformation” the leading global risk of the next two years, surpassing war, migration, and climatic catastrophe. A stack of new books echoes their concerns. In “Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It” (Columbia), Paul Thagard, a philosopher at the University of Waterloo, writes that “misinformation is threatening medicine, science, politics, social justice, and international relations, affecting problems such as vaccine hesitancy, climate change denial, conspiracy theories, claims of racial inferiority, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.” In “Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity” (Norton), Sander van der Linden, a social-psychology professor at Cambridge, warns that “viruses of the mind” disseminated by false tweets and misleading headlines pose “serious threats to the integrity of elections and democracies worldwide.” Or, as the M.I.T. political scientist Adam J. Berinsky puts it in “Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It” (Princeton), “a democracy where falsehoods run rampant can only result in dysfunction.”
Most Americans seem to agree with these theorists of human credulity…
In a masterly new book, “Religion as Make-Believe” (Harvard), Neil Van Leeuwen, a philosopher at Georgia State University, returns to Sperber’s ideas with notable rigor. He analyzes beliefs with a taxonomist’s care, classifying different types and identifying the properties that distinguish them. He proposes that humans represent and use factual beliefs differently from symbolic beliefs, which he terms “credences.” Factual beliefs are for modelling reality and behaving optimally within it. Because of their function in guiding action, they exhibit features like “involuntariness” (you can’t decide to adopt them) and “evidential vulnerability” (they respond to evidence). Symbolic beliefs, meanwhile, largely serve social ends, not epistemic ones, so we can hold them even in the face of contradictory evidence…
Van Leeuwen’s book complements a 2020 volume by Hugo Mercier, “Not Born Yesterday.” Mercier, a cognitive scientist at the École Normale Supérieure who studied under Sperber, argues that worries about human gullibility overlook how skilled we are at acquiring factual beliefs. Our understanding of reality matters, he notes. Get it wrong, and the consequences can be disastrous. On top of that, people have a selfish interest in manipulating one another. As a result, human beings have evolved a tool kit of psychological adaptations for evaluating information—what he calls “open vigilance mechanisms.” Where a credulity theorist like Thagard insists that humans tend to believe anything, Mercier shows that we are careful when adopting factual beliefs, and instinctively assess the quality of information, especially by tracking the reliability of sources.
Van Leeuwen and Mercier agree that many beliefs are not best interpreted as factual ones, although they lay out different reasons for why this might be. For Van Leeuwen, a major driver is group identity. Beliefs often function as badges: the stranger and more unsubstantiated the better. Religions, he notes, define membership on the basis of unverifiable or even unintelligible beliefs: that there is one God; that there is reincarnation; that this or that person was a prophet; that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are separate yet one. Mercier, in his work, has focused more on justification. He says that we have intuitions—that vaccination is bad, for example, or that certain politicians can’t be trusted—and then collect stories that defend our positions. Still, both authors treat symbolic beliefs as socially strategic expressions.
A key part of this article points out:
That’s why thoughtful scholars—including the philosopher Daniel Williams and the experimental psychologist Sacha Altay—encourage us to see misinformation more as a symptom than as a disease. Unless we address issues of polarization and institutional trust, they say, we’ll make little headway against an endless supply of alluring fabrications.
One of my favorite lines is that our problems are rarely our problems, they are just symptoms of deeper problems. We usually prefer to think about symptoms rather than the disease because symptoms seem so fixable while the disease seems too challenging for comfort. For example, I sometimes obsess about why I am not married and I blame it on bad luck and other external factors, but inside I know my bachelorhood is just a symptom of my deeper issue with connecting with others, which in turn is just a symptom of my ultimate disease – my troubled relationship with myself and with reality (religious people might call reality “God”).
Journalism is among the most powerful cultural industries in this regard—not for nothing has it been called “the primary sense-making practice of modernity.”
In 2016, no major pundit or journalist or academic, to my knowledge, predicted a Donald Trump victory. When that happened, our elite felt anxious because they had been revealed as blind to a significant part of reality. When people feel anxious, they often try to off-load their feelings as quickly as possible, and so for many Democrats and members the MSM, the notion that Russia hacked our election became an irresistible story. That there was never any evidence that Russia put Trump in office didn’t get in the way of the story because when our desires collide with truth, we usually side with our desires.
So You Think You’ve Been Gaslit: What happens when a niche clinical concept becomes a ubiquitous cultural diagnosis.
Sitting in Kafka’s office thinking of Dunn and Adaya, I found myself swelling with indignation on behalf of these gaslit children, taught to feel responsible for the pain their parents had caused them. But beneath that indignation lurked something else—a nagging anxiety coaxed into sharper visibility by the therapeutic aura of Kafka’s sleek analytic couch. I eventually told him that, as I worked on this piece, I had started to wonder about the ways I might be unintentionally gaslighting my daughter—telling her that she is “just fine” when she clearly isn’t, or giving her a hard time for making us late for school by demanding to wear a different pair of tights, when it is clearly my own fault for not starting our morning routine ten minutes earlier. In these interactions, I can see the distinct mechanisms of gaslighting at work, albeit in a much milder form: taking a difficult feeling—my latent sense of culpability whenever she is unhappy, or my guilt for running behind schedule—and placing it onto her. Part of me hoped that Kafka would disagree with me, but instead he started nodding vehemently. “Yes!” he said. “Within a two-block range of any elementary school, just before the bell rings, you can find countless parents gaslighting their children, off-loading their anxiety.”
We both laughed. In the moment, this jolt of recognition seemed incidental, a brief diversion into daily life as we crawled through the darker trenches of human manipulation. But, after I’d left Kafka’s office, it started to feel like a crucial acknowledgment: that gaslighting is neither as exotic nor as categorically distinct as we’d like to believe….
Ben Kafka told me that he thinks one of the key insights of psychoanalysis is that people respond to anxiety by dividing the world into good and bad, a tendency known as “splitting.” It strikes me that some version of this splitting is at play not only in gaslighting itself—taking an undesirable “bad” emotion or quality and projecting it onto someone else, so that the self can remain “good”—but also in the widespread invocation of the term, the impulse to split the world into innocent and culpable parties. If the capacity to gaslight is more widely distributed than its most extreme iterations would lead us to believe, perhaps we’ve all done more of it than we care to admit. Each of us has been the one making our way back into bed, vulnerable and naked, and each of us has been the one saying, Come back into this bed I made for you.
I remember one Saturday morning in 1983 or 1984, when my dad and I were running five minutes late for church. I stood in the driveway ready to go when my dad hastily backed the car out of the garage with his driver’s door open looking behind him. The car door then smashed into the garage door. My dad had done a stupid thing. He had the flu and he was not thinking straight. Rather than take responsibility for his mistake, my dad blamed me for the accident because I had made us late.
As The New Yorker notes, we all feel tempted to do this when our anxiety mounts and so we gaslight others about reality. Smart people in the media do this along with dumb people who dig ditches.
I started compiling in my head the principles of my worldview that I believe are superior to what is generally offered in the elite media:
In ways not seen since at least the McCarthy era, Americans are finding themselves increasingly constrained by a rising class—what I call the progressive Clerisy—that accepts no dissent from its basic tenets. Like the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, the Clerisy increasingly exercises its power to constrain dissenting views, whether on politics, social attitudes or science.
The rise of today’s Clerisy stems from the growing power and influence of its three main constituent parts: the creative elite of media and entertainment, the academic community, and the high-level government bureaucracy.
The Clerisy operates on very different principles than its rival power brokers, the oligarchs of finance, technology or energy. The power of the knowledge elite does not stem primarily from money, but in persuading, instructing and regulating the rest of society. Like the British Clerisy or the old church-centered French First Estate, the contemporary Clerisy increasingly promotes a single increasingly parochial ideology and, when necessary, has the power to marginalize, or excommunicate, miscreants from the public sphere.
Left and right politics are evolutionary adaptations that have different levels of reproductive success depending upon the situation. As the 2013 book Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences notes: “[T]he political left has been associated with support for equality and tolerance of departures from tradition, while the right is more supportive of authority, hierarchy, and order.”
* We live in a post-modern world. There’s no one narrative that adequately explains reality.
* We’re all locked in an iron cage together and nobody is coming to save us. To survive, you want to become as strong as possible because you never know what might happen.
* We primarily know the world around us from the news, but this is a distorted prism directed not so much towards sharing important knowledge, but to meet the desires of viewers for excitement. It was exciting, for example, to create stories implying that Russia hacked our 2016 election, but there was never any evidence that Russia played a decisive role in this contest. It was exciting to portray American police as racist in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, but the boring reality is that police usually do the best they can in often difficult circumstances and many of those who die at police hands bear substantial responsibility.
* Personalities in politics are usually less powerful than situations. The news media focuses on personalities because that is a more compelling story than focusing on structure, but structure shapes the world more than individual whims. For example, as I write this in April of 2024, Bibi Netanyahu is Israel’s Prime Minister and his personality gets a lot of media coverage. If someone else were Israel’s prime minister at this time, Israel’s conduct toward its enemies wouldn’t change much. For example, if Bibi decided to support an independent Palestinian state, he would simply be removed from power because the majority of Israelis are not in a mood to give the Palestinians anything. If a Haredi Gadol came out in favor of Zionism, he would no longer be a Haredi Gadol. If Putin dies today, the next leader of Russia would follow similar policies toward Ukraine (because if the Monroe Doctrine is good for the United States, the equivalent is good for superpowers Russia and China).
A structuralist understands that what happens in Ukraine or Israel or Nigeria has nothing to do with America’s vital interests. To adopt a lesson from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, don’t confuse the urgent for the important.
Sometimes, however, individuals are more important than situations. If anyone but Hitler had led Germany during WWII, there would not have been a Holocaust.
* Different people have different gifts. Different plants and animals have different gifts. Life evolves differently in different situations and those mutations that are adaptive promote survival and reproduction.
Yesterday Iran launched dozens of drones and missiles at the Jewish state that didn’t kill anyone (though 31 people were injured) because the weapons were slow and cheap and 99% of them were shot down.
Iran apparently provided 72-hours advanced notice to its neighbors and to the US and hence to Israel.
The attack looks more like a public relations exercise than a killing exercise.
Most of us want to contribute. If I didn’t think I had something to add to this story, I would do other things with my time. While I see nothing I can add on the moral dimension of this conflict, I do think I have some insights into the realpolitik.
Millions of Israelis sought shelter during the attack so Iran demonstrated its ability to disrupt the lives of its enemies. This was a warning more than an attack. If Iranian-backed Hezbollah unleashes its full missile arsenal on Israel, thousands of people would die and large parts of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa would be flattened.
Simultaneous with the attack on Saturday, Iran publicly announced that this was the end of its retaliation for Israel’s bombing of a building next to Iran’s embassy in Damascus on April 1st that killed a leading Iranian general.
Even if Israel hit Iran’s embassy, while a violation of international law, it was not attacking Iran proper. An embassy is not sovereign territory. Iran, on the other hand, has attacked Israel proper, and not just military targets, but also population centers such as Jerusalem.
If Israel fights back in an obvious way, the world may regard Israel as the provocateur.
An example of a country not fighting back after terrorism is India after the 2008 Mumbai attacks by Pakistanis. India rightly judged it was better served by not directly retaliating against its nuclear-armed neighbor.
On the other hand, what Israel experienced Saturday is different from the Mumbai attacks. Israel received a broad-based missile and drone attack, much of it aimed at its capital city — Jerusalem. Which countries would not publicly, explicitly and directly retaliate after such an assault? Would the US or France or Japan or Australia sit back and absorb such a drone and missile barrage, even if none of their citizens were killed? I doubt it. The only countries that would not explicitly fight back in these circumstances would be weak countries. Israel is not a weak country. Israel has the most formidable military in the Middle East. I can’t imagine any country with a formidable military not fighting back after such a strike. If I am wrong, please name that country.
Why should Israel be held to a different standard than other countries in similar circumstances with similar capability?
Why has Iran engaged in this blatant signaling exercise? On the face of it, Iran’s attack seems no more effective at achieving its aim of hurting Israel than wearing a mask while driving alone minimizes one’s chances of catching Covid.
We all signal because signaling works. Life signals. Animals signal. Dogs and cats and snakes and people constantly send signals. We often signal without knowing we’re signaling. It’s a basic instinct.
The accusation of virtue signalling is typically understood as a serious charge. Those accused usually respond (if not by an admission of fault) by attempting to show that they are doing no such thing. In this paper, I argue that we ought to embrace the charge, rather than angrily reject it. I argue that this response can draw support from cognitive science, on the one hand, and from social epistemology on the other. I claim that we may appropriately concede that what we are doing is (inter alia) virtue signalling, because virtue signalling is morally appropriate. It neither expresses vices, nor is hypocritical, nor does it degrade the quality of public moral discourse. Signalling our commitment to norms is a central and justifiable function of moral discourse, and the same signals provide (higher-order) evidence that is appropriately taken into account in forming moral beliefs…
Animals use signals for a variety of purposes. For instance, gazelles famously signal their fitness by stotting (jumping up and down on the spot) in front of predators (FitzGibbon and Fanshawe 1988). Peacocks even more famously signal their fitness with their spectacular tails (Zahavi and Zahavi 1999). Good signals are hard to fake signals: if a signal is cheap, then defectors will co-opt it and it will rapidly lose its value. Stotting is a hard to fake signal because it is costly. The gazelle who can afford to waste energy it might have saved for fleeing is probably not worth chasing. The peacock’s tail is an even more reliable signal, because the more spectacular the tail the more resources have been devoted to it and the better the health of the bird. A good signal of trustworthiness, too, will be hard to fake.
In human beings, hard to fake signals take a variety of forms. Some are costly, like the peacock’s tail. Many cognitive scientists argue that costly signalling is at the root of a variety of religious practises (Irons 2001; Sosis and Alcorta 2003; Sosis and Bressler 2003). Regular attendance at religious services is costly, insofar as it requires forgoing more immediately rewarding activities. More directly, tithing is costly and religious rituals often involve some kind of privation. Fasting is a common signal of religious commitment (Lent, Ramadan and Yom Kippur all involve fasting, of course), and particularly devout individuals may take vows of celibacy, of poverty or even enter small cells for life as anchorites. Some signals are not costly, but nevertheless are credibility enhancing (Henrich 2009). Crossing a bridge may not be costly for the person who crosses (she may benefit from doing so) but it is a reliable signal that she believes the bridge is safe.
We live in a world in which we cannot easily rely on others’ moral record, as conveyed by gossip, to identify those we can trust. Our societies are too large for reputation-tracking to be reliable: gossip may not reach us, and agents move relatively freely from community to community. Formal systems of regulation may help, but their effective development and enforcement depends on a sufficient level of trust to avoid systematic corruption. Costly and credibility enhancing signalling help fill the gap between reputation tracking and formal regulation. For example, because religious observance involves hard to fake signals of trustworthiness, co-religionists may seek one another out as business partners. The role of Quakers in the early years of British industry is, for instance, well-known (Prior et al. 2006). Moreover, trust is not limited to co-religionists. Religious and non-religious people express more trust in religious people, regardless of their religion, than in atheists (Gervais et al. 2011, 2017).
Credibility enhancing displays and costly signals of religious commitment are moral signals (at least for those individuals who belong to the High Gods religions (Norenzayan 2013), with their moralized gods, which have a near monopoly on the faithful today). They are signals of willingness to abide by certain, publicly proclaimed, norms. They are ways of signalling our virtue. Displays of religiosity continue to play this signalling function today, especially in highly religious societies like the United States.
But as societies secularise, such signals no longer have the same power. Small wonder we have turned to more secular virtue signalling.
I first went to public school in tenth grade in September of 1981. Because I wasn’t known at Placer High School in Auburn, CA, I was often mistaken for a freshman and people tried to haze me. One day a group of kids in my grade started bullying me, and I lost my temper, went up to one of them, and right in his face, I took a big bite of my apple. I don’t know why I did this, but I guess I was signaling.
It wasn’t such a great move. The kids then followed me up the campus mocking me but at least they didn’t beat me up. Nobody did.
A year later, I collaborated with the guy I crunched my apple at when he complained that football players got preferential treatment when compared to other athletes such as himself who rode bicycles. It was the article that put me on the map in my high school. Various football players got in my face afterward and one squeezed my neck and another, Jim Otto Jr (now a pastor) threw me in trash can. I was running on adrenaline for weeks. I saw myself as a brave truthteller.
I never discussed the bullying I received with the people who bullied me, nor did I talk to my best friend at Placer High School why he turned against me after my article came out on preferential treatment for football players (months prior to the publication, we collaborated on ways to do the article when we both worked on the school newspaper, but at crunch time my friend was no longer on the newspaper and he identified more strongly with his fellow athletes). We’re still friends and we’ve never discussed this, nor talked about the various ridiculous things I’ve said and done.
When I first got into Judaism circa 1992, I started cutting off people from my life who were not sufficiently righteous and deep in my estimation (it was one of my many maladaptive 1990s interpretations of Judaism’s and Dennis Prager’s teachings). Luckily, I didn’t do this to my high school friend, but for years afterward, I would distance myself from those who indicated they watched a lot of TV, even those who were only baiting me by saying they watched eight hours of TV a day.
Signaling is good, but like anything good, it can go awry.
Iran has yet to directly attack Americans on American or European soil. It certainly has that capability, but it has held back because it does not want to directly go to war with America (as opposed to war through proxies, which Iran has waged for decades against Israel and the US).
It is not clear yet whether this attack is better for Iran or for Israel. If Israel abstains from escalating with Iran, this might be a win for Israel.
My biggest disagreement with the latest news coverage is the idea that Israel does not want to escalate. Israel has many incentives to escalate, in large part because of American security guarantees. Israel would love to get American cooperation to bomb the hell out of Iranian nuclear facilities, which, ironically, would massively increase Iran’s incentives to build nuclear weapons.
When you subsidize something, you get more of it. America subsidizes Israel’s military, and backstops it with security guarantees, and this creates incentives for Israel to engage in risky behavior.
If an investor has a guaranteed limit to its losses, he is likely to make risky bets. If the bets pay off, the investor wins. If the bets fail, his losses are limited.
A common critique of American banking is that the losses are socialized while the profits are held in private hands.
Israel’s losses are similarly socialized — not in terms of lives, but in terms of arms. Israel’s gains, on the other hand, largely accrue to Israel, and not to American interests. A greater Israel, for example, freed from the presence of Palestinians, may well be in Israel’s best interests but not necessarily in America’s.
Mearsheimer: ‘Israelis wouldn’t mind a general conflagration because that would facilitate ethnic cleansing.’
Different groups have different interests. When you believe your enemy threatens your existence, as Israelis believe about Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, no cards are taken off the table.
What people are happy with the existence of enemies within them and beside them? I’m talking “enemy” in the Schmittian sense of one who is seeking your destruction.
The normal reaction of any living thing is to create an environment around it most conducive to its thriving.
John J. Mearsheimer says 45 minutes in: “The United States does not want escalation in the Middle East. The United States would like to see Israel win in Gaza, whatever that means, and end that war so that we have a stable Middle East. The Israelis are a different matter. I believe the Israelis wouldn’t mind a general conflagration because that would facilitate ethnic cleansing.”
If I lived in Gaza, I’d want to leave. If people I cared about lived in Gaza, I’d want them to leave. Gazans are suffering horribly. Given that Israel is not willing to live with Hamas dominating Gaza, I don’t see life improving in Gaza any time soon.
Ethnic cleansing is horrible, but there are degrees of awfulness in ethnic cleansing. Moving a people ten miles to a country with their same religion and language (which is what would happen if the residents of Gaza and the West Bank left for a neighboring Arab country) and adequate financial support (the Arabs have the money to take care of their Palestinian brothers) is not the same as moving people hundreds of miles through hostile territory to a place where they are alone and have few resources.
Most people would prefer to be ethnically cleansed to a place ten miles away rather than be murdered. Right now relations between Palestinians and Israelis are so bad, that many people on both sides want ethnic cleansing as the least of two evils.
John Mearsheimer: “I think the Israelis are interested in cleansing not only Gaza, but also the West Bank. A general conflagration would make it easier for them to do it. The other reason [Israelis] want escalation is that they have a huge problem on their northern border. About 200,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes… How do they move those people back to northern Israel until the conflict with Hezbollah is settled and Hezbollah stops firing rockets into northern Israel. As long as the war in Gaza goes on, I believe Hezbollah will continue to target northern Israel. The Israelis want to escalate because they think they have escalation dominance here. They’d like to inflict massive punishment on Hezbollah and Lebanon and reach some kind of modus vivendi with Hezbollah that allows them to move those 100,000 Israelis back into northern Israel.”
I usually prefer talking to realists rather than moralists. With realists I can learn from them even if we have different hero systems, while with moralists, if I don’t share their foundations, I rarely learn anything. I can talk to somebody who hates Israel and it makes no difference to me, an Israel lover, as long as we are talking solely in terms of power and group interests.
Is Iran conducting a smart foreign policy? That depends on how other groups react to it. Sometimes it is smart to punch your enemy in the nose and other times it is smarter to ignore him. Yesterday Iran launched cheap missiles and thousand dollar drones at Israel that required expensive million-dollar weapons to shot down. This met several objectives simultaneously: Iran depletes the reserves of its enemies (America and Israel), and appeals to its own nationalists and to the Arab street, making it harder for Arab nations to have normal relations with Israel. Iran also makes American involvement in the Middle East increasingly expensive and dangerous. This latest escalation exemplifies the dangers of Biden’s foreign policy of over-extension into places such as Israel and Ukraine that don’t matter to vital US interests.
On the other hand, Sam Vaknin argued early Sunday morning that Iran miscalculated.
Vaknin:
Israel bombed a structure that served the Iranian consulate in Damascus. Though not strictly within the compound of the Embassy, it was widely known as an outpost of Iranian diplomacy in Syria.
The language of articles 21-25 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) is clear: embassies and consulates are not sovereign territory and not extraterritorial. They just enjoy certain legal exemptions, that’s all.
So, why did Iran choose to escalate and retaliate by attacking Israel with a barrage of 300 UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or drones) as well as cruise missiles and ballistic missiles?
Because of the growing threat to its out-of-control proxies everywhere: Hamas, the Houthis, and Hizballah, first and foremost. Iran needed to reassert its authority over these terrorist organizations by being seen to fearlessly conflict directly with the “Little Devil”, Israel.
But the attack misfired in every conceivable way.
More than 97% of the weapons launched were intercepted long before they had reached the borders of Israel, exposing the inefficacy of drones and even missiles as decisive factors in modern warfare, set as they are against hi-tech defenses.
The onslaught on Israel diverted attention at least momentarily from the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza and the much heralded Israeli invasion of Rafah. It is a distractive window of opportunity that Israel might use to push on with its offensive.
The United States, France, the United Kingdom and even Jordan sided with Israel against Iran. It is a reminder that Suni countries are actually quite elated with the damage that Israel is inflicting on Shia Iran and its proxies, both Suni and Shia.
Countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt regard Israel as a handy and welcome buffer against Iran’s expansionist dreams and in the face of the Iran-sponsored death cults that cloak themselves in Muslim Brotherhood religious-political ideology.
Finally, Iran’s buffoonish retribution is humiliating. It exposes the incompetence and corruption of the theocracy. Coupled with a tanking economy, it will lead to civil unrest within Iran and perhaps to the rise of a more reformist streak of political Islam.
All these positive outcomes depend on Israel’s next move.
Biden’s sage advice to Netanyahu was to “take the win” and gloat over Iran’s debacle. But far-right forces within Israel have been spoiling for a regional war with the arch-enemy Iran for many years now. Netanyahu himself may provoke a regional kerfuffle in order to divert attention from his legal woes and force the USA to commit to his agenda.
Such a course of action would amount to an unmitigated disaster for the Jewish state.
Israel cannot defeat Iran, especially when it is already fighting a war on multiple other fronts. The USA will not be dragged into Israeli adventurism. It will rather abandon Israel to its fate. Should it choose to confront Iran now, Israel will have completed its transformation into the second North Korea, a pariah state.
When you overstate your case, you lose credibility. A classic example of this is Donald Trump’s trajectory over the past year. Fourteen months ago, Trump appeared irrelevant. Then there were a plethora of Democrat-led criminal charges against him, and now Trump appears likely to be the next president of the United States.
When Trump was elected in 2016, his opponents did a better job of organizing than did his supporters, and Trump’s four years in office saw limited progress towards his goals. Trump consistently mobilized more opposition than support and voters turned against him in 2018 and 2020 (in particular, there was a 2% swing against him in the suburbs).
When you’re at war, you need to mobilize more support than opposition. This usually requires one to keep your instincts in check and to continually asks what will do good as opposed to what will feel good.
I’m sure that Iran’s attack on Israel felt good to Iran, and that Democrat-led criminal prosecutions of Trump over the past year felt good to Democrats. Did either of these attacks succeed in their purposes? I don’t think so, but situations change, and what looks like a bad decision today may well be vindicated by tomorrow.
Anglo countries such as the United States, Australia and England tend to be the most individualist in the world. In some cases, individualist strategies work well. Anglo countries have enjoyed more than their share of success, wealth and power. On the other hand, in some circumstances such as dealing with terrorism, corporate strategies may work better.
There are reports that in this latest battle with Hamas, Israel has skipped the opportunities to take out Hamas leaders individually and instead chosen to take them out with their families.
John J. Mearsheimer: “The article made it manifestly clear that the Israelis were inflicting massive punishment on the civilian population on purpose… What I found most shocking was… that the Israelis instead of killing someone in Hamas when that fighter is by himself or with other Hamas fighters, waits until the person goes home and is with his family so that they can kill not only him but also kill the family. This is horrible.”
If a corporate strategy of taking out terrorists with their families is more effective at discouraging terror than just taking out terrorists on their own, that’s important. Few questions are more important than — what works?
The world is not as individualist, in general, as Anglo norms. Individualist ideals sound beautiful, but how does the world work? Even in individualist countries such as the United States, when a person has repeated negative interactions with an out-group, that causes the person to take on increasingly negative views of not just that out-group, but of all individuals in that out-group that the person does not know well.
To economize on decision making, most people, even in individualist countries, are likely to have some general reactions to groups such as gays, Armenians, Jews, whites, blacks, Mexicans and the like. We are wired to be tribal and to have some negative feelings about out-groups. Negative experiences with members of out-groups exacerbate out negative feelings. When acted on with discretion, these reactions may be adaptive, but in a multi-cultural setting, explicitly betraying your feelings about out-groups usually won’t serve you. People in big cities, for example, know that it is usually a bad idea to share out loud your racial and religious stereotypes. Assuming that somebody named “Ahmed” or “Shaniqua” is in a low status position may serve you if you keep your assumption to yourself, but this might hurt you if you sat it out loud.
Israeli Professor’s ‘Rape as Terror Deterrent’ Statement Draws Ire
‘The only thing that deters a suicide bomber is the knowledge that if he pulls the trigger or blows himself up, his sister will be raped,’ says Bar-Ilan University professor.
“The only thing that can deter terrorists, like those who kidnapped the children and killed them, is the knowledge that their sister or their mother will be raped.” This assertion was made by Middle East scholar Dr. Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University about three weeks ago on an Israel Radio program. “It sounds very bad, but that’s the Middle East,”…
Suicide Bombers ‘Only Deterred By Threat Of Rape Of Sisters And Wives’, Israeli Academic Says
An Israeli academic has been defended by his university after he implied would-be suicide bombers could only be stopped if their female relatives were threatened with rape.
Dr Mordechai Kedar said he was not suggesting such a tactic, but added “the knowledge that their sister of their mother will be raped” was “the only thing” that would stop terrorists from attacking Israel…
“We can’t take such steps, of course,” Kedar told the programme. “I’m not talking about what we should or shouldn’t do. I’m talking about the facts. The only thing that deters a suicide bomber is the knowledge that if he pulls the trigger or blows himself up, his sister will be raped. That’s all. That’s the only thing that will bring him back home, in order to preserve his sister’s honour.”
This week the university faced calls from feminist groups for Kedar to resign from his post, but Bar-Ilan defended the comments, saying Kedar did not intend be taken literally…
Kedar originally made the comments on July 1, after three Israeli teens – Gilad Shaar, Naftali Fraenkel and Eyal Yifrah – were kidnapped and found murdered in the West Bank, before Israel’s offensive, which has killed 630 Palestinians and 29 Israelis so far, began on July 8.
Dr Kedar has also served as chairman of the Israel Academia Monitor organization, which is involved in “exposing extremist Israeli academics who exploit academic freedom in order to take steps to deny Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state,” according to Haaretz.
Every rabbi I’ve asked about this said the type of retaliation Kedar described would be forbidden by Jewish law.
Legal systems describe how the world should work, but how does the world actually work?
When you rip off serious criminals, they may not only hurt you but they may also go after your family and everyone you love. Why? Because this tactic works to deter people from messing with you.
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
